STOP trying to please all your donors with a single message — time to personalize your communications

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.

Be honest, have you ever used one of these strategies for communicating with your nonprofit community members?

• Emailed the same message to everyone on your list, every time.
• Rarely communicated so as not to “bother” anyone.
• Relied on just one or two channels to get your message out.

If so, you are not alone!

Most organizations we’ve worked with have struggled with at least one, if not more of these communication challenges.

And that’s because trying to please everyone using the exact same methods and strategies is impossible.

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.

What is segmentation?

Segmenting means dividing your supporters into groups with similar characteristics.

For example, a school might segment their database into current parents, alumni, and parents of alumni. Each of those groups could be further segmented into decades or by individual class year.

By speaking to a smaller group of people within your community, you can send a message that speaks directly to them and connects over a shared experience or common interest.

Segmenting has huge benefits. It has been shown to increase click-thru rates on email campaigns by 15% according to MailChimp! Hands down, it’s the best way to ensure each of your constituent groups get what they need at the right time.

So how do you segment a group of supporters?

That’s the million-dollar question! Truthfully, it will vary from organization to organization, and the possibilities are endless.

Here are some basics to consider:

• Giving history
• Event attendance
• Relationship to organization
• Demographic info
• Behavior
• Preferred communication method
• Interests

Let’s take a closer look at these categories.

Giving History

Giving history, including gift date and amount, is the one single marker that every organization, regardless of size, should be segmenting for.

Why? Because you most likely wouldn’t send the same “thank you for your gift” response to a person who just gave $50 as the person who have $5,000, at least not with a separate follow-up and stewardship plan.

Their levels of investment are very different, and they’d expect different levels of engagement from your organization in return.

Event Attendance

Whether you hold an auction, gala, race, meeting, or other event, consider tracking attendees as well as no-shows. After the event, you can easily sort and customize the message from “thanks for attending” to “sorry we missed you”. It also becomes much easier to invite past attendees in the future. Relationship to Your Organization

Who volunteers for you? Who serves on your board of directors? Who participates in your programs? Knowing who does what is key to personalizing your communications.

It might be a single line of text that differs from one group to another, or you might have an entirely separate communication strategy. Whatever the case may be, put yourself in your supporters’ shoes and think, “How do I feel when I read this?”

Reading a “Dear Friend, thank you for your support” letter is much different than the one that says, “Hi Debbie, thank you for volunteering at the Linky Din 5K!”

Delight your people with personalization, and they will return the favor.

Demographic Info

Should you track things like age, gender, geographic location, income level, marriage status, and the like? Sure! If you can.

Generationally, we can see trends in giving and philanthropic interests, although we’d also caution that making assumptions based solely on any one of these characteristics could flop.

That said, you might have a case where you’re appealing specifically to women and want to highlight a shared experience. Or perhaps your national organization is serving a unique need in a particular city or province, so segmenting by location could be very helpful.

However you decide to segment based on demographic information, put some careful thought into your plan.

Behaviour

Segmenting by behaviour is a terrific way to target a very specific audience. In fact, some CRMs and email platforms will do it automatically for you.

For example, what if you saw that a whole bunch of people opened your last email but didn’t click through? Perhaps you could send a follow-up note just to those people who showed interest and entice them with a very personalized message.

This is a powerful way to send targeted communications through email, and it might be worth looking into.

Preferred Communication Method

One version of the golden rule is to communicate with supporters the way they communicate with you:

• Do they text you after you leave a voicemail? Text that person back.
• Are they quick with email? Great, make sure they’re on your email list.
• Don’t have an email but respond to your direct mail appeals? Keep sending those letters — it’s working!

To get this information, consider sending out a survey with the communication options that you can accommodate. It doesn’t do any good if you provide a list of 6 or 7 methods that you can’t honor.

Interests

Your nonprofit might have a single focus, or you could have several arms that work together to solve a problem. If you’re able to speak to people who are really interested in one particular