Why Lighthouse
Direct mail is not a general reporting problem.
Tools that report on everything report on this badly. Lighthouse does one category of work, the way the people who run the mail already think about it.
Who it is for
Three people are in every one of these conversations.
They need different things from the same data, which is usually why there end up being three versions of it. Here there is one, and each of them gets their own way in.
- Fundraising agencies
Stop being the bottleneck between the file and the client
Every client, mailing and keycode in one place. The account team answers questions without opening a workbook — and the client can answer their own.
- A day per drop back for the team
- A client portal under your own brand
- Renewal conversations backed by numbers
- Nonprofit programs
Know what the mail earned without waiting to be told
Your own results, on your own schedule, with the acquisition maths already done. Walk into the board meeting with the same figures your agency is working from.
- Cost per dollar raised, already computed
- Donor counts that mean people
- Board-ready exports, nothing rebuilt
- Caging vendors
Hand the file over once and be finished with it
Upload into an account scoped to the clients you actually cage for. You see that the file was accepted. You see nothing else, and nobody sees you.
- No more emailing files around
- Confirmation it parsed, in writing
- Fewer resend requests coming back
What it replaces
The other three options, honestly.
Each of them can be made to work. The question is how much of someone’s week it takes to keep them working, and whether the answer survives being questioned.
| Capability | A spreadsheet | A BI tool | Your CRM | Lighthouse |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reads caging files as they arrive | By hand, each time | With an engineer | Imports gifts, not files | Yes |
| Ties a gift to keycode, package, list and mailing | If someone maintains it | If you build the model | Appeal code only | Yes |
| Cost per dollar raised without building it | No | No | Rarely | Yes |
| Keeps what doesn’t match instead of dropping it | No | No | No | Yes |
| Same figure for the agency and the client | No | If both have a licence | No | Yes |
| Client-facing under your agency’s brand | No | Extra licences | No | Yes |
How it is built
Four decisions we do not bend on.
Most of what makes reporting untrustworthy is a series of small conveniences taken years ago. These are the ones we declined.
One calculation, everywhere
Response rate means one thing in Lighthouse. Not one thing on the dashboard and a slightly different thing in the export, and not one thing for you and another for your client. There is a single definition and everything reads from it.
Nothing disappears to make a total look clean
A row that cannot be placed is held in front of you with its count and its amount, not silently discarded and not guessed into the nearest package. A total you cannot reconcile is worse than one that admits what is missing.
People are counted as people
Gifts and donors are different measurements and we never quietly substitute one for the other. You choose what makes two records the same person, and every acquisition and retention figure is computed off that choice.
The relationship stays yours
Your logo, your subdomain, your name on the report. Lighthouse never contacts your clients, never markets to them, and never appears in front of them as a third party they now have to manage.
Questions
The ones that come up first.
If yours is not here, ask it directly — you will get an answer from someone who knows the product, not a form response.
Ask us anything- Do we have to change how our caging vendor sends files?
- No. Send exactly what you send today. A layout you receive regularly is mapped once during setup, and everything that arrives in it afterwards is read automatically.
- What happens when a keycode doesn’t match anything?
- It waits in a queue with its gift count and its dollar amount, held out of the totals rather than absorbed into them. Assign it to the right package, reprocess, and every figure that depended on it corrects itself.
- Does this replace our CRM or database of record?
- No, and it is not trying to. Your CRM holds the donor relationship. Lighthouse answers what the mail did. Every table exports, so whatever you need in the CRM can go there.
- Can one client ever see another client’s data?
- No. Scoping is enforced on the record itself, not by hiding menu items, so there is no view that can be linked into, guessed at or shared that crosses a client boundary.
- How long does setup take?
- Most of the first client’s setup is agreeing the keycode structure and loading whatever history you want to compare against — so the timeline depends on how settled your keycodes already are and how far back you want to go. Clients after the first are considerably faster, because the structure is already agreed.
- What does it cost?
- It depends on the size of your operation, so we quote rather than publish a price list. Tell us roughly how many clients you report on and what you mail in a year, and we will come back with a number and what it covers.
Judge it against your own last drop.
Bring one caging file and your keycode list. Thirty minutes later you will know whether any of this is true for you.
or email nick@lighthouseresults.com