Helping Livestrong Deliver Its Best Fundraising Month in Nine Years

In short:

Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI) named growing monthly giving revenue a top fundraising priority, but lacked a system to identify which donors were ready to convert to sustainers. Delve Deeper proposed a dedicated monthly-donor conversion, recapture, and EFT-switch program, paired with value-based budget allocation, to grow recurring revenue while improving fundraising efficiency.

The challenge:

HFHI wanted to grow monthly giving revenue and strengthen its mid-level and major-giving pipeline, but donor segmentation didn’t go beyond standard recency/frequency/monetary scoring, creative testing for recurring-gift asks hadn’t been successful, and there was no reliable way to see which channels or messages actually moved a donor toward a monthly commitment.

The approach:

Delve Deeper built a dedicated journey and segmentation system around monthly giving:

  • Hope Builders Conversion journey: Triggered by donor behavior signaling readiness (such as a second gift or a high predicted value), a persona-matched email and SMS sequence with social proof and digital retargeting, designed to convert donors to monthly giving.
  • Sustainer Recapture: A short, urgent sequence recovering failed EFT/credit-card payments before they cost the file a recurring donor.
  • EFT Conversion: A simple sequence moving credit-card sustainers to bank-draft giving to reduce churn.
  • Value-matched budget allocation: Pairing donor value-to-organization data with values-based donor personas so media and stewardship spend follows the segments most likely to convert and stay, rather than being spread evenly across the file.

Summary:

Give monthly giving its own funnel. The Hope Builders Conversion journey is a dedicated, triggered sequence, not a generic ask folded into a newsletter, aimed at donors already showing signs of readiness.
Defend the recurring base before growing it. Sustainer Recapture and EFT Conversion sequences target the two most common ways monthly donors quietly churn: failed payments and credit-card declines.
Fund the segments most likely to convert and stay. A value-based testing matrix directs budget toward the monthly-giving segments with the strongest predicted return, instead of spreading spend evenly.
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