GUEST POST // 5 Ways to Use Donor Data to Streamline Strategic Planning
By Lomesh Shah of NonProfitEasy
Your donor data provides a window into what your donors want and need from your organization. It can help you anticipate their expectations and align yourself with them. Doing so can greatly set you apart from other organizations that only react to data rather than making proactive strategic plans.
Before you can use your donor data to gain insights, you need to ensure that you’re properly collecting and managing it. Good data management is an essential habit for staying organized and is especially important for finding valuable trends in your donor data.
Once you’ve set yourself up for efficient and secure data management by investing in a donor database, you can start improving your strategy with these five unique ways to leverage your donor data:
Improve Communications
Increase Engagement
Secure Major Gifts
Improve your Volunteer Program
Manage Your Finances
Are you ready to build a strong and data-informed strategy? Let’s get started!
1. Strategize for Different Segments
Your donors are not one size fits all so it’s important not to treat them as if they are.
Depending on factors such as age, background, education level, and experience with nonprofits, your donors will be interested in different aspects of your organization. They will also be more or less responsive to different communication styles.
Taking this information into account allows you to implement donor segmentation to craft a strategy that meets the needs of different members of your audience. You can craft communications on a variety platforms in different styles to appeal to all segments of your audience.
If your donors have explicitly expressed their preferred method of communication, make sure to use it when getting in touch with them. Not doing so may inadvertently communicate that their preferences are not important to you. Consider this demographic information when drafting emails, texts, social media posts, and any other communication.
Then, you can analyze incoming data and modify your strategy. Remember that both where you reach donors and how you speak to them through those channels are equally important and will differ by segment.
2. Improve Communication and Engagement
Once you’ve narrowed down what different segments of your audience respond to, you can start focusing on how to best reach them through different channels.
Understanding when to be short, relatable, and personable (like on Instagram for younger supporters) versus when to be serious, direct, and informative (like in an email to older supporters who are already familiar with nonprofits), can drastically improve the effectiveness of your nonprofit’s marketing efforts.
These decisions will be informed both by the audience that you’re speaking to and the channel that you’re using to speak to them. The kind of copy you would write in an email should be different in style than what you would write in an Instagram caption or in a tweet.
Donor data provides you with the demographic information you need to set a baseline standard for different types of communications. Having set communication standards for different segments of your audience will enable you to better track engagement rates.
If you don’t know your donors’ preferred communication channels, there are still ways to determine what kind of messages they respond to best. Your communications team should be able to use your donor data and messaging tools to gain insight into your communication engagement rates. They should be able to see:
Email open rates. Email can be a great way to reach your audience — if they’re opening your emails. Do some research on best practices for subject lines and try out different versions to see what kind of messaging gets your supporters to open your emails the most.
Text message response rate. It’s great to modernize with a new form of communication at your organization, but if you’re not treating it differently than other platforms, you may not be successful. Make sure that your copy is engaging and well-suited to the format of your message and the audience you’re reaching through text messages.
Event sign-ups. A low sign-up rate may mean that you’re marketing the wrong events to the different segments of your audience or that you’re not using language that gets your supporters excited when they read your email, social media post, or other communication about your event.
Social media comments. If people are commenting on your content, not just liking your post, that means that they took the time to think about what you posted and chose to interact. That’s much more effective than double-tapping as they scroll past!
Social media shares. Sharing content typically signals that this post was important or valuable in some way. If you can share informative and useful posts with your audience, they’ll be more likely to share them.
Other relevant social media insights. Depending on the platform this can be things like saves on Instagram, link clicks, story replies, and more. Get familiar with the platforms you’re using and the analytics they offer.
Make sure to track this data if you aren’t already. Understanding what types of communications are receiving high engagement rates and what could be improved can help you regroup and create a better strategy.
Combining your engagement insights with your donors’ demographic data can help you determine if pursuing a specific communication method is worth your time. You have a lot to do and often, not enough time. Use the data you have to focus your strategy and efforts for maximum results.
