DonorVoice productizes behavioral science for fundraising. The products below turn donor attitudes and identity data into evidence-based decisions about who to target, what to test, and where to invest your comms budget. Pick a product below to see its full breakdown.
SEM-based modeling that combines survey data with CRM giving behavior. Outputs a Keep/Fix/Drop call on every donor touchpoint, sized in dollars, with rewritten test versions of three live communications ready to ship.
View product →The simulator that tests thousands of creative combinations against your target audience and tells you which ones would win — before a single piece goes to market. Six weeks. $32,500 standard scope.
View product →Big Five personality scores appended to every donor record. The segmentation lens you use across DM, email, and digital to match copy, design, and ask to who each person actually is. $0.15 per name. Two-day turnaround.
View product →When to ask each donor, and when to hold. Mode of 1 donors get their three-touch anniversary halo. Responsive Multiples get scored against their own history every month. One file. Every donor. Green, yellow, red.
View product →Match the donor's payment preference to how you ask them to transact. Distinguish check writers from those influenced by mail but converting digitally, and route each one to the path they will actually use.
Coming soonNot when. Not how. Not how much. Why. That's what your CRM can't tell you. The Commitment Study answers it by combining the human data your CRM doesn't capture with the giving behavior it does. The answer has three parts working together.
Every touchpoint scored on two dimensions: how much it drives commitment and giving, and how well you're currently delivering. Three actions. Sized in dollars. Below is real engagement output, simplified.
| Experience Item | Seg A | $ | Seg B | $ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Asking for appropriate donation amounts | FIX | $31 | FIX | $8 |
| Memorial & honorary giving option | KEEP | $30 | — | — |
| Addressing questions/concerns promptly | KEEP | $5 | KEEP | $19 |
| Clearly showing the difference you make | FIX | $18 | FIX | $13 |
Motivation has two halves. The first is fragile. The second retains. We size each half on your file and tell you which of your communications are pushing donors into which.
All giving is autobiographical.
Different donors give to the same cause for entirely different reasons. The study identifies which identity questions statistically tie to commitment and giving for your file. Those validated questions then become a business imperative: ask them everywhere, on every form, every survey, every onboarding flow. Goal is coverage. The more constituent records you can append an identity answer to, the more your entire program can segment, target, and message on what actually matters.
After the study, knowing each donor's anchor identity becomes an organizational priority on par with knowing their email. Append it wherever you can. Below are examples of validated identity questions from real engagements:
You pick three live pieces. We mark up the control and write the test version. Ship the test the week the briefing ends. Read-out data before your next planning cycle.
Test ads built to match validated Identity and Personality traits, framed for internal motivation. Cheap to test (Facebook, display). Small-bet proof for skeptics on your team before any major budget shift.
The DonorVoice derived donor segments are truly donor-centric, built entirely on who they are and why they support.
— UNHCR
Most behavioral science training stops at the theory. Our workshops put it directly into a working appeal. Led by two PhDs who do this work for charities every day. You leave with a communication of yours rebuilt through five evidence-based concepts: motivation science, identity, personalized matching, role of brand, and the nudges actually worth testing.
The continuum from amotivation through external pressure to identified motivation. Why durable giving feels like the donor's idea, not yours. How to craft asks that produce volitional motivation rather than one-time compliance.
All giving is autobiographical. Which identities tie your donors to your cause. How to write copy that resonates with the self-image they're trying to live up to.
Big Five personality traits and how they change what works. Different copy, different cadence, different channel for an Agreeable donor vs a Conscientious one. Practical matching rules.
Brand connection (trust, loyalty, commitment) is the foundation that makes everything else work. How each touchpoint either builds or erodes that connection. How to audit your current program.
Behavioral science interventions that have actually moved metrics in real fundraising tests. Social proof, loss aversion, anchoring, default options, framing. Which to test first, which to skip.
