How Masterworks built a donor intelligence engine with RudderStack

Understanding donor behavior is critical to effective nonprofit fundraising. As digital channels transform how people give, organizations face a unique challenge: connecting online interactions with offline giving while maintaining the precise attribution that traditional fundraising methods have typically provided.

This is the story of how Masterworks, a full-service marketing agency serving 30+ major nonprofits, built a sophisticated donor intelligence engine using RudderStack's customer data infrastructure.

Nonprofit fundraising is evolving

For decades, nonprofit fundraising operated through predictable channels with clear attribution. When a supporter mailed a check in response to a printed appeal, the connection between campaign and donation was direct and measurable.

Digital fundraising changed everything. Today's donors might see a social media post, open several emails, visit a website multiple times on different devices, and finally make a donation weeks later—possibly even through traditional mail. This complexity creates significant challenges for organizations trying to understand which efforts are truly driving results.

"Our clients want to know exactly which $22 donation came from which campaign—just like in the print world," explains Jason Campbell, Director of Digital Data at Masterworks. "In digital, that's incredibly difficult."

The challenges of multi-client, multi-channel fundraising

Masterworks supports dozens of mission-driven organizations helping communities worldwide. As fundraising evolved, they found themselves facing several critical data challenges:

1. Fragmented donor journeys: Interactions scattered across web, CRM, email, media, and print channels created disconnected views of donor behavior
2. Attribution complexity: Nonprofits expected detailed, donation-level attribution for digital campaigns similar to what they received with direct mail
3. Technology misalignment: Previous customer data platforms were expensive, designed primarily for e-commerce, and lacked the flexibility needed for nonprofit use cases
4. Multi-client infrastructure: Supporting 30+ organizations meant juggling diverse CRMs, KPIs, and compliance requirements within a single agency architecture

Building a donor intelligence engine with RudderStack

Rather than forcing clients into rigid, pre-built solutions, Masterworks chose RudderStack to build a more flexible donor intelligence infrastructure. This approach allowed them to create a system tailored specifically to nonprofit fundraising while maintaining the technical autonomy their team needed.

Their implementation focused on five key capabilities:

1. Complete behavioral tracking across the donor journey

Using RudderStack's JavaScript SDK, Masterworks deployed consistent tracking across dozens of client websites. This captured how every visitor engaged with donation forms, campaign content, and educational resources—all flowing into a centralized data layer.

The critical insight: RudderStack's ability to backfill historical anonymous activity once a visitor identifies themselves by submitting a form or clicking through an email. This creates a complete picture of the donor journey, not just the conversion moment.

2. Identity resolution that bridges digital and physical worlds

For nonprofits, connecting anonymous digital behavior to known donors is particularly challenging. Masterworks leveraged email addresses as the primary identifier, allowing them to tie web sessions to donor records in their clients' CRMs.

Using RudderStack Profiles, they achieved impressive results:

"We're merging over 14 identities per donor across web sessions, mobile devices, emails, CRMs, and donation platforms."

This multi-ID stitching creates the foundation for their attribution system, connecting digital engagement to traditional giving outcomes—even when donations come through offline channels.

3. Analyst-driven data governance

One of Masterworks' most significant achievements was shifting control of data definition from engineers to analysts. With RudderStack's YAML-based configuration and transformation capabilities, analysts could manage event tracking schemas and tailor logic to each client's requirements without writing code.

This approach delivered three key benefits:

• Standardization: Consistent schemas across clients reduced pipeline ambiguity
• Autonomy: Analysts could update tracking logic without engineering dependencies
• Quality control: Real-time alerting caught tracking issues before they affected client reporting

4. Personalized donor experiences

With unified donor profiles in place, Masterworks built dynamic audience segments spanning the full donor lifecycle. These segments power personalized experiences based on cause-specific interests, browsing history, and previous giving patterns.

For example, when someone browses disaster relief content, they might see an urgent appeal focused on immediate needs. Meanwhile, a visitor exploring clean water initiatives might enter a different journey highlighting long-term impact.

These tailored experiences don't just improve conversion rates—they create deeper alignment between donors and the specific causes they care about most.

5. Multi-client scaling with a single infrastructure

Perhaps most impressively, Masterworks achieved all this for 30+ nonprofit clients using a single RudderStack implementation. Their flexible architecture allows for centralized control while still tailoring data flows to each organization's unique needs.

This approach eliminated expensive legacy CDPs and custom stitching logic, saving "hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in engineering overhead and licensing costs."

What's next: The future of data-driven fundraising

Masterworks isn't stopping with their current implementation. They're expanding their RudderStack usage to enable:

• Real-time personalization: Integrating Redis with RudderStack to power live, on-site content tailoring as donors browse
• Predictive modeling: Building propensity models on RudderStack Profiles to identify donors most likely to give, upgrade, or churn
• Automated data quality: Scaling RudderStack Transformations to automatically enrich events, update CRMs, and enforce data consistency
• Marketing agility: Empowering non-technical marketers to define and sync audience segments without data team dependencies

The bigger picture: Transforming nonprofit technology

Beyond the technical implementation, Masterworks' story highlights a broader shift in how nonprofits approach technology. Rather than accepting off-the-shelf solutions designed for other industries, forward-thinking organizations are building custom data infrastructure that respects the unique nature of donor relationships.

This transformation is particularly important as digital privacy evolves. With RudderStack's data cloud-native approach, Masterworks maintains complete control over sensitive donor data while still enabling sophisticated personalization and attribution.

For nonprofits focused on maximizing their impact in a changing world, this balance of technical sophistication and mission alignment isn't just nice to have—it's essential for the future of fundraising.

Key takeaways

• Attribution precision matters: Connecting digital interactions to donation outcomes remains crucial for nonprofit fundraising success
• Identity resolution is foundational: Stitching together 14+ identifiers per donor creates the complete picture nonprofits need
• Analyst empowerment accelerates impact: Giving non-engineers control of data definition reduces bottlenecks
• Personalization drives connection: Cause-specific content aligned with donor interests creates more meaningful engagement
• Flexible infrastructure scales: Supporting 30+ organizations with diverse needs requires adaptable, rather than rigid, technology

As digital transformation continues to reshape how people support the causes they care about, the organizations that thrive will be those with a clear, complete understanding of their donors' journeys—and the ability to turn those insights into personalized, meaningful experiences.

Want to learn more? Read the full Masterworks case study