More cooperative databases than ever before are available for donor acquisition. In a challenging environment, where declining gift or response rates create increasing pressure to find the most productive prospect names possible, it’s natural for co-op solutions to flourish.
Co-ops offer value by combining vast amounts of charitable giving information, marrying it to robust demographic, lifestyle, capacity and political affiliation data, and then employing either a modeled or selection-based approach to identify the prospects best suited for fundraising campaigns.
A successful co-op strategy provides a perpetually refreshed source of names and offers results equal to or surpassing your profitable response lists.
While the rise in co-ops offers new solutions to the vibrant prospecting needs of the nonprofit sector, it also challenges fundraisers to understand the differences among the current services in order to judge which provides the best selection approach and value.
Are Non-Profit Co-ops Right For You?
The first question regarding non-profit cooperative use is simple: do you have the ability and comfort level needed to participate in a co-op environment?
Co-ops ask for a copy of your active donor file (or lapsed donor file if you use the co-op for donor re-activation services). Your data is used to understand what types of charitable behavior drives gifts to your organization and helps define your prospecting criteria, and it is made available to the other users of the co-op to help them find productive names for their campaigns.
Because co-ops multi-source so much transactional data, each donor record has the potential to be identified as a strong prospect record based on the aggregated data it reflects. This volume of information is simply not available when selecting individual list sources, which only offer the transactional selections related to a single organization.
However, if your organization’s policy prohibits the sharing of your donor data (if you refuse to exchange or rent your list with others), then co-ops are simply not an appropriate service to consider.
Further, when you enter a co-op you need to be very clear about how your names are used and the extent your data is made available to other organizations. Is it used only in the service of other co-op members, or does the co-op use your data to create products or lists that are offered to third-party (non-co-op) mailers?
If your data is being used to serve non-members (organizations that are not reciprocally sharing their own data with you, but are benefiting from any product created in part from the data that you have contributed), how are you being compensated for the use of your data?
You provide data to a co-op with other like-minded organizations so that all member campaigns benefit from the reciprocal pooling of knowledge.
Any use of your data for the benefit of mailers outside the co-op, without clear compensation, should be thoroughly investigated and explained.
Make sure you have clear answers from your co-op regarding all use of your data to ensure a fair and transparent relationship together.
Modeled Data Approaches
The next question is more focused
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