About Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue
Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue is dedicated to one of the most urgent missions in animal welfare: saving wild horses from slaughter. With a lean team and an unwavering commitment to their herd, Lifesavers operates the way most nonprofits do––with more good to do than hours to do it in. Effort has never been the constraint. Capacity is.
The Challenge
Before working with Avid, Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue sent one appeal per month.
The same email.
The same message.
Sent to everyone on their list.
What looked like segmentation from the outside was really batch sending––the same content going out in staggered waves, not tailored to different audiences.
Current donors, lapsed donors, and supporters who had never given received identical messaging with no acknowledgment of where they were in their relationship with the organization.
The team knew they should be personalizing their communication. But like many small teams, batch sending was all they had capacity for.
Edna—Avid’s fundraising agent—promised to give them the capacity to scale segmentation. But the team was skeptical.
- Could Edna write copy that actually sounds like them?
- Would she capture the urgency and heart of a wild horse rescue?
- Would the copy feel generic, like it could have been written for anyone?
The Experiment
For their April appeal, Lifesavers decided to try something different. Using Avid, they built three distinct versions of the same campaign:
- one for current donors
- one for lapsed donors
- one for supporters who had never given
Each version was shaped around where that audience stood in their relationship with the organization.
April was a non-emergency appeal.
No dramatic rescue.
No immediate crisis.
In a way, this made it the perfect test. If segmentation could move the needle without a compelling news hook, it would prove the strategy worked on its own merits.
Edna built the whole campaign in minutes––pulling every segmented list, personalizing the message for each audience, orchestrating the full campaign sequence.
All of this was staged, ready to review by the Lifesavers team—able to be launched at a moment’s notice.
The Results
This experiment would have been a win even if it was a flat result. The time savings alone would give their team capacity back to focus on the work only they can do.
The stewardship. The donor relationships.
But this experiment led to more than just time savings.
The April appeal—written by Edna—outperformed every comparable campaign in Lifesavers’ history.
It generated 130% more revenue.
Revenue increased 130% compared to similar non-emergency campaigns. A routine monthly appeal became one of their strongest performers of the year through Edna’s ability to scale their personalization.
It increased donor engagement.
Overall open rates increased 50% compared to prior non-emergency appeals. The current donor segment reached a 45.2% open rate––well above their historical baseline of roughly 30%.
It activated recurring donors.
This was the first non-emergency appeal to generate new recurring donors for Lifesavers. With Edna handling the segmentation, it was possible to speak directly to where each supporter was in their journey.
It reactivated lapsed donors.
Lapsed donors came back at a rate 500% higher than in prior non-emergency campaigns. The message Edna wrote met them where they were––acknowledging the gap, not ignoring it–– and they responded.
A Turning Point for their Team
Leadership came in skeptical. Could Edna really capture their voice—let alone help them achieve better performance?
After the campaign, they were convinced.
Edna produced copy that sounded like Lifesavers. It wasn’t a template—it was personalized to their voice, their brand, and their donors.
Leadership’s hesitation turned to enthusiasm. As one team member put it:
“This makes your job a little easier so you can focus more on your supporters.”
That’s the point. Edna doesn’t replace an organization’s voice. She works from it, reads it, and extends it across every segment and campaign without the team having to start from scratch each time.
You stay in complete control of the message. Edna takes care of the rest.
Greater Capacity. Better Results.
This 130% increase in revenue is just the beginning.
Lifesavers didn’t overhaul their fundraising program. They ran one segmented appeal. Powered by Edna, this deeply segmented appeal took less time than their standard one-size-fits-all appeal would have taken.
Segmentation has a reputation for being complicated.
It often requires dedicated staff, sophisticated platforms, and a level of technical infrastructure some teams don’t have capacity to maintain.
Avid changes that equation.
Avid connects to the tools your organization already uses, shapes strategy, builds your audiences, drafts your campaigns, and adapts as the program moves.
For Lifesavers, the result was a non-emergency appeal that outperformed expectations across every metric that matters: opens, revenue, recurring giving, and lapsed donor reactivation. Not because the cause got more urgent in April.
Because Avid gave Lifesavers the capacity to match the message to the audience.