Mark Hobbs and Chris Kolmatycki knew they were on to something with FundMetric when clients said they would sign up for the product that helps charities improve their fundraising before it was even completed.

The two former advertising execs realized a few years ago that charities they were working with needed an online tool that would help them communicate with donors at the best time possible, and help them to organize their fundraising campaigns.

They gravitated toward the startup world with the encouragement of several people, including Milan Vrekic, the Executive Director of the Volta startup house in Halifax. And now they are on the cusp of launching FundMetric, which uses predictive analytics to help charities to target donors under the best circumstances possible.

“What we’ve learned recently is that fundraisers are sending other fundraisers to our door, and they’re asking about it even though they know it’s not ready yet,” said Hobbs in an interview in the company’s office in Volta.

The product is a software-as-a-service tool that lets charity workers communicate with their best donors and plot fundraising campaigns. It presents lists of donors and their contact details, highlighting how they like to be contacted. It can stream the list of donors into groups, so the charity can congratulate grads of a university that won a sports championship. Or it can send out Christmas cards to Christian donors and Hanukkah greetings to Jewish donors.  And through a simple drag-and-drop mechanism, Fundmetric lays out the timeline of a fundraising campaign, plotting when and how to contact donors.

The data analytics in the tool can help charities find the best time and method to approach clients – especially the clients the vast number of middle-income clients that don’t get the attention that wealthy donors do.

“The number of charities in need of more metrics is huge,” said Kolmatycki. “Ninety percent of their time is spent on 10 percent of the donors. … If we can personalize the lower end, we can help them bring in more money.”

The analytics can even help with the operations of the charity. For example, FundMetric is working with a charity that provides breakfasts to low-income high school students. By examining weather data, it can tell the charity when storms are coming. Fewer students arrive at school early on storm days, meaning the charity can prepare fewer breakfasts on such days and make its money go farther.

FundMetric now has one paying customer and is in close talks with two or three others. Its Lead Developer Scott Brown is working on a mobile product that will allow charity organizers to work on campaigns regardless of where they are. It will soon do a full launch, and when it does it will enter a huge market. It is first targeting health and education charities, and there are 5,000 such organizations in the U.S. alone. They raised $63 billion last year and spent $12.6 billion doing so – without the aid of a product like FundMetric.

“I think we’re going to change the way fundraising is done, especially in Canada,” said Kolmatycki.