How We Worked With Wiland to Build a Smarter Text Message Prospecting
Most nonprofit texting content focuses on one use case: deepening relationships with donors an organization already has. In 2025, we set out to test something different for one of our clients, a major national conservative non-profit – using text messaging purely for cold donor acquisition, from a custom modeled audience based off the organization’s existing housefile.
The data behind the program came from Wiland, a co-op partner we’d already worked with for years on direct mail prospecting. When Wiland launched a new peer-to-peer style texting product in 2025, we saw an opportunity to bring that same high-propensity data to an entirely new channel.
A Strong First Year
The results came quickly. Optimize Consulting layered targeted creative – polls, petition-style actions, and signed messages from a recognizable internal voice – on top of Wiland's Tier 1 data, testing and iterating fast since each name could be texted up to three times before requiring re-rental.
After 12 months, the names acquired had generated $97,769 in total revenue against a $32,400 investment – a 3.02x return – while adding 489 initial new donors and 5,328 additional contacts to the client’s housefile.
Many in the fundraising world hyper focus on donors, and rightfully so. But don’t sleep on list building. More than 8% of the the non-donor contacts we acquired on the initial prospecting campaigns converted to first-time donors once they were added to the housefile.
The result? $47,792 in downstream donations from the non-donor acquired contacts!
This wouldn’t be possible without a robust welcome series, housefile email, and text program to solicit these high-propensity donors over the subsequent months.
Building a Better Model Together
As the program scaled, it became clear that reaching the next level of volume called for a different pricing structure than the one Wiland’s product launched with.
So we worked directly with Wiland to build one including special pricing for Optimize Consulting clients. We paired this with a migration to a dedicated texting platform, Political Comms, which cut our delivery costs by half. Together, that opened the door to expanding the file into new audience tiers beyond the original Tier 1 segment.
A Stronger Second Round
Just two months into the rebuilt program, the new model was already proving out: $39,438 in revenue against a $36,649 investment, with the newest gifts barely two months old – putting the program on pace to match or beat year one's return.
What You Can Do
The best vendor relationships get better with real collaboration. Download the full case study for the complete breakdown of the approach, the creative, and how the model evolved between round one and round two.
