The Modern Donor Journey: How Personalization & Automation Increased Giving by 11%

Challenge

Like many arts organizations, Merit School of Music faced a looming "fiscal cliff" driven by an aging donor base. Our traditional, one-size-fits-all appeals were failing to retain major donors or attract a younger generation. We needed to modernize our fundraising urgently—bringing in marketing to optimize messaging and leverage digital best practices—while honoring the limited bandwidth of a lean team.

Solution

Strategy

• High-Tech for the Many, High-Touch for the Few: To maximize our small team's impact, we used automation for broad donor stewardship. This freed up human capacity to focus on high-touch "delight" experiences for major donors, keeping them engaged while simultaneously nurturing a new generation of younger supporters digitally.

• Stronger Together (Cross-Functional Partnership): We replaced silos with specific collaboration. Marketing brought the digital infrastructure, content strategy, and performance data to identify exactly which communications were resonating. We paired this with Development's deep expertise in fundraising and relationship stewardship. By combining these strengths, we moved from guessing to doubling down on what worked, creating a unified engine that was far more effective than either team working alone.

Key Initiatives

• Automated Stewardship & Segmentation: Automation only works if it feels relevant. We used HubSpot to build out deep segmentation and ensure the right message reached the right person, whether a first-time donor or a long-time patron. This allowed us to automatically nurture the wider donor pool with relevant, personalized communications without draining staff time.

• Hyper-Personalized "Delight": To retain and nurture our major donors, we created bespoke gratitude experiences. This included sending personalized videos of students performing and thanking specific donors by name—high-effort, emotional touches that brought their investment in our mission to life.

• Integrated Multi-Channel Campaigns: We synchronized our message across direct mail, email, and social media. Crucially, we also optimized our webpages and donation forms to remove friction. This ensured that whether a donor came from a letter or an Instagram post, the path to giving was simple, fast, and mobile-friendly.

• High-Impact Storytelling: With a lean team, we couldn't churn out endless new content. Instead, we focused on capturing a few powerful, emotional stories that brought our impact to life. We then leveraged these core narratives across every channel (appeals, newsletters, social) to maximize the value of our content and maintain consistent messaging.

Results

11% year-over-year contributed revenue growth

Why It Worked: We combined high-impact storytelling with digital optimization. We used data to ensure our communications were relevant to each individual while simultaneously improving the user experience by optimizing emails, webpages, and donation forms to remove friction. This ensured that once the story inspired a donor, the actual path to giving was seamless.