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The Story Behind Success
The Challenge
When Bucknell's campaign leadership decided to convert its leadership annual giving officers into major gift officers, it left a gap for donors in the $1,000–$5,000 range, without anyone managing the relationships.
The Solution
Bucknell introduced Lauren, their Virtual Engagement Officer, to manage a portfolio of former leadership annual giving donors, focused on current, recurring, and lapsed alumni in the $1,000–$2,500 range.
The Results
Since launch, Lauren has raised $1,018,134 from over 1,900 gifts. The upgrade and reactivation numbers tell the clearest story about what consistent, personal engagement can do at scale. Lauren has generated $80,728 in upgrades and $27,625 from lapsed reactivation.
Impact By The Numbers
$1.8M
Raised
$80K
Upgraded Giving
1,900
Gifts
16K
Personalized Touchpoints
Strategic Restructure Left a Gap in the Pipeline
Bucknell's restructure of the leadership of annual giving officers into major gift officers left a significant gap in the pipeline. Once managed donors were now left to mass communications. Without personalized cultivation, donors stopped increasing their gifts, and many began to lapse, breaking the consistent year-over-year giving patterns the team had worked to build. When the team launched their Virtual Engagement Officer to help close this gap, they also built a control group— a mirror population of similar donors receiving only direct marketing for results and data comparison.
Outperforming Across Every Measure
When Bucknell's analytics team completed the control group analysis, Lauren had outperformed the mirror population across every metric they tracked: total gift value, number of upgrades, number of donors giving at the $2,500 level, renewal rates, and lapsed donor counts.
