World Vision: A Better Look at Donors

When addressing major social issues such as homelessness and hunger, every dollar counts. To maximize results, leaders of nonprofit agencies need to make sure each appeal reaches the right donor audience.

SAS helps World Vision, a Christian relief agency that links needy children, their families and their communities with generous donors, discover which types of fundraising campaigns are most effective and which donors are most likely to continue giving, says Kelly Lindell, World Vision's Senior Donor Analytics Consultant.

World Vision works to reduce poverty and improve living conditions in nearly 100 countries through a range of programs, such as child and family sponsorships, directed donations and emergency relief after civil wars or natural disasters.

Receiving 9 million gifts annually, the World Vision staff works hard to keep track of every dollar taken in, as well as how and where that money is spent. The agency transfers 87 cents of every dollar to its programs – an excellent record in the world of nonprofit management.

Lindell uses SAS to gain insight into giving patterns through analysis of donor traits and response rates.

"SAS has helped us tremendously," she says. "Last year, we had 750,000 distinct designations for gifts. We're able to track gifts by region or country, whether they are for particular children, whether they are to be used for digging a well or for providing seeds and tools to farmers, and however else the gift is to be used. It is really fertile ground for mining through the data and learning more about who the donors are, what their intentions are and what might appeal to them in the future."

She also uses SAS to organize and analyze demographics and donation histories, the timing of gifts, payment methods, and whether a gift came in response to a certain appeal.

SAS helps Lindell make sense of data from different sources to build five-year forecasts for each donor and to make some useful discoveries.

"Our 40-year-olds are our peak donors for the gift catalog, which is available online and allows donors to choose how their money will be spent," Lindell says. "Direct-mail campaigns are attracting mostly older donors, who tend to give smaller gifts than their younger counterparts."

Such discoveries provided the "a-ha moments" that World Vision expected from SAS. "With SAS," Lindell says, "I was able to write a program in a short time that got this great information out and let me chart it and explain it to our fundraisers so they could use it effectively."

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