One or two half-day sessions covering all five concepts. Case studies from real engagements. You bring a piece of your live work (an appeal, a welcome email, an impact report, a midlevel pitch) and we audit it together using the framework.
Built around a specific pain point you choose: new donor retention, midlevel growth, lapsed reactivation, sustainer churn, legacy. Same five concepts but every exercise applies to your chosen problem. Output is a test-ready plan for that area.
Applies behavioral economics to fundraising every day for charities globally. Leads DonorVoice's Behavioral Science Unit. Background in cognitive psychology and neuroscience with a track record of in-market wins.
Brings the science of human motivation and personality into fundraising practice. Specializes in personalized persuasion and fostering the most volitional forms of motivation among donors.
Unlike training that ends at "interesting theory," you finish the workshop with a piece of your own fundraising rebuilt through the five-concept framework. Welcome email, year-end appeal, midlevel pitch, legacy offer, whatever you bring — it goes home redesigned and test-ready. Plus a structured assessment of where the original version was leaving money on the table and which behavioral principles produced the largest improvements.
The DonorVoice derived donor segments are truly donor-centric, built entirely on who they are and why they support.
— UNHCR
PreTest Tool is the simulator that tests thousands of creative combinations against your target audience and tells you which ones would win — before a single piece goes to market. You bring more variation to market, faster, and cut the live testing budget that pays for it.
A live test cycle takes months. The testing budget eats real revenue you could be putting against winners.
Most live tests change multiple things at once. When the test loses, you cannot tell which idea was good and which dragged it down.
You can run two or three packages live. Most ideas never get tested. Creative breakthroughs are bounded by what got argued for in the room.
We don't ask people to rate the logo, the image, or any individual part. We don't ask why they do or don't like it. We show two full packages and they pick the one they prefer. A statistical model decomposes which ingredients drove the wins.
Ingredients can be tactical direct mail parts — outer envelope, letter, lift note, reply slip, premium, insert. Or behavioral science ingredients — voice, moral frame, identity priming, image, ask construction. Often a mix. You decide what's in the grid; we build the experiment around it.
Fifteen years of failed attempts to beat the iconic catalog control. They tested a complete redesign — new cover and new interior pages — and came close but lost again. We ran it through PreTest as a backtest. The interior pages were a clear winner. The cover lost handily. Same baby-and-bathwater problem, parsable by our model and invisible in their live read. They put the old cover on the new interior pages and got a new control. First time in fifteen years.
Client needed a new family as the face of their direct mail. PreTest predicted which option would win. The live wet test produced exactly the predicted result. Conventional wisdom had a different favorite, and would have missed the actual winner entirely.
Client ran a multi-panel wet test, then ran the same panels through PreTest as a backtest. PreTest correctly identified the winners (Personalization, Duffle) and the losers (Grey Wrap, Calendar). Calculated revenue gain had they dropped the predicted losers and doubled volume on the predicted winners: $20,382.
The assembled package built from the highest-scoring level of each ingredient row. Every part chosen because it outperformed the alternatives — not because it was someone's favorite in the room.
The full 5 × 5 grid with a score from 0 to 100 in every cell. Scores are both rank and magnitude — a 60 is twice as helpful in driving preference as a 30. You see exactly how far ahead the winners are and exactly how badly the losers underperform.
We split the model by any segmentation you bring (active vs. lapsed, identity, demographics, prior giving). If the Ideal is the same across segments, one package wins for everyone. If it diverges, you get a different recommended concept per segment.
If you include your current control in the grid, we score it just like every other concept. If the Ideal scores well above the control, you can roll out with confidence. If the gap is narrow, we recommend one or two head-to-head live tests before commit.
The sector says donor experience matters. Almost no one measures it.
The Donor Feedback Platform measures it and helps you act on it, across every touchpoint where you interact with donors.
Higher lifetime value. Earned by managing the experience you already deliver, not by asking more often.
