Connecting supporters with causes to drive meaningful change
MissionWired improves donor engagement and marketing outreach with Databricks
Donor data points processed
Raised for nonprofits with the Co-Op tool
Individuals represented in the Co-Op tool
MissionWired specializes in raising funds for nonprofit organizations and political campaigns. Tapping into their Cooperative Email Database (Co-Op), the company combines the fast-paced innovation needed for political campaigns with the long-term strategies necessary for nonprofits. By aggregating data from 150+ organizations to identify high-quality donor prospects, MissionWired uses machine learning (ML) to optimize marketing campaigns, predict donor behavior and drive click rates while lowering cost per acquisition (CPA). However, the business was dealing with the increasingly low performance of traditional acquisition sources (e.g., Meta and Google), the inability of their legacy systems to process massive data volumes and continually shrinking nonprofit operational budgets. By implementing Databricks, MissionWired processed 275 billion data points across donor activities to raise an incredible $350 million for their clients since 2020.
Facing outreach hurdles in a competitive donor environment
Political campaigns and nonprofits both suffer from unique challenges in modern times. For political campaigns, misinformation/disinformation, voter apathy, cybersecurity threats and ad restrictions contribute to failed outcomes during election cycles. Nonprofit organizations are hindered by increased competition for resources, global crises that come with shifting priorities and digital transformation challenges. Enter MissionWired. The company empowers political campaigns and nonprofits to connect with high-quality donor prospects to drive meaningful change across the U.S. At the heart of their strategy is the Cooperative Email Database, or Co-Op — a shared data product aggregating and analyzing anonymized donor insights from over 150 organizations. By leveraging machine learning, the Co-Op can identify potential donors based on their donation history, behavioral signals across organizations and real-time activity data. The system also evaluates cross-organization donor patterns by highlighting individuals likely to support multiple causes with similar goals, enabling organizations to harness shared learnings, expand their reach and connect with similarly minded donors.
In addition to optimizing donor segmentation, the Co-Op tool targeted these donors — drawing intel from 275 billion donor events involving 125 million+ individuals — with tailored marketing efforts. Using custom-built machine learning models, MissionWired analyzed behavioral patterns, such as email opens and click rates, to better understand how to improve engagement. This specific intelligence enabled MissionWired’s clients to allocate resources effectively and deliver targeted, impactful campaigns by optimizing email timing and tailoring messaging based on targeted audience segments. With such a data-driven approach, MissionWired delivered more personalized, agile and responsive campaigns with better reach, engagement and results.
Scaling MissionWired’s groundbreaking Co-Op tool came with its own set of hurdles. Traditional acquisition channels, like Meta and Google, became less effective, which made it harder to attract new donors. Bob Albrecht, Chief of Marketing and Brand at MissionWired, explained, “If organizations can’t bring enough supporters into their systems to upgrade and convert, they can’t fulfill their missions. The acquisition landscape has changed dramatically, and nonprofits have fewer tools to reach the right audiences effectively. That’s why we developed a solution that empowers nonprofits to connect with the right supporters, maximize engagement and drive meaningful conversions.” Aside from the acquisition challenges, the company’s legacy systems were also unable to handle the growing complexity of their data, and this created delays that affected timely outreach. Finally, despite their innovative use of machine learning, MissionWired’s ML workflows lacked the infrastructure required to build and deploy the thousands of models for personalization campaigns. To address these barriers, MissionWired implemented the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to transform how they managed data and drove overall campaign success.
Reimagining campaigns with unified data and machine learning
Recognizing the limitations of their existing data infrastructure, MissionWired pivoted to a unified data and AI platform — an essential first step in overcoming operational hurdles and driving innovation. The company planned to use Databricks as their central platform to manage data ingestion, transformation and machine learning at scale. A critical component of this transformation was Delta Live Tables, which automated MissionWired’s data pipelines to process and transform data from over 125 million individuals in their Co-Op system. With this shift, MissionWired designed and built robust, automated systems within the tool itself, streamlining extract, transform, load (ETL) processes. Not only did this improve data reliability and free up engineering resources to focus on higher-value initiatives, but it also standardized and hardened MissionWired’s pipelines, reinforcing their data ecosystem so it could handle the demands of real-time insights and downstream machine learning.
Once the pipelines were strengthened, Unity Catalog, a unified governance solution within the Databricks suite of products, enabled MissionWired to organize their data catalog for improved operations. With cleaner, better-governed data that allowed for seamless accessibility, the company unlocked serverless compute, a cloud computing model that automatically scales resources as needed without requiring infrastructure management, which contributed to cost efficiency of computer resources. Meanwhile, Databricks SQL became a cornerstone for data analysts at MissionWired and provided a user-friendly way to query data to generate internal insights. Whether running quick analyses or building dashboards for broader visibility, Databricks SQL empowered MissionWired’s team to extract actionable takeaways rapidly, helping them visualize critical marketing metrics via Tableau. “With Databricks SQL, we were able to integrate with tools like Tableau to automate workflows for faster reporting turnaround times,” Todd Plants, CTO at MissionWired, commented. “I’ve gotten immense value from the tool given I don’t use SQL as often as I used to. But Databricks SQL just makes it so easy to create queries.”
In addition, MissionWired took advantage of Databricks support for open source tools — including TensorFlow — to scale their machine learning capabilities. With the Databricks Platform, the team trained and deployed thousands of machine learning models annually to significantly boost campaign performance and customer engagement tactics. Better yet, MissionWired engineers embraced the live collaboration capabilities of Databricks Notebooks, which allowed them to build pipelines, refine models and troubleshoot issues together in real time. This approach guaranteed a more collaborative and agile development environment, removing bottlenecks and enhancing productivity. By centralizing their data and analytics, MissionWired laid the foundation for exploring future innovations in a secure, well-governed environment.
Driving fundraising success to achieve ROI within 12 months
With the power of Databricks, MissionWired solved critical challenges within their growing business, particularly donor acquisition and marketing campaign scalability. Using various components of the Databricks Platform, their Co-Op infrastructure can process 275 billion data points across the donor activities of 125 million+ people. This scalability is key for MissionWired’s lean technical team to deliver a product that outperforms the traditional marketing acquisition channels that have lost their luster in the political and nonprofit arenas.
Identifying good candidate donors for outreach at an unprecedented scale, MissionWired has solidified their products spanning hundreds of nonprofit organizations to deliver immediate performance improvements and long-term fundraising success. Now, the Co-Op and their campaigns consistently see higher click-through rates, improved CPA and enhanced donor quality compared to paid social ads. For MissionWired’s technical team, the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform ultimately allowed them to operationalize thousands of machine learning models annually to make sure campaigns remained effective and responsive to shifting market dynamics.
In fact, member organizations leveraging the Co-Op achieved a complete return on investment within 12 months. This success drove $350 million in total donations to date. “With better donor targeting and scalable outreach, we’re helping campaigns connect in ways that feel more personal and get results,” Bob concluded. “Seeing campaigns drive $350 million in donations shows how much the right data can change the game for nonprofits and political organizations.”
Looking to the future, MissionWired sees Databricks as central to their continued innovation, with plans to increase end-to-end automation, deploy larger and more comprehensive models, massively increase operational efficiency and develop new products to support new fundraising channels. Building on the success of their machine learning initiatives, the company aims to revolutionize nonprofit fundraising by delivering even more personalized and meaningful donor experiences. They also seek to expand their support for organizations addressing critical global challenges, such as climate change, hunger relief, and gun violence prevention. Built on Databricks, MissionWired’s Co-Op is poised to redefine success for nonprofits and political campaigns and drive significant social good for the causes they champion.