Located in Los Angeles, St. Vincent Meals on Wheels (STVMOW) is the largest privately funded Meals on Wheels program in America, serving over 2,700 meals a day to homebound seniors and providing meals for many other local programs through its own on-site kitchen.

When Schultz & Williams (S&W) first partnered with SVMOW in 1989, the program had only a few thousand donors and no development program. Since then, we have worked together to:

• grow the donor base to over 20,000 donors
• create mid-level and monthly giving clubs
• develop and promote a planned giving legacy society
• revamp the website and online marketing program

The Solution

We have been able to achieve strong response and increase SVMOW’s revenue through continuous programmatic and donor-trend analysis; a strategic package, list and segment testing; and the development of new campaign, program and marketing initiatives.

Those identified as “renewal only” donors are mailed on a strategically reduced schedule, ensuring that they are still being asked year-round during key campaigns while also minimizing costs.

Here are some of the notable achievements we accomplished together:

• S&W continuously tests markets, lists and packages. By doing this, we opened a new market for the organization—the Catholic market—which resulted in a 6% increase in prospects for the acquisition program. We also tested several new package formats and found two new formats that beat the previous controls by 5% and 8%, respectively. As a result of our testing process, we’ve seen anywhere from 3% to 5% annual growth in donors and revenue.
• As part of our work to enhance SVMOW’s mid-level giving program, Circle of Angels, S&W refined audience segmentation and targeting, optimized communications across all channels and added stewardship offerings including personal contacts. The result is a program that solicits a targeted 2,000 donors and generates over $600,000 annually.
• A competitive market analysis showed that food bank and mission programs were mailing their Thanksgiving appeals earlier. Since this is traditionally the strongest appeal of the season, S&W moved up the appeal to ensure that our “ask” came ahead of the competition’s, and we added a follow-up campaign to capture late donations. This resulted in a 57% increase in donations and a 52% increase in income over the prior year.