Retain, reactivate or acquire: Can nonprofits reliably use community profiles as an alternative to past donation data?

Sinha, Shameek, Malik, Sumit ORCID: 0000-0003-3913-6645, Mahajan, Vijay and ter Hofstede, Frenkel (2025) Retain, reactivate or acquire: Can nonprofits reliably use community profiles as an alternative to past donation data? Journal of Business Research, 186. p. 114997. ISSN 0148-2963, 1873-7978

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Abstract

Nonprofits face the challenge of low response rates to solicitations, leading to unachieved fundraising goals. They face difficulty in retaining active donors, reactivating lapsed donors, and acquiring prospective donors. The challenge often stems from the need for more reliable data for predicting the expected behavior of different groups of donors. Although nonprofits have reliable data relating to past donations from active donors, the data on lapsed donors is limited, and data on prospective donors is nonexistent. We propose that nonprofits can use community-clustered donor profiles to predict the expected donations. Our results validate that predictions based on “actual donation data” and “community donor profiles” are equivalent in accuracy. Drawing insights from the nonprofit marketing and social psychology literature, we suggest that nonprofits can reliably devise targeting strategies for active, lapsed, and prospective donors using community-clustered profiles. We test these predictions using a donation incidence model and conduct several robustness checks.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Nonprofit organizations, Donor groups, Community profiles, Hazard model, Hierarchical Bayesian inference, Predictive analytics
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences > School of Management
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	11 Oct 2024 07:06
Last Modified:	28 Feb 2026 01:17
DOI:	10.1016/j.jbusres.2024.114997
Open Access URL:	https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0148-2963...
Related Websites:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3185009
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