The Legal Aid Society

Challenges

The Legal Aid Society works throughout New York City to ensure everyone has access to justice. The organization has a lean development team with limited bandwidth, spending almost all of their energy on a small group of institutional donors. Consequently, their donor base was concentrated, leaving them vulnerable to changes in behavior from only a few key decision makers.

Over the past 10 years, the organization has ramped up its social media presence to build brand awareness, but has struggled to convert that awareness into new donors of the next generation.

Without the resources to create an internal grassroots effort, The Legal Aid Society lacked any path forward.

Solutions

The Legal Aid Society came to DonorSpring with a limited development team, a donor base concentrated among institutional funders, and no practical path to building a grassroots individual giving program.

DonorSpring addressed that on three fronts: identifying and connecting LASNY with qualified individual donor prospects, creating content to cultivate those relationships over time, and reactivating dormant contacts already in LASNY's database.

Results

Over two years, The Legal Aid Society raised more than $150,000 through DonorSpring. That growth reflects the compounding nature of the acquisition pipeline: new prospects arrive monthly, warm over a 6 to 8 month cultivation period, and convert at increasing rates as the program matures. Year two substantially outperformed year one not because anything changed operationally, but because two years of monthly prospect additions had built a much larger audience moving through the pipeline at once.

DonorSpring grew LASNY's opted-in contact base by 1,349 percent. That growth came entirely through DonorSpring's acquisition process: prospects matched from the 20 million-plus donor network, introduced to LASNY through outreach sent on LASNY's behalf, and added to the database only after expressing genuine interest. Because every contact opted in before receiving a single fundraising email, the program consistently produced strong engagement and healthy deliverability.

Over those two years, 745 new donors made their first gift to LASNY. Each arrived through the same process: identified based on geography, giving history, demographic profile, and mission affinity, pre-qualified through the opt-in step, and cultivated by DonorSpring content before ever being asked to give. These were not cold contacts. They were individuals whose giving profile matched LASNY's existing donor base and who had already shown interest in the organization's work before any solicitation took place.

Among the contacts DonorSpring reactivated were lapsed donors who had given in the past but had not been reached in years. DonorSpring's contact analysis surfaced these individuals and created targeted re-engagement content based on their prior relationship with LASNY. The results appeared as revenue from people LASNY had long since stopped counting on, without any manual work from LASNY's team to identify or individually reach them.

The recurring giving program that DonorSpring established now generates more than $25,000 per year in predictable monthly revenue. DonorSpring's donation pages are built to surface monthly giving in a way that drives adoption, and the recurring giving tools handle enrollment and stewardship automatically. The compounding effect is significant: recurring donors added in year one are still giving in year two and beyond, while new recurring donors continue to be added each month.

The time LASNY invested to achieve these results averaged under one hour per week. DonorSpring provided content, managed every prospect outreach communication, handled all opt-in coordination, and built and maintained the donation infrastructure.