Revamped Data Strategy For Unsolicited Arc New Member/Donor Appeal

Case Study Thursday!

Project Overview: To enhance Coarc’s outreach for new members and grassroots donors in Columbia County, CRST (Cornerstone) shifted from traditional third-party data to an innovative, in-house approach using New York State Real Property data. This strategy aimed to better target local residents with a propensity for community involvement, especially those in proximity to Coarc facilities. 

Location: Columbia County, New York 

Industry: Non-Profit Social Services (Support for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities) 

Website: www.coarc.org 

Coarc is the Columbia County chapter of The Arc New York.  The organization does a tremendous, selfless job of serving and supporting Columbia residents with intellectual and developmental disabilities.  To learn more, please visit Coarc’s “Who We Are” page on their website. 

As with many such New York State not-for-profit social services entities, to support its essential programming, Coarc must be creative and diligent with securing funding, which thankfully comes from multiple directions.  Here are some ARC funding examples: the U.S. Government, the State (of New York), the County, private and public foundations, annual events (e.g. golf outings, auctions, galas, etc.), onsite revenue generating enterprises [ref], online retail webstores, auxiliary groups or clubs or churches, and of course, local community support. 

Cornerstone assists Coarc with local community support via direct mail.  This outreach is important for two reasons:  first, there’s a direct appeal to the community to create awareness that Coarc is here, supporting citizens in need, and that help is available.  Second, there’s the prime directive of soliciting new, grassroots donors via the direct membership appeal. 

Sending such unsolicited membership appeals is not uncommon for most similarly sized 501(c)(3) organizations; it’s often considered a “crapshoot” because of the nature of unsolicited data.  Abiding by the traditional wisdom, CRST would annually combine both recurring members, select new prospects or tagged records, and then include a large, third-party, heavily qualified, sourced dataset of “philanthropically minded” households in Columbia County.  And, this approach worked fine until one year… it didn’t. 

We didn’t know exactly why this stopped working — we only knew that the philanthropically tagged households stopped feeling highly charitable.  Perhaps we hit all the households that we could with this set of criteria.  All we really knew was that the conventional approach now needed something unconventional.  To solicit memberships, we had to try something new. 

Our revised strategy was to stop using any third-party data and use our NYS Real Property data set, setting our own “wealth indicators”, householding, and then vetting and targeting residential properties located in proximity to Coarc facilities.  The data filter requirements were carefully established, and we reviewed logistics with the real property data and didn’t just draw a 1-mile circle around each Coarc facility.  Ultimately, we sensed that homeowners within these select areas probably were aware of Coarc’s existence, so we didn’t have to “sell” them on brand awareness. 

Bottom line:  Cornerstone’s list data for the annual membership appeal performed much better than rented third-party list names and addresses.  Our takeaways are these:  real property data works, and if you aren’t getting the unsolicited appeal responses you expect, then get creative, but don’t give up. 

For more information, please reach us at info@crst.net or call us at (845) 255-5722.