3. Secure Major Gifts
Robust donor profiles with information about where your donors work, their contributions to your organization over time, past involvement with other organizations, and more can provide valuable insight for your prospect research.
Prospect research is how organizations identify major donor candidates as well as plan capital campaigns and solicit annual giving, according to Double the Donation’s guide to prospect research. Few individuals have the capacity and affinity for major gifts, and prospect research helps identify key wealth and interest factors, helping your nonprofit cultivate relationships and avoid asking the wrong supporters for contributions they don’t have the means to give.
Your donor data can help you identify prospect research factors, such as:
Personal information
Past giving history
Nonprofit involvement (with your organization and others)
Employment
Relationships or business affiliations
Ensure your data is clean and accessible so your major gifts team will be able to make good use of it. Even if you are not directly involved in the prospect research process, doing this will help the whole process run more smoothly and be more successful.
4. Improve Your Volunteer Program
Do your donors also volunteer with your organization? Why or why not? Your donor data can be valuable for showing you how your donors are getting involved with your organization. As you organize this data, you may start to notice that some of your donors regularly volunteer, while others only volunteer once or never even start!
This information, along with data about your most popular types of volunteering, can give you valuable insights into how to encourage more volunteering. Plus, you can even learn how to improve your volunteer program’s structure for better engagement.
If you want to start engaging more donors to encourage them to volunteer, consider:
Sending volunteer opportunity-focused newsletters to donors who haven’t volunteered
Reaching out to one-time volunteers to get their feedback on their volunteer experience
Getting creative with new ideas for volunteer opportunities
Knowing your donors’ preferences for volunteer activities and what may be deterring them from volunteering will help you cater your volunteer program to engage even donors who have never volunteered before.
This can also help you retain volunteers. According to NonProfitEasy’s guide to volunteer retention, an ideal retention rate is about 65%. Showing your supporters that you care about their volunteer experience helps increase their affinity to your organization, which often leads to longer-lasting relationships. As you revamp your volunteer program based on the data you gather from your donors, focusing on volunteer retention can help you build a durable program that will keep supporters engaged.
5. Manage Your Finances
Understanding when, how, and how much your supporters donate to your organization is crucial for planning your fundraising campaigns, creating your budget, and filing your taxes. You can create a smoother tax season for yourself by ensuring your donation data is organized well before the deadline to file your form 990.
Your donor data about what events attendance rates, how much each event raised, and what donations you received can help you determine your budget for upcoming quarters. This information will allow you to determine your nonprofit’s most lucrative events and fundraisers, ensuring you can make data-driven investments to meet your fundraising goals.
While your financial office should already have excellent financial records, your donor data can be helpful for pinpointing more specific donation information. Take the time to ensure that your donor data is well organized and can be accessed easily when you need it.
Donor data comes in many forms and can serve a large variety of purposes. The five uses for donor data that we’ve outlined can help your organization modify your strategy to better serve your supporters while reducing ineffective and redundant work for your team.
If you start with a strong base of donor management best practices, take the time to set up useful analytics reporting, and use your data intentionally to make decisions, you’ll be well on your way to stepping up your organization’s efficiency. Good luck!
This guest post was written by Lomesh Shah.
Lomesh Shah has over 25 years of experience in international corporate leadership with a strong emphasis on marketing technology and data management systems. Lomesh has worked with small to mid-size businesses, privately-held companies and Fortune 500 corporations in various capacities; from sales and marketing to overseeing automation and re-engineering of processes and operations.
As President and Co-Founder of NonProfitEasy, Lomesh spends much of his time immersed in the nonprofit industry both as an industry leader, speaker, and in service to several organizations as a board member and volunteer. Outside of the industry, Lomesh is a technology junkie and will give anyone willing to listen an assessment of the latest trends in anything from espresso makers and mobile gadgets to electric cars and wind power.
