Case Study: Arena Stage achieves a 20%+ increase in individual giving and 10x ROI with WealthEngine

Arena Stage - Customer Case Study

Arena Stage is a Washington, D.C. theater company that produces, presents, develops and studies American theater, serving over 540,000 audience members annually and raising about $5.2M a year. When Chief Development Officer Danielle St. Germain-Gordon arrived, she inherited a stagnant donor file of roughly 3,000 constituents and a culture that treated renewals as sufficient—without a systematic, data-driven way to determine appropriate ask amounts or to move donors up the giving ladder.

She implemented a WealthEngine screening appended to Arena’s Tessitura database, retrained staff to tailor asks to donors’ estimated capacity and overlaid those ratings with marketing affinity clusters. With monthly screenings and targeted segmentation, Arena quickly changed solicitation strategy and prospect assignment, driving a 20% increase in individual giving in 2011 and 15% in 2012, identifying a $5M+ capacity prospect now facing a $100K ask, and realizing an estimated 10x ROI from the investment.

Arena Stage

St. Germain-Gordon

Chief Development Officer