5 Data-Driven Nonprofit Omnichannel Marketing Strategies
By Gabrielle Perham of Deep Sync
Reaching your target audience is one of your key priorities and biggest challenges as a nonprofit marketer. To cut through the clutter of ads and other messages people receive daily, you must develop personalized campaigns with as many touchpoints as possible.
That’s where omnichannel marketing comes in. Omnichannel marketing is the practice of reaching the same audience with consistent messaging across multiple channels. It allows you to develop a unified marketing strategy that speaks to your audience’s needs and encourages people to convert.
For the best results, leverage data at every step of the omnichannel marketing process. This guide covers how to infuse your strategy with data to ensure your approach is well-informed and customized to your specific audience.
1. Unify constituent data.
Putting data in a central location eliminates data silos, helps you get a full understanding of your supporters, and makes it easier to target them across channels. Invest in a constituent relationship management platform (CRM) with robust features like:
Donor profiles that allow you to store pertinent information for each individual, including contact information, interests, and engagement history
Marketing tools that enable you to create and send marketing messages directly from the platform
A dashboard that tracks key metrics and helps you evaluate your strategy
Integrations with the software solutions you already use, such as fundraising, event, marketing, prospect research, and accounting software, for smooth data transfers
To maximize the amount of data you can store in one place, consider using a cloud-based solution like Snowflake or Databricks. These platforms use cloud technology to store and manage large amounts of constituent data, so you can easily scale up and add new information as your organization grows.
2. Enrich your database.
Once your constituent information is all in one place, leverage data enrichment to gather missing contact information and other details about your supporter base. Data enrichment is the process of supplementing your database with third-party information. It allows you to reach your audience across channels and personalize communications as you learn more about your supporters.
Through data enrichment, you can append the following data types to your database:
Demographics
Contact information
Education
Marital status
Home ownership and property data
Presence of children in the home
Income
Net worth
Lifestyle information
Then, segment your supporters based on similar characteristics to develop targeted campaigns. For example, you may create groups for different stages of the donor lifecycle to target potential, new, recurring, long-time, and lapsed donors with relevant messages across channels.
3. Leverage identity resolution.
While third-party data providers can help you build your understanding of your supporters, you may have constituent information you can’t easily map to individuals.
For example, let’s say you want to personalize your programmatic advertising efforts. You have supporter names, contact information, and interests stored in your CRM, and you can also identify supporter IP addresses. However, you’re unsure which IP addresses connect to which individuals in your database.
The solution to this problem is identity resolution. Identity resolution refers to the process of combining disparate constituent identifiers into singular identities. With identity resolution, you can meld online and offline data for more robust supporter profiles.
As Deep Sync’s identity resolution guide explains, this unified view of your constituents enables you to “target them with cohesive, relevant messages across channels instead of serving them different messages on each channel they use to interact with your brand.” It can also reduce wasted ad spend, helping your nonprofit stay within budget.
4. Identify lookalike audiences.
A truly successful omnichannel campaign doesn’t just target current supporters. It allows you to expand your horizons and scale up to reach an even wider audience.
However, you don’t want to target just anyone with your marketing messages. For best results, you’ll want to find people similar to your target audience who will likely engage with your organization.
Lookalike audiences are just that—people you identify as similar to your target audience members. By targeting lookalike audiences, you can expand your reach, focusing on individuals who are likely to convert.
You may have already dabbled in lookalike audiences before if you’ve used single-channel audience-building tools on platforms like Meta and TikTok. These tools allow you to select demographics or qualities of your ideal audience, but they’re not omnichannel-friendly because:
It’s difficult to determine who clicks on your ads and converts and who doesn’t.
You receive disparate data from each platform, limiting your understanding of your target audience as a whole.
Each lookalike audience learns in its own environment, requiring you to waste time and funds experimenting with each channel separately.
You prevent your organization from experiencing a multiplier effect from people seeing the same ads on multiple platforms.
Instead, we recommend working with a data provider to build and activate a portable lookalike audience that reflects your supporters’ demographics and interests. That way, you can target the same audience across channels for an efficient, effective omnichannel approach.
5. Track key performance indicators.
Measure your omnichannel strategy’s success by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) across platforms. Double the Donation’s nonprofit data collection guide recommends assessing marketing data like:
Website traffic, including how many people visit your site, how they get there, what pages they visit, and how long they stay
Social media engagement, such as impressions, likes, shares, and comments
Email open and click rates to evaluate your email marketing strategy
Advertising data like impressions, ad conversions, click-through rate (CTR), and cost per click (CPC)
Additionally, you may survey supporters to gain qualitative insights on your approach. Ask them how they found your organization, what platforms they use to engage with your nonprofit, how often they see your ads and marketing messages, and if they feel your communications speak to their interests and needs.
Omnichannel marketing is the best way to reach your target audience across channels, and with a data-driven approach, you can maximize engagement and conversions. Remember to keep your database clean and up to date so you have accurate data to power your strategy. Use this data and supporter feedback to iterate and improve your approach over time.
This guest post was written by Gabrielle Perham.
Gabrielle Perham is the Director of Marketing for Deep Sync. She joined the organization in 2017 and brings more than 20 years of experience in strategic marketing, branding, communications, and sales enablement.
With a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done attitude and a big-picture mindset, Gaby loves solving marketing and business challenges. She leads the brand strategy for Deep Sync, which has included consolidating four longstanding brands under the Deep Sync banner. She nearly single-handedly implemented HubSpot company-wide and holds four HubSpot Academy Certifications. Additionally, she works cross-functionally with operations and product teams and is passionate about operational excellence and efficiency.
Gaby earned both a B.S. in Marketing and an M.B.A. in Marketing Management from the University of Tampa. She enjoys spending time with her fiercely outspoken daughter, hiking and kayaking, rocking out in the first row of a live show, and giving back to her local community.
