• by Felicia Greiff , March 30, 2016

Last year, global nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund(EDF) partnered with Rocket Fuel on a multichannel direct campaign that brought in a 41% increase in return on ad spend over 2014.

"One of the challenges is that a lot of these partners don’t have a lot of nonprofit clients and don’t understand the space in which we’re operating," Downing said. "Rocket Fuel does."

Rocket Fuel, which expanded its politics and advocacy business last July, works with several other nonprofits. Amanda Whiteman, Rocket Fuel's director of strategic accounts, said it was exciting to see how well her company's Moment Scoring tech was poised for issue advocacy campaigns. The point went beyond just reaching an audience, Whiteman said, to really taking into account an audience who cares about an issue. 

So with that in mind, EDF partnered with Rocket Fuel on a year-end fundraising campaign. At first, EDF wasn't looking to prospect. It already had some partners for that purpose. But Rocket Fuel's Moment Scoring tech sounded interesting, so EFD tried it out -- with successful results.

The campaign saw a 70% return on investment with Rocket Fuel's prospecting program, more than 10% higher than EDF's next-best-performing prospecting partner. EDF originally dedicated about 40% of its Rocket Fuel budget to running audience models focused on identifying prospective donors, and the models were successful enough that EDF increased its media spend 25%. Additionally, the campaign targeted existing donors with a 241% return on every dollar spent.