Segment your donors and increase engagement and charitable giving

If it seems like segmenting is a no-brainer, you’re right. However, it’s not always easy to execute in practice.

Sending the same donation letter to everyone could be wasting resources at best, and potentially hurting your relationships with them at worst.

So how can a nonprofit like yours “please everyone”?

Unfortunately, you can’t…but…

Here’s what we do know after working with hundreds of nonprofits over the years:

There are better ways to communicate with your supporters than by throwing spaghetti at a wall and to see what sticks.

Or worse, ghosting your audience until it’s time to ask for a gift.

If finding that sweet spot of communicating with your donors is difficult, let’s talk about one way you might relieve some of the stress in the system: Segmentation.

Steps to segmenting your list:

If it seems like segmenting is a no-brainer, you’re right. However, it’s not always easy to execute in practice.

1. Start small — choose one or two areas to focus on and test it out. You can always revisit and adjust your segments as you learn more about your audience.
2. Determine your messaging strategy for each segment. Will you write a unique message for each segment, or simply change a small part (a line, a paragraph, the offer, the ask)?
3. Develop key message themes you’d like to send out regularly (appeals, receipts, thank you’s; newsletters, emails, surveys)
4. Decide how often (weekly, monthly, quarterly) and through which media channels (social, email, direct mail) you’ll communicate with each segment.
5. Track as much data as you can from each segment and use that data to make adjustments in your subsequent communications.

Overcoming hurdles

In an ideal world, communication between an organization and its supporters should be ongoing, relevant to their lives, and done through the channel(s) that they (the supporters) prefer.

The most difficult challenge to overcome is bad data. Wrong, missing, outdated, or duplicate information can lead to some folks being left out and others getting double-asked.

If your organization is currently using a spreadsheet for your constituent information, you might find it difficult to track key segmentation data. It’s also hard to sort by multiple characteristics in a spreadsheet and not end up with mistakes or duplicate emails being sent to the same person.

How can you segment efficiently?

With a good system.

Investing in a CRM with great reporting capabilities such as fundraisingManger by Salesforce, might be a logical next step. Looking for your LYBUNTs? Your volunteers? Your donors over $5,000? A master database with all your donor and constituent information allows you pull segmented lists with just a few clicks.

In the end, personalization matters a great deal to your organization’s bottom line, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. So if you’re not yet segmenting your lists, I hope this article gave you some food for thought and a little inspiration to give segmentation a try.

Looking for CRM support in 2022? Get in touch with our team to learn more about cloudStack’s services and our trio of products: fundraisingManager, receiptManager and financeManager.

All built on the Salesforce platform.