Tiffany Neill

As the recession has deepened, acquisition of new donors through direct mail has become more difficult. In a session titled “Keep the Acquisition Ideas Coming: List Optimization" at the recent DMA 2010 Washington Nonprofit Conference, four speakers provided techniques to refine selection of prospect lists to improve acquisition results.

Put simply, modeling means finding like characteristics about people that, when combined, enable you to predict future behavior. There are several inexpensive ways to model your data yourself (and some more expensive ways to use external data sources to help you) that can yield more revenue at lower cost from your direct-response program.