“I’ve always been very idealistic and altruistic,” said Donald Summers, founder and CEO of Altruist Partners. By applying for-profit business principles to nonprofits, Altruist accelerates performance, growth and impact. Organizations on Altruist’s management platform see sustained growth at 25 percent a year. That’s a rarity in the nonprofit world.
Challenge
While clients saw remarkable gains, there was a time when Altruist Partners struggled with lead generation. “I badly want to share the benefits of our process with more nonprofits to help them make the world a better place,” said Summers. “Finding clients ready to scale up their impact journey proved more difficult than anticipated.”
Summers hired marketing firms, conducted webinars, staged public events and tried other strategies. He and his small team put hundreds of hours into direct outreach, blog posts, social media, and publishing in peer-reviewed journals. He hired sales people and brought in new executive talent. But he needed something more.
Solution
Summers decided to respond to a pitch email from RevBoss. In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Summers thought, “This is my marketing Hail Mary. I’m going to give this a try.”
Onboarding was simple and fast. “They are super smart. They’re extremely tight. RevBoss is very agile,” said Summers.
Result
In short order, the RevBoss engine churned out more leads than Altruist could handle. The strategy began with local organizations in the Seattle metropolitan area. It paid off. Just four months later, RevBoss added about a half million dollars of qualified clients into the acquisition stage of Altruist’s pipeline.
“Every week I was getting three, four or five qualified clients. RevBoss completely altered the trajectory of my business,” said Summers. “I’m not exaggerating. I was dejected after years of marketing underperformance, and now I found a pathway to help many more nonprofit leaders transform their organizations. I am ecstatic.”
With a unique open rate of nearly 50%, RevBoss was so successful that Altruist Partners actually had to pause services after a few months to handle all the inquiries.
“We had to pause RevBoss temporarily because they swamped us with new leads and new clients.” he says. “That’s metric number one. There are more qualified leads than I’ve ever had in 15 years of doing this business. Metric number two is in terms of ROI. I saw a 10X return within six months. I thought mine was the only firm that could deliver that type or ROI.”
There are greater benefits to the RevBoss relationship. Altruist’s web traffic quadrupled. “And the reduction in stress, the satisfaction with finding a pathway to true mission fulfillment, is worth so much more than raw business growth. I now know that I and my team can do our best work with nonprofits, knowing that we will be able to share our work with increasing numbers of changemakers.”