The sector treats donor experience as a vibe, not a metric. Asking once a year in a brand-health survey doesn't count.
Without structured, continuous listening you cannot tell what's working from what's not. Donor experience stays a buzzword.
It's the highest-leverage retention channel in fundraising. Profit-center potential, run as a cost center.
The donor shared something with you. The platform responds automatically — a tailored email matched to what they actually said, sent without anyone on your team lifting a finger. The same engine generates a real-time file of high-need or at-risk donors that flows directly to your donor service team for human outreach. Automation handles the volume. Humans handle the cases that need them.
Aggregate the feedback patterns. Surface the systemic issues you can't otherwise see — donation-page friction, pressurizing asks that lift short-term conversion but damage lifetime value, confusing event registration flows. Stop guessing what's broken. Fix it once at the source instead of one complaint at a time.
Most CRMs tell you nothing about why a donor supports you. Commitment and Identity turn "name + email + RFM" into a record that finally explains the why. This data isn't for sale anywhere — no third-party append has it. It's first-party, it's yours, and it compounds. The charity that knows its people best wins. This is the moat.
For F2F and telefundraising sustainer acquisition we add TrueQuality Score — an at-risk model that combines need-satisfaction collected in the first week with first-party data (age, payment method, fundraiser ID) to predict Month-3 churn. You see it in Week One. You act on it before it's too late. You manage agencies on quality, not just signup quotas.
Used TrueQuality Score to identify at-risk donors in Week One of the F2F sustainer journey. Targeted save calls to the at-risk cohort, control group untouched.
Structured feedback added to every inbound donor service call at a national charity. Business rules sort callers into four follow-up paths by commitment × satisfaction. Aggregate insights drive agent coaching and policy review.
A single feedback survey, with no other intervention, produced measurable behavior change six months later. Sub proof, not a substitute for the platform — but the floor of what happens when you start asking.
Pricing scales with channels covered, integration complexity, and ongoing analytics scope. We share comparable engagement sizes on the scoping call.
Contract to live platform. Survey engine, automation engine, business rules, and dashboard all set up and integrated with your CRM and donation systems.
The calendar treats donors like rows. Their giving doesn't behave that way. We score each donor against their own history, not against the file, and tell you when to ask and when to hold. Less mail. Less irritation. More net.
After analyzing millions of donor transactions across more than twenty charities, the same two behavioral patterns kept appearing. Most donors fall into one of them. We built a product for each.
A large segment of your file gives exactly once per year and resists every attempt to change that. They give in the same month or season they always have. Ask them eight times, ten times, twenty times. They still give once.
The fix is to stop fighting their rhythm. We identify them, find their anniversary month, and run a three-touch halo (month before, month of, month after). Suppression outside the halo. Auto-renewal as the easy path.
The donors who can give more than once a year without friction. Additional asks don't feel intrusive to them, they feel relevant. But only when timed right. Even Responsive Multiples have rhythm. Press the wrong moment and you wear them out.
We model each donor's response history against their own promotion history. Every month, the model answers one question for each donor: should I ask this person right now, or would waiting create more value?
One charity cut mail volume 60 percent (fifteen drops a year down to six). Net revenue was up eight percent.
Another charity cut mail volume in half. Measured over two years, gross was up slightly and net was up 23 percent.
Head-to-head testing of personalized cadence versus an always-on calendar across a full year produced an average twelve percent revenue lift.
Over-soliciting cannibalizes your own future revenue, not your competitors'. Mailing more costs you much more in the long run than mailing less costs you in the short run.
Two files: your transaction history and your promotion history. We come back in a day or two with counts and breakdowns: how many donors qualify as Mode of 1, what their anniversary months look like, and what a Responsive Multiples score would tell you about timing your next ask.
Email DonorVoiceCo-op models find people with a record of giving. People who fit your mission but have never appeared in that data do not enter the ranking at all. Acquisition 2.0 lowers the cost of the names you already use, then helps you find and test the larger audience the ranking misses.
License the core file for the year and use it across mail and digital. We can calculate the data savings from your existing costs before you commit to anything.
Select additional people on mission fit, geography and capacity, whether or not a co-op has seen them give. Reach them more than once and test whether they become donors whose value justifies the cost.
Tier 1 is the savings move. Tiers 2 and 3 are the new audience, and the reason to run a test at all. Personality, channel preference and wealth scoring come bundled with the licensed file, so deeper names can be matched to creative and channel rather than treated as filler volume.
For a pediatric hospital, two identities carry the mission. One is community: this is my town and this is its hospital. The other is parent or grandparent: those children are like my own.
Neither is a field on a data file. The markers are. Community shows up in length of residence, homeownership, an address history that never leaves the county, turnout in local elections, in-state alumni flags, and membership in local civic groups or congregations. Parent and grandparent show up in presence of children and their ages, household composition, and age of head of household.
An estimated income floor keeps the standard ask plausible. Co-op giving history, where it exists, cuts the results afterwards rather than qualifying anyone for the file.
A single cold appeal is a poor verdict on an audience selected by fit rather than by mail-response history. Annual licensing makes repeated, coordinated contact practical: the same five cents whether you reach someone once or a dozen times across the year. A rented name can be contacted again, but each contact means another rental.
Because the audience starts as a named list, households can be assigned to test groups and their subsequent giving compared in your CRM. Whether a particular household saw a given impression is a separate question, and depends on the platform.
Sustained low-CPM exposure across a year costs a fraction of what the same number of touches would cost in mail. That is what makes repeated contact practical rather than theoretical.
Comparable groups of new names, each getting a different combination of brand advertising, conversion advertising and mail. The read is donors acquired and what they are worth against the full cost of acquiring them. Delivery metrics help you manage a campaign, but they do not answer this question.
Take a 500,000-name core file as a round illustration. At five cents, the annual licence is $25,000. A program that size typically carries a six-figure rental line, re-rented at every drop, with brokerage commission inside the CPM and a merge/purge charge each time. Five cents is the data licence; media, creative, production and postage sit outside it, the same as they do today.
Our program data show what can happen when organizations keep buying from the same pool. Whether the expanded audience produces profitable new donors is what this program is built to test. The findings behind the first move — how volume gets allocated across co-op sources, how much of what you rent never reaches a mailbox, what happens to response at depth — are set out with their methods and their limits on a separate page.
Our program data show what can happen when organizations keep buying from the same pool: how volume gets allocated, how much of what you rent never reaches a mailbox, and what happens to response at depth. Whether the expanded audience produces profitable new donors is not something this evidence can settle. That is what the program is built to test.
A good appeal lifts the month it lands in and then gives the lift back. The base it lands on is what carries year over year, so the only line that compounds is the one where the base is getting bigger. This is what decides whether a cheaper name is worth anything to you.
The premise of a managed mix is that someone is watching performance and moving volume toward whatever is working. Across 36 co-op buys in two programs, that is not what the records show.
Pearson correlation between a source’s share of a drop’s co-op volume and its response index within that drop, pooled across 36 buys in two programs. Spearman −0.40.
Drop the two most extreme buys and the relationship weakens to −0.22. It does not reverse, but it is carried in part by a small number of points.
In three consecutive drops in one campaign, the source that received the largest share of volume was the best-responding source once.
You pay for the record whether or not it survives the merge. Asking several sources for the same people means buying the same person more than once and then paying again to remove the copies.
We took campaign matchback results by source and re-ran the arithmetic with the volume sole-sourced, holding quantity and response by source constant. On those assumptions, either national co-op would have beaten the managed allocation.
The worry is that one source runs out of good names, and that leaning on one source costs something even before it does. Neither shows up in the data we have.
The case for contacting a new name more than once depends on repetition being cheap enough to sustain across a year.