For some time now we at Z/Yen have been convinced that PropheZy can help organisations to target their direct marketing activities better. The fundraising arms of our charity clients are, of course, heavily involved with direct marketing. Z/Yen has therefore been conducting experiments with one charity client whose database has several hundred thousand donors. This client has a heavy reliance on, and excellent track record of, fundraising through direct marketing. After several retrospective experiments, PropheZy participated in the client’s autumn mail-shot with a couple of thousand potential donors that PropheZy fancied even though conventional methods would not have selected those donors. The results were superb, exceeding our expectations (although not exceeding PropheZy’s of course) with c30% of the people PropheZy fancied actually giving.

Following that success, in January, a much larger PropheZy selection will participate in that charity’s first post-Christmas mailing. If, as we hope (and PropheZy predicts) PropheZy can boost the return from that mailing by 15% to 25%, we will have proved that PropheZy is capable of significantly boosting performance. Jez Horne, Mary O’Callaghan and Ian Harris are the Z/Yen team on the case.

We believe that PropheZy can also help solve other fundraising and membership problems, such as helping to select donors with a propensity to switch to committed giving schemes and helping to recover lapsed members who have a propensity to rejoin.

Any charity and/or membership and/or direct marketing readers who want to know more about this exciting development should contact Ian Harris on ian_harris@zyen.com or by telephone.