Customer Success

The Nature Conservancy

Fund-raising efficiency that would make any organization – for-profit or not – green with envy

More than 117 million acres of land and 5,000 miles of river protected. More than 1,500 local volunteer board members. And 1 million individual members and supporters.

Here's another impressive number: The Nature Conservancy achieves a fund-raising efficiency of 89 percent, according to Forbes magazine's annual survey of the largest U.S. charities. Also, in acknowledgement of its wise use of resources, The Nature Conservancy boasts an "A" rating from the American Institute of Philanthropy and four stars – the highest possible rating – from the Charity Navigator, which evaluates independent charities.

How many nonprofit organizations can claim that kind of efficiency? How many for-profit businesses can claim such a return?

The market challenge
Despite its standing as a leading international, nonprofit organization that has been working since 1951 to preserve the diversity of life on Earth, the Conservancy faces challenges specific to the philanthropic sector, explains Connor Baker, director of business information and analysis.

Over the past decade, in particular, U.S. economic and political environments have shifted, bringing new challenges to the Conservancy. "After 10 years of vibrant membership and revenue growth, the economy slowed, employment growth stalled and the stock market fell flat. These events reduced membership program expansion below historical performance levels," says Baker.

Recent policy decisions, including the reduction of marginal tax rates, also have had the short-term effect of reducing the tax benefit of charitable contributions.

Additionally, the charitable landscape has broadened significantly. The number of registered charities has doubled since 1990, and more recently, the events of 9/11, the war in Iraq, and the 2004 U.S. presidential election have created intense competition for charitable dollars.

Given these external market challenges, Baker knows that it is more important than ever to treat resources strategically. "Ultimately, charitable contributions are a function of consumer disposable income and consumer confidence," he says.

"To ensure a strong base of support for our critical conservation work, we needed to invest in a leap in technology that could overcome these fund-raising challenges," says Baker. "Modeling allows us to find those members who are more likely to respond to cultivation and information about our mission."

The data challenge
Prior to turning to SAS for making better decisions with the Conservancy data, Baker says the fund-raising environment was a challenging one. "When conducting direct-mail analytics in the worldwide production membership database," says Baker, "we were unloading data from Oracle to flat text files, uploading to MS Access for transformation at the PC level, then down to MS Excel for reporting. We were spending much of our time converting data, not analyzing data. And the tools we were using were effective for data transformation or for statistical analysis or for modeling – but none was effective for all three."

SAS consultants helped The Nature Conservancy devise an analytic data mart solution that would eliminate contention with other users and allow them to build analytic files (rather than use general ledger interface files) that imbed customer relationship management knowledge into a separate environment.

Consulting services and software from SAS allowed the conservation organization to integrate data selection, transformation and analysis in a single environment with a single software solution.

Increased campaign revenue, reduced costs
The immediate objective using the new suite of SAS tools was to optimize gift size and response rate simultaneously, and maintain a low per-dollar cost for donations.

"We have increased campaign revenue while decreasing direct costs through reduced mail volume," Baker reports. "As a result of data management efficiencies, we have reduced indirect costs, such as analyst hours. The final result is an increase in revenue per item mailed, which means more money is available for conservation and less is spent on fund raising."

"After all," says Baker, "The Nature Conservancy has always been deeply committed to maintaining a low cost-per-dollar-raised. The difference is that now we're doing it even better."

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.