

National Cardiovascular Nonprofit uses RAL for Donor Insights


A large cardiovascular nonprofit had the goal of understanding how its donors behaved across multiple giving channels. The ideal solution would ingest data from numerous disparate databases and stitch it all together to create a single view of the donor. The client sought to understand its customer retention and to drive additional revenue.

To do that, this nonprofit needed to overcome the following challenges:

  • Multiple donor databases across giving programs (events, direct mail, online, etc.) with millions of historical transaction records
  • No ability to link donor identities across the various sources
  • Unclean data and no support from the internal IT department
  • No insight into how the donors differed from a demographic standpoint across the various programs (age, income, interests, education levels, geographic location, etc.)


Merkle quickly stood up the Rapid Audience Layer (RAL) platform and began ingesting data through flat file data feeds. PII data was mapped into Merkle’s identity resolution engine, Merkury, to join donor data across multiple sources. Historical data that spanned across decades was then ingested to build a full profile of each donor. Data scientists also built a standard process to link donation (transaction) data across all data feeds to create a single, comprehensive view of each donor across all programs and time. The analytics and strategy teams then evaluated donor retention within each program, crossover between programs, and overall retention to the organization


Delivered an enhanced constituent experience across the enterprise to increase engagement, build connected, lifetime relationships, create greater loyalty and ultimately grow donor life-time value and sustain long-term revenue growth.


transactions processed for Identity Resolution

Less than 2 months platform onboarding 

Single view of constituents across all programs allowed the organization to understand how they are engaging, retaining, and creating opportunities for greater loyalty

Gained a deeper understanding of donors’ behaviors, motivations, and interests

Project output informed Donor Journeys that were mapped in Salesforce as a blueprint for future outreach and fundraising efforts

Keys to success

  • Clean program data was leveraged for additional insights into the most valuable donors across each program
  • Gaining invaluable insight into donor retention and donation behavior across all time and programs

Discover how we did it. Contact us today.

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