Empowering Alumni Giving by ML-Driven Targeting
Session Description: Nanyang Technological University has over 260,000 alumni. In previous years, the University has consistently reached out to the alumni and students to raise awareness and cultivate philanthropic support. However, the team experienced an uphill battle in expanding the alumni donors pool, retaining existing alumni donors, increasing ROI of emails, direct mails and Phonathon resources were stretched to the maximum with diminishing margin of returns.
Instead of the previous "spray and pray" approach, the newly formed Data Analytics team partnered with data scientists from Dell Technologies adopted various data-driven strategies by leveraging ML technology to support the annual giving fundraising process, from data collection and classification, model training and testing, AB testing and implementation. Within one year, the Alumni Giving team cut down 40% of outreach to the alumni (with significant reduction in email bombings), while the team achieved a more than 70% improvement in response to the appeals. The alumni annual participation rate increased 28% in the year.
The successful experience has proven that using ML model to improve fundraising ROI is not something unreachable for most of the fundraising organisations, as long as the fundraising organisation set the expectation, plan for long term development and plan the future steps carefully, and involve the right experts in different stages of the transformation process.