VSO and Adroit

VSO previously held supporter and volunteer data across multiple platforms, often with overlapping records. Adroit were tasked with creating a Single Supporter View (SSV) by integrating three key systems. The resulting SSV layer enabled structured, deduplicated data to flow into Apteco, significantly enhancing its power and usability and enabling selection, modelling, and journey orchestration on a clean, person-level universe. The Apteco solution has now become the strategic backbone of VSO’s supporter engagement and fundraising activity. It sits at the heart of supporter communications, enabling a step-change in sophistication and targeting. The platform now supports multi-channel automated communications such as new supporter welcome journeys and regular giving conversion journeys. A regression-based ask strategy model has also been implemented, allowing personalised ask amounts to be scaled across campaigns.

This was not a one-off build. The aim was to build an intelligent, scalable supporter marketing ecosystem, with Apteco at its core - capable of supporting continuous optimisation and innovation. This growing sophistication is enabling VSO to take a longer-term strategic view. The initial regular giving conversion campaign has delivered early conversions, with projected retention rates indicating a strong long-term ROI. With Apteco underpinning model integration, channel orchestration, and audience segmentation, VSO now has a platform from which to test, learn and grow its fundraising. Apteco is no longer simply a data tool - it is a strategic enabler supporting VSO’s supporter engagement ambitions, delivering smarter journeys and laying the foundation for future innovation through social integration and advanced modelling. Apteco email and SMS functionality was piloted to automate communications and in summer 2025, an SMS campaign formed part of the Summer Appeal delivering a positive return and performing a valuable data-cleansing role. Learnings from this will shape future SMS use, which VSO sees as a rapid-response test and learn channel. Both email and SMS are now priority channels, enabling Apteco’s journey automation and a readiness for future use of soft opt-in data.

Apteco is used collaboratively by the fundraising, digital and data teams to plan, execute, and monitor all campaigns. This multi-team collaboration has reduced briefing cycles, reduced the need for laborious checking and quality control - because this is now built into the solution - and fostered a more data-led culture. In less than 12 months since adopting Apteco and launching journeys, VSO achieved the following: