Masterworks powers smarter fundraising for 30+ nonprofits

Company Overview

Employees: ~200

Region: US

Industry: Advertising Services

Masterworks is a full-service marketing agency helping large nonprofits modernize their fundraising. With 200+ experts across the globe, they support mission-driven organizations - those digging wells, feeding the hungry, and responding to crises - through services that blend creative strategy with advanced digital and data solutions.

As traditional fundraising shifts and donor behavior evolves, Masterworks helps nonprofits unify fragmented systems and donor data to power smarter, more personalized fundraising. To scale this for dozens of clients, they chose RudderStack to centralize customer data, enable real-time personalization, and build a flexible, multi-client infrastructure.

With over a decade of experience in AI-powered fundraising, Masterworks needed a CDP as sophisticated as their strategy.

The challenge

Despite having strong data engineering talent and a mature BigQuery practice, Masterworks faced a disconnect: their clients’ fundraising ecosystems were rooted in analog systems (like mailed checks and printed reply devices), while digital channels were becoming the core of campaign execution.

Masterworks key challenges were multi-faceted:

Data Silos: Web, CRM, email, media, and print channels operated in isolation

Legacy Expectations: Clients wanted precise 1:1 attribution - like direct mail tracking - within digital campaigns

Misfit Tools: Previous CDPs were expensive, built for e-commerce, and lacked flexibility

Client Complexity: Supporting 30+ nonprofits meant juggling diverse CRMs, KPIs, and compliance requirements

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

The result: a constant struggle to unify donor behavior, measure conversions, and confidently activate data-driven campaigns.

The Solution

Masterworks chose RudderStack for its transparent and customizable approach to customer data. Unlike black-box CDPs, RudderStack empowered their team to build a solution tailored to their agency and client needs.

Core implementation highlights:

Behavioral Tracking: Using RudderStack’s JavaScript SDK, Masterworks deployed tracking for dozens of clients. This meant they could monitor how every visitor engaged with donation forms, campaign content, blog posts, and more - all in real-time. Once someone fills out a form or clicks through an email, RudderStack backfills their previous anonymous activity - giving Masterworks a full view of that donor’s journey, not just the moment they converted.

Identity Resolution: Web analytics are powerful but only if you can connect anonymous activity to real people. Masterworks used email addresses as a key identifier, allowing them to tie web sessions to known donor records in their clients' CRMs. Instead of treating each session or device as a separate person, Masterworks could see the complete picture of who someone was, what they cared about, and how they engaged - no matter the channel.

Profile Stitching: With RudderStack Profiles, Masterworks unified data from mobile, desktop, email, media platforms, and offline sources into a single, stitched donor profile. Many users interacted with campaigns on multiple devices - Profiles ensured those journeys weren’t fragmented. When a donor visits a site, RudderStack ensures that tools like Iterable know who they are, what they’ve supported before, and what content is most relevant to them - instantly.

Custom Transformations: Masterworks leveraged RudderStack Transformations to enrich behavioral events before sending them downstream to tools like Redis and Iterable. For example, a simple “page view” could be enriched with campaign metadata, CRM status, or donation history.

Reverse ETL: Masterworks used Reverse ETL to push updated donor data - ike campaign engagement, audience membership, or donation predictions - back into each client’s CRM. This allowed marketing teams to use the CRM not just as a database, but as a living source of campaign intelligence.

“The minute we get an email address, we can backfill years of anonymous behavior and tie it to actual donations.”

Masterworks didn't build a stack - they built a donor intelligence engine. Every part of the implementation was chosen to:

Reduce friction for analysts and marketers
Increase visibility across the donor journey
Unlock real-time personalization
Make data accessible and actionable for every client

Rather than force clients into rigid workflows or black-box platforms, it gave Masterworks the infrastructure to build a flexible, insightful, and scalable system for smarter fundraising.

Key Results and Benefits

Identity Resolution & Campaign Attribution

Masterworks’ nonprofit clients needed deep attribution - the kind you’d expect in direct mail, where every check and every donor can be tied to a specific ask. But achieving this level of traceability in digital fundraising had long been elusive. RudderStack helped solve that problem.

Using RudderStack Profiles, Masterworks was able to merge over 14 identities per donor across web sessions, mobile devices, emails, CRMs, and donation platforms. This multi-ID stitching allowed the team to paint a complete picture of a donor’s journey - from anonymous web visitor to known supporter.

By mapping online behavior to offline giving, Masterworks created a bridge between digital engagement (ad clicks, email opens, site activity) and traditional giving outcomes (checks received, forms submitted). With that connection in place, they could finally deliver donation-level ROI attribution - tracking the specific campaign or message that led to each gift, even across multiple touchpoints.

“Our clients ask, ‘What generated this $22 gift?’ RudderStack finally gave us the fidelity to answer that question with confidence.”

Data Governance, Standardization & Analyst Empowerment

At the heart of every successful data operation is trust - and for Masterworks, that meant building a system where analysts, not engineers, could define and govern the tracking logic across 30+ clients.

With YAML-based configuration files and custom transformations, analysts had the autonomy to manage event tracking schemas and tailor logic to each client’s CRM, compliance rules, and campaign structures - without writing code or relying on backend engineering support.

By standardizing schemas across clients, the team reduced pipeline ambiguity, enabling faster troubleshooting and easier cross-client comparisons. Real-time alerting ensured any issues with tracking - like dropped events or malformed payloads - were caught before they compromised data integrity.

“Now, our analysts control their own tracking logic. And when something breaks, we know about it before the client does.”

Donor Personalization & Lifecycle Activation

RudderStack didn’t just unify data - it activated it.

With enriched Profiles in hand, Masterworks built dynamic audiences across the full donor lifecycle, from cold prospects to repeat sustainers. They used behavioral signals - like browsing history, campaign engagement, and cause-specific interests - to trigger personalized experiences and campaigns.

For example, a user browsing disaster relief content might be shown an urgent appeal, while someone exploring clean water pages might enter a different donor journey. These cause-specific web experiences increased relevance and boosted engagement across every channel.

The enriched profiles also powered automated lead-gen flows, converting anonymous traffic into email subscribers and donors. With real-time CRM syncing, those profiles flowed directly into downstream platforms like Iterable, enabling nurture and sustainer campaigns without manual list-building.

“Before, we had audience gaps. Now, we have continuity across every donor touchpoint.”

Scaling Across Clients & Saving at Scale

Supporting dozens of nonprofit clients - each with their own CRMs, KPIs, and compliance frameworks - used to mean cobbling together custom pipelines and stitching logic that barely scaled. RudderStack changed that.

With one shared infrastructure and flexible transformations, Masterworks could support 30+ nonprofit clients on a single RudderStack implementation. This enabled them to centralize control while still tailoring experiences and data flows to each client’s unique needs.

By replacing costly, inflexible legacy CDPs and eliminating the need for hand-rolled stitching logic, Masterworks saved hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in engineering overhead and licensing costs.

“We used to build janky stitching logic. Now RudderStack just handles it - across devices, CRMs, and media channels.”

What’s Next: Pushing the Frontier of Nonprofit Data

Looking ahead, Masterworks is doubling down on RudderStack to unlock even more powerful donor intelligence. Their vision: to help nonprofits engage every supporter with empathy, precision, and impact - powered by real-time, data-driven decision-making.

Real-Time Personalization

By integrating Redis with RudderStack, Masterworks will power live, on-site personalization - tailoring appeals and content to each donor’s cause interests and history as they browse, not after.

The result: higher engagement, better conversion, and deeper alignment with each donor’s mission.

Predictive Targeting with Propensity Models

Built on RudderStack Profiles, new models will score donor intent using behavioral signals - helping nonprofits proactively prioritize who’s most likely to donate, upgrade, or churn.

Smarter targeting = higher ROI with less wasted outreach.

Automated Data Quality with Transformations

Masterworks plans to scale RudderStack Transformations to automatically enrich events, update CRMs, and enforce data consistency across clients and tools - no manual cleanup required.

Automation boosts data trust and scalability without more engineering headcount.