Long-term value: Innovative to some, old hat to Masterworks

I think “disciple” is a strong word and “follower” takes on a new meaning with Twitter. Whatever I want to call myself, I think Seth Godin is smart. He posted today about lifetime value. His post focuses on a business relationship, but the comparisons to fundraising are obvious. For years, Masterworks has been using Long-Term Value (LTV) as a primary metric to determine the success of our marketing efforts. This allows us to not only choose marketing vehicles that have the best initial return, but also those that acquire and cultivate donors with the largest long-term value to a ministry.

We have been doing this sort of analysis at Masterworks since 2006.  And with our multi-channel efforts we now can get a more complete picture of value across any response channel, online or offline. I’ve always defined innovation as doing something first that others emulate. Looks like focus on long-term value fits that definition. Update: This just in Steve Hanberg, we’ve been doing LTV analysis at Masterworks since the 1990’s. Looks like the information I got was off by about a decade.