CLIENT
ALSAC (The fundrasing arm of St. Jude children's cancer research hospital)
MY ROLE
Lead AI Strategist
Added 40 new financial advisors to file and unlocked two digital channels to reach financial advisors
Impact
Key Question: How might we identify, reach, and engage high net worth and ultra high net worth donors beyond our current base of mass and affluent donors?
Innovating revenue generation methods for a non-profit cancer research hospital
The problem
ALSAC, the fundraising arm of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, identified a gap in its donor base: they were underrepresented among ultra-high-net-worth and high-net-worth givers.
With wealth increasingly concentrated in these segments and the donor landscape shifting, ALSAC needed to evolve its philanthropic strategy to reach this audience effectively.
Phase 1: Competitive teardown and prioritization of potential fundraising initiatives
My role: Lead competitive research, co-facilitate ideation, and conduct market sizing to identify the highest-potential growth opportunities for ALSAC.
Key Activities I Owned:
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Competitive Research: I created an exhaustive list of ALSAC's direct, adjacent and analogous competitors, the key donor segments they were targeting and mapped the strategies from least to most effective
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Ideation and prioritization: After doing a thorough competitive teardown, my team and I ran several ideation workshops to generate 100+ ideas that would be relevant given ALSAC’s context. We then ran a prioritization exercise to find an overlap between ALSAC’s strategic priorities and the ideas to identify 10 potential pathways forward.
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Deep dive and market sizing: I then created a framework to market size these ideas and ran additional competitive research to map how exactly these fundraising initiatives were run, key donor segments, key activities etc
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Expert Validation: My team and I ran validation interviews with experts in philanthropic fundraising to pressure-test assumptions and understand where the biggest opportunities for growth existed.
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Prioritization: I developed a 5-part evaluation framework to guide decision-making: market size, feasibility, cost, alignment with ALSAC's mission, and scalability.
Outcome: Down-selected to 3 high-potential pilots. A pilot focussing on increasing number of financial advisors on file and engaging previously acquired advisors was voted as the most strategicaly important.
Competitive teardown outcome
Market sizing outcome
The ALSAC team had prioritized acquisition of new financial advisors on file and engagement with previously unengaged financial advisor as the pilot of highest value. ​
My role: I lead the financial advisor pilot end-to-end and managed a team of two
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In order to do this, I
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Created a framework to help us prioritize key financial advisor segments
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Designed a multi-channel experiment plan that would run across LinkedIn organic outreach, LinkedIn paid ads and email outreach that would balance our key questions, statistical significance and budget constraints
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Framed a value-first acquisition strategy using gated content (estate planning, tax strategy, philanthropy) to build relationships before donation asks
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Collaborated with the team to run the experiment, making iterations as we progressed to increase confidence in our results
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Collaborated with the team to execute personalization at scale leveraging LinkedIn sales navigator and Clay (AI-powered marketing automation tool)
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Managed ALSAC executives which included prepping senior stakeholders whose LinkedIn profiles we using for LinkedIn outreach, providing regular updates and creating a process to redirect financial advisors who wanted to have a conversation
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Collaborated with cross-functional ALSAC teams to get legal, marketing and digital's approval on the content and the landing pages we created
Phase 2: Design and execute one high value pilot before scaling
Landing pages for the experiment
An advisor directing his client to St. Jude for a donation conversation as a result of the LinkedIn outreach