Treasure Coast Food Bank runs a summer match campaign every year.
It’s a straightforward ask:
A matching gift is on the table, and it’s a chance to bring back the donors who already believe in the mission.
But every campaign has the same open question.
Who else looks like they’d give, if only they were asked?
Working with their agency partner, Brad Cecil & Associates, Treasure Coast used Avid’s propensity model to find out.
The Results
Avid Identifies High-Likelihood Donors Before a Single Email Goes Out
Avid’s propensity model audience led to a 103% increase in campaign donations—leveraging data across Treasure Coast’s fundraising tools to find the most likely donors.
- 103% increase in conversion rate over the standard donor list
- 57% conversion rate among donors surfaced by Avid’s propensity model
- 88% increase in average gift size among those donors
- 96.9% level of confidence in the result
With no changes to the campaign itself, Avid’s propensity model alone was the difference between a good campaign and a great one.
A propensity model uses data from all your sources—your CRM, donation platform, email engagement, and more—to create an audience of people most likely to take an action.
This is not just a “prediction.” It’s an analysis of behavioral patterns to find your next most likely donors.
The Challenge
Knowing Who’s Likely to Give, Beyond the Usual List
Every summer match, Treasure Coast Food Bank sends the same campaign to the same core group: people who gave to the match in previous years.
It works, but it also leaves an obvious question unanswered:
Which donors would have given if they had just been asked?
Somewhere in the broader donor file are people who never gave to last year’s summer match, but who look a lot like the donors who did. The challenge was finding them before the campaign launched, not after, when it’s too late to include them.
Without Avid, this would mean manually pulling donor history, mapping giving patterns, and building a model by hand for every campaign. Brad Cecil & Associates needed a faster and more effective way to identify these donors for Treasure Coast Food Bank.
The Solution
A Propensity Model Built to Find Lookalike Donors in Minutes
1. Avid Built a List of Likely Donors
Brad Cecil & Associates gave Avid one input: everyone who gave to Treasure Coast’s 2025 summer match.
This audience can be built by simply prompting Edna—the fundraising agent inside of Avid: “Create an audience of donors who gave to the appeal named 2025 Summer Match Campaign.”
Then, used that list to build a propensity model—identifying donors in the broader file who hadn’t given to the previous year’s match, but shared the giving patterns of those who had.
2. The Test Stayed Clean
To isolate the model’s impact, Treasure Coast changed nothing else.
Same emails, same copy, same donation page—all sent to both the propensity list and the standard donor list.
Any difference in results would come down to one thing: whether Avid could correctly identify who was likely to give.
3. The Model Found Donors the Standard List Missed
57% of the donors that Avid identified made donations.
That’s more than double the 28% conversion rate of the standard list. In total, that is a 103% increase in donations, with a 96.9% level of confidence behind it.
The donors that Avid identified also gave 88% more.
Average gift size among donors Avid surfaced came in 88% higher than the standard list. The model wasn’t just finding more donors, it was finding some of Treasure Coast’s most generous ones.
Without Avid, generous donors would have been left off the list entirely. Instead, the Avid propensity model allowed Treasure Coast to reach more donors who converted and gave generously.
What’s Next
Having proven the model on digital, Treasure Coast and Brad Cecil & Associates are now looking at applying the same propensity model to direct mail, where finding the right people to give has a higher impact on costs and ROI.
Use Avid’s Propensity Models for Your Next Campaign
Traditional modeled audiences are expensive. They often take a data scientist or a 3rd party contractor weeks to create. And they’re often limited to only the most sophisticated fundraising programs.
With Avid, your modeled audiences are ready in minutes.
No extra fees.
No waiting on a contractor.
Just generate the list. Sync it to your channels. And launch your campaign.
Want to see how Avid’s propensity models work with your tools?
Schedule a tour of Avid to learn more »