Frequently Asked Questions

While we’ve done something new with The Digital Co-Op, it has roots in something that will be familiar to most organizations: the direct mail co-op model for cooperative growth that has existed for years. Organizations pool behavior data (that’s where the term “co-op” comes in), and then your organization can acquire new email addresses from this pool that have been modeled to be most likely to belong to a potential donor or action-taker.

What’s new about the co-op model, in its old-made-new digital form, is a combination of cutting-edge machine learning and billions of rows of data that allow our platform to model your email file. But there are some email addresses we don’t touch, which is just as important as the data we do need. For example, if an email address is unique to your organization we value that relationship and don’t use that data. There are a few other cohorts of people we immediately exclude, which we can discuss!

Once you join the co-op, it’s as simple as letting us know how many new email addresses you want to join your program. Our cutting-edge models will parse billions of data points from you and other, like-minded organizations to meet the needs of your organization. You’ll receive new prospects modeled to support your mission, communicate with your new list, measure your return, and then choose which challenge your next investment will solve. Once you’re in the co-op, it’s easy to take advantage of any models within our suite of data-backed solutions! You can reactivate lapsed subscribers, model for sustainers, find advocates, and more.

For one co-op member, response rates from names acquired through The Digital Co-Op are 41% higher than response rates for Facebook names and 66% higher than names from another fixed-cost source.

Another co-op member saw all their 2021 pre-Giving Tuesday list purchases pay back on average 116% by the end of the year.

While some organizations are seeing their investments return in full in 60 to 90 days, every single co-op member to date has seen a 100% return in 12 months.

Here’s what the results have looked like for one top 100 nonprofit who joined in 2021:

There are many reasons this works so well, but a few stand out: The co-op features both supporters’ email addresses and corresponding email behavior – so the combined audience and channel insights deliver strong performance. Additionally, a 30-day recency screen ensures that each email address delivered to you is high-quality and recently active on the list of another organization.

This is an anonymous co-op, meaning we do not publish or reveal its members. But current organizations come in all sizes – from Forbes Top 100 nonprofits to leading voices in the progressive space. Every new member who joins will find email addresses who are similar to their supporter demographics and who engage with missions similar to their own.

Additionally, we only work with nonprofits and progressive organizations who closely align with our values at MissionWired. Every organization who joins the co-op is vetted by our senior team to ensure they align with our members’ missions.

We created The Digital Co-Op by taking the sophistication of Facebook’s lookalike modeling feature and combining it with the stability, efficiency, and scalability of fixed-cost acquisition. 

While Care2 and The Digital Co-Op both offer a stable fixed cost per name, Care2 and other fixed-cost sources don’t use email exhaust data to offer the most active names. While Facebook does have the ability to access exhaust data, what it cannot see is the donation data we leverage to help you acquire the individuals most likely to give to your program.

The Digital Co-Op has a frequency and recency screen to ensure all emails you receive are active, have recently engaged with email content, and have not previously been added to your list.

In virtually every case, yes – and for the positive. Since The Digital Co-Op prioritized recency and specificity, we’ve seen cohorts outperform the open rates of house files! However, as with any fixed-cost acquisition source, we encourage you to onboard lists in accordance with best practices to ensure continued high deliverability.

We think so! And if you’re interested in testing the co-op – or if you have any other questions at all – we’d love to talk more. Reach out to thedigitalcoop@missionwired.com, and a member of our team will be in touch!