Every nonprofit has goals it aims to achieve in order to grow and further its mission. Your organization might strive to boost revenue by 10% or grow its donor base from 1,000 supporters to 1,500. But, your organization won’t be able to accomplish these goals without retaining existing donors, upgrading donors’ giving levels, and nurturing relationships with major donors.
While attracting new donors is important to growing your donor base, it's more expensive to bring in new donors than it is to retain existing ones. There are many factors that impact donor retention rates, and your donors’ relationship with your organization is one of the most important. If donors feel deeply connected to your organization, staff, and mission, they are more likely to continue supporting you for years to come.
By using nonprofit data analytics, you can improve your existing donor stewardship strategy and communication efforts. Analyzing your donor data allows you to tailor messages to your donors to cultivate deep, personal relationships. Here are some of the ways you can use data analytics to craft customized, targeted donor communications.
1. Create segments.
It can be difficult to understand trends in donor data or tailor communications to a single donor if you are looking at your entire file of donor data at once. To better understand your supporter base, use donor analytics to create segments of donors based on shared characteristics.
Here are a few of the ways you can segment donors to target them with customized communications:
Demographics: There can be significant differences in giving behaviors and preferences across different age groups, genders, marital status, and employment. For instance, older generations may prefer more formal greetings while younger donors are more comfortable with casual messages.
Past involvement: Look for records of involvement donors have had with your organization, including any donations they made or volunteer opportunities they took part in. Then, you can segment by the amount they gave, how long they’ve been involved with your nonprofit, or how dedicated they are.
Wealth markers: Explore wealth markers to understand how much donors are capable of giving. Reference factors like a donor’s net worth, political contributions, prescriptive discretionary income, and real estate ownership to create segments based on their ability to give. You can also analyze past philanthropic activity like gifts to other organizations to understand their giving affinity, or their willingness to donate to your cause.
Keep in mind that while filters and segments are instrumental in directing tailored messages to subgroups of your constituents, you should still reference your full, unfiltered file from time to time. This way, you can still catch any large patterns and trends that could impact your organization.
If your nonprofit is struggling to segment donors due to a lack of demographic data, you can perform a data append to gather additional information about them. As NPOInfo explains in its guide to demographic appends, a demographic append pulls basic background information like their age, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, and more to enrich your database. You can also look for nonprofit data analytics software that appends and enriches your data for you.
2. Communicate through the proper channels.
As a nonprofit professional, you understand the importance of communicating with donors through the channels they regularly engage with. You wouldn’t want to send them important messages via email and then find out that they rarely check their inbox. In addition to saving time and funding by ensuring your messages actually reach donors, communicating through donors’ preferred channels conveys that you are paying attention to and value their unique preferences.
You can use data analytics to identify donors’ communication preferences and begin sending messages through that channel. According to GivingDNA, you can leverage your data analytics tools to measure and visualize how likely donors are to respond to each media channel and create custom segments based on that data. This way, you’ll only expend resources on messages that donors are highly likely to engage with and respond to, boosting your ROI and giving you more opportunities to foster connections with donors.
3. Tailor communications.
Segmenting donors and understanding their communication preferences help you get your nonprofit’s message to the right people through the right channels. But, how do you know what to include in these messages? Your nonprofit can apply donor analytics to content creation to personalize donor outreach.
Here are a few ways you can customize your messaging based on insights from donor data:
Customize your ask amount. Reference data from wealth screenings to tailor the amount you request from donors to a value similar to their average gift size. This ensures that the amount you request is within range of what the donor is willing and able to give. This strategy can also help you smoothly upgrade donors to your mid-level giving program by proposing a reasonable increase in the size of their gift.
Connect with donors’ values. Analyze donors’ connections to other nonprofit organizations, political or religious affiliations, and business connections to get a sense of their values and beliefs. Then, acknowledge these values in your message and recognize their reasons for engaging with your nonprofit. For example, if a donor shows an affinity for organizations that fight childhood hunger, you can reference this in your communications with them.
Acknowledge past contributions. Be sure to mention and thank donors for their past donations and volunteer efforts. Call out the specific ways they contributed by referencing the gift amount or volunteer activity they joined. This makes the message all the more personal and lets supporters know that you notice and value their dedication to your cause.
Another great way to customize messages and acknowledge donor support is to explain what a specific donation was used for when thanking donors. If a donor donated to your organization's project to rebuild a community playground, for instance, you might let them know that their contribution help you complete a new swing set.
Transforming your relationships with your supporters takes time and dedication. But, with the help of the right data analytics platform, you can screen donor trends as often as you’d like and receive the most up-to-date information on demand. Donor data analytics can help your organization save time, effort, and funds by directing personalized messages to donors on their preferred platform, becoming an essential part of your donor stewardship strategy.
Author: Ryan Carpenter
Ryan Carpenter is the Vice President of Client Success at GivingDNA, an all-in-one fundraising analytics, data visualization, and wealth screening tool. He has experience and interest in developing innovative strategies that efficiently identify, cultivate and solicit donors and prospects through effective engagement tactics. Ryan has a keen ability to synthesize large data sets and has a proven track record in creating successful cross-channel donor engagement strategies that deepen donor relationships.