Comprehensive Fundraising Collaborative

Member Services Bureau (MSB) is laser focused on helping stations drive more net revenue while also improving personal donor relationships. When core fundraising programs are left to a centralized service like MSB, economies of scale generate more net income and faster file growth for your station. Freed from managing the day-to-day details of membership programs, station staff can focus on the high-touch activities at which they excel: development strategy, community engagement, local programming and major donor development.

Fundraising is an intensely local exercise. That idea is at the center of MSB’s approach. In this collaborative model, station’s local brand is protected and the membership program benefits from applying best practices while driving down cost of fundraising. That is what being a good steward of donor funds really means.

Collectively, MSB stations are managing 780,000 active donors and 289,000 sustainers – raising over $110 million in annual membership revenue.

Compelling Reasons to Join the Member Services Bureau

Grow Total Membership Revenue: MSB stations collectively increased membership revenue in 2018 by 6.9%, raising nearly $71 million, compared with an increase of 4.1% by non-MSB stations.

Improve Donor Retention: Second- and third-year donor retention among MSB stations rose an average of 6.8% and 6.5%, respectively. Among non-members, the increases averaged 3.7% and 5.1%.

Maximize First-Year Donor Acquisition: First-year donors increased by an average of 11.6% among MSB stations compared with 6.1% among non-members.

Recapture Lapsed Donors: Through aggressive recapture programs and donor stewardship, MSB achieved a 2.1% decrease in lapsed donors between 2016 and 2018. Among non-MSB stations, lapsed donors increased by 16% during this period.

Boost Major Donor Fundraising

One of the tenets of the MSB value proposition is that, once in the Bureau, station staff are allowed the bandwidth to focus on high-touch fundraising.  There is no greater example of this than major donor fundraising.  Stations joining MSB in 2016 have increased the number of major donors by an average 20.2% from 2017 to 2019 compared to an average increase of 16.8% among stations in the benchmark cohort.  This increase in major donors contributed to a 33.8% average increase in major-donor revenue from the MSB group, compared to 23.8% average growth rate for stations in the benchmark group.

Leverage On-Demand/Passport Fundraising

Among nearly 50 stations in the benchmark group, Passport revenue accounted for 3.5% of total revenue compared to 4.5% for the MSB stations in our cohort.  Passport revenue at the benchmark stations showed an average 5.3% increase in 2019 vs 2018 while stations in the MSB cohort reported a much more robust increase of 21.5% on average.  The average amount of Passport revenue raised among MSB stations was $173K compared to $148K among stations in the benchmark group.

Increase Sustaining Members

MSB has consistently outperformed the benchmark cohort in increasing both the number of sustaining members and the overall revenue from sustainers.  Our cohort of stations completing two full years with MSB reported a 65.5% increase in the number of sustainers and a 66.8% increase in sustainer revenue compared to the 54.4% and 45.1% average increase among stations in the NRF benchmark.  This 21.7 percentage point difference between the MSB cohort and the NRF benchmark meant an additional $1.4 Million in sustainer revenue for these MSB stations.

Optimize Web Fundraising (Web, Web Pledge, Passport)

For stations completing two fiscal years in MSB, fundraising from Web, Web Pledge and Passport, as a percent of total membership revenue, has outpaced the benchmark cohort in each year.  Specifically, for the 3-year period from 2017 – 2019, MSB stations outpaced the NRF benchmark by 0.7, 0.8 and 5.1 percentage points, respectively.  The aggregate lift over the benchmark during these 3 years resulted in nearly $1.6 million of additional online revenue for the MSB station cohort.