About the Organization
Andrew Wommack Ministries (AWMI) is a global Christian ministry reaching millions of people through television, online content, and direct ministry programs. With a fundraising program that spans multiple channels––broadcast, digital, direct mail, and email––AWMI operates at a scale where small shifts in strategy can have significant downstream effects.
The Challenge
In May 2024, something changed. New donor acquisition dropped sharply.
By the time the team took stock of the full picture, overall acquisition had declined 30% year over year.
What made the decline difficult to diagnose wasn’t a lack of data. It was the opposite.
Several major changes had occurred around the same time:
- An updated donation form process
- New calls-to-action were being made on television
- A shift in direct mail strategy
- A migration to a new email marketing tool
Any one of these could have been responsible. Without a way to connect the dots across channels and isolate variables, the team was working with assumptions instead of answers.
The Investigation
AWMI used Avid to bring their fundraising data together across every channel into a single view.
Edna, the AI Fundraising Agent inside of Avid, read continuously across the program––analyzing cohort behavior, acquisition trends, upgrade and downgrade activity, and cross-channel performance––not waiting to be asked, but actively working through the data to surface what the numbers were telling them.
The first finding reframed the problem. The 30% overall decline wasn’t spread evenly across the program.
Avid identified that digitally acquired donors were the critical drive––down 25% year over year. That narrowed the focus considerably and gave the team a clear place to investigate.
From there, the analysis went deeper.
The timing of the digital acquisition decline aligned closely with changes made to AWMI’s television broadcast calls-to-action. What Avid revealed next was something that would have been nearly impossible to see with channel-by-channel analysis: messaging changes in one channel were directly influencing donor acquisition in another.
Television content was shaping how––and whether––donors were converting online.
Messaging changes in one channel were directly influencing donor acquisition in another. Television content was shaping how––and whether––donors were converting online.
Avid’s fundraising benchmarks added one more layer of clarity.
Ministries of similar size were experiencing some acquisition pressure during the same period, but AWMI’s decline was significantly steeper than their peers. That ruled out the easy explanation that this was simply a market trend, and confirmed that something specific to AWMI’s program was driving the drop.
The Solution
With the root cause isolated, AWMI updated aspects of their television broadcast strategy. The team also implemented multiple measures including a direct appeal to their constituents.
The fix wasn’t complicated once the problem was correctly identified. The process took approximately three months. Avid helped spot the problem almost immediately, but changing messaging on a broadcast television program takes time. The delay was logistical, not diagnostic.
The problem was diagnosed in February and the decline reversed in the month of May. Avid Insights gave the team confidence to take action by doing the hard work of ruling out the alternatives.
They weren’t guessing. They knew what to change and why.
The Results
The results followed the fix.
After the broadcast messaging updates rolled out, the acquisition decline reversed. Digitally acquired donors increased 24.5% in 2026––the segment hardest hit by the drop. A 30% decline, reversed in a single program cycle, by addressing one correctly identified root cause.
What Avid helped AWMI avoid is just as important as what it helped them recover. Without a connected view of their fundraising data, the team might have spent months adjusting their digital program, their donation forms, or their email––none of which were the problem.
Every change made to the wrong variable would have cost time, budget, and donor relationships while the real issue went unaddressed.
The Takeaway
When acquisition performance drops, the answer isn’t always found in the channel where the results appear.
For AWMI, the issue wasn’t their digital fundraising program. It was a messaging decision happening in a different part of the donor experience entirely.
Avid connected the data, Edna found the pattern, and the team made the right call.
Most fundraising programs run on separated data––channel by channel, report by report. What that model can’t show you is how everything connects. When a change in one place moves results in another, you need a system that’s reading the whole program, not just the parts.
That’s what Avid does. And for AWMI, it made the difference between months of misdirected effort and a complete recovery in three months.
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