Welcome Series Test:
Structural Lift in Donor Value

  • A national environmental advocacy organization with a decades-long history of campaigning on climate, food systems, and corporate accountability runs a broad-based individual giving program supported by grassroots donors across the country. New donors arrived and then went quiet. Onboarding existed as a single acknowledgment, not an experience, and the organization had no way to know whether a first gift would ever become a second one.

    The question was whether a structured welcome series could change what a donor is worth over time, not just what they give in the first week.

  • We built a structured welcome series and ran it as a controlled test against the existing onboarding experience, then measured across a full annual cycle including peak season.

    The series was designed to deepen the relationship before making the next ask. Rather than pushing for an immediate second gift, it introduced the organization's work, established what a donor's money does, and set up recurring giving as the natural next step.

    Measurement ran through one complete peak season. Early reads were inconclusive, which was expected: a program built to change long-term behavior does not resolve in 30 days.

    • Total revenue per recipient rose 10%

    • Recurring revenue rose 34%

    • Recurring gift conversion rose 17%

    • Gifts per donor rose 9%

    The test population generated $20.4K in incremental revenue, or $1.46 more per donor. Rolled out to all new donors across the test period, that projects to roughly $42K in 15 months.