How North West Air Ambulance Used AI to Power Smarter Recurring Giving and Provide More Lifesaving Care

North West Air Ambulance Charity (NWAA) flies lifesaving missions every day across the North West of England. But unlike NHS services, the charity receives no government funding.

Every flight is funded entirely by the generosity of NWAA’s supporters which is why recurring giving is so crucial to the charity. It’s not just steady, reliable income; it’s what keeps the helicopters in the air and its critical care cars on the ground, 365 days a year, ensuring lifesaving care is there when people need it most.

To keep this vital stream of support strong, NWAA’s fundraising team needed to move beyond business-as-usual. They wanted to improve recurring giving retention, deepen donor commitment, and bring lapsed supporters back - all while working with a lean team and limited resources.

In 2024, they partnered with Dataro to find out if AI-powered insights and smarter audience building could help them better identify and engage the right donors, whether it was converting one-time supporters to recurring givings, retaining or upgrading existing givers, or reactivating those who’d dropped off.

It worked. With Dataro, the team achieved a 38% recurring gift upgrade rate, added £3,000 - £4,000 in new annual income, and built a stronger foundation for the long-term future of their recurring giving program.

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Key Results

In their first campaign using Dataro’s AI platform and insights to engage the right one-time donors and recurring givers with the right ask they achieved:

• 38% upgrade rate
• £4.50 average gift uplift per upgraded donor
• £3,000 - £4,000 in additional annual income from a single campaign
• Greater insight into churn risk and reactivation potential
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How We Did It

To build a more strategic and scalable recurring giving program, NWAA integrated Dataro directly with their Donorfy CRM.

Once connected, Dataro’s platform analyzed the charity’s CRM donor data and generated weekly-updated predictive scores and ranks for every contact, including each donor’s likelihood to upgrade, lapse, or reactivate. These scores surfaced directly within Donorfy and Dataro’s platform, making it easy for the fundraising team to build targeted campaign audiences without manual exports or data wrangling.

Using Dataro’s predictions, the team:

• Built upgrade and reactivation audiences based on donors most likely to respond for their calling campaigns (managed by Unity4)
• Donors with a high propensity to churn were excluded from upgrade and reactivation audiences
• Identified supporters at high risk of churn and took early action to engage and retain them via an omnichannel strategy using automated donor email journeys (using Dotdigital) and targeted thank you calls
• Low-propensity donors were removed from the 'retain' and 'increase' campaigns to reduce wasted outreach and improve ROI
  

With campaign-ready insights available in their CRM each week, the team could act quickly, plan with confidence, and deliver better results without increasing pressure on internal resources.

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Analyzing the Results

Using Dataro’s upgrade and reactivation predictions, NWAA built more targeted audiences and delivered campaigns that achieved stronger outcomes with less waste. 

By focusing only on donors most likely to respond, the team achieved a 38% response rate for upgrade and reactivation activity, generating an average uplift of £4.50 per donor and over £3,000 - £4,000 in additional annual income from a single campaign.

Churn scores also enabled the team to identify at-risk recurring givers in advance, giving them the opportunity to run timely, targeted and omnichannel retention activities before donors dropped off. This proactive approach helped protect long-term value and reduce attrition, without adding to operational workload.

With predictive scores surfaced directly in Donorfy, campaign execution was faster and more efficient. The team could build campaign-ready lists in minutes, without needing to run manual reports or rely on guesswork, freeing up time to focus on creative, donor-first communications.

This shift to an audience-first strategy allowed NWAA to deliver more relevant, higher-performing campaigns across every stage of the recurring giving journey, from retention and upgrades to reactivation, while also maximising the impact of their internal capacity.