Ask Yourself About Your ‘Ask’

For its key model variables, the Nature Conservancy used income and wealth indicators, gift frequency, affinity, recency and average gift amounts to other organizations.

In FY04, the organization’s basic control package pulled in an average gift of $19.69; with ask-string modeling, that number rose by 116 percent to $42.59. For those donors who responded to the former control, 14.63 percent of them remained active donors after 12 months. But for the package employing ask-string modeling, 22.88 percent of the donors kept giving after 12 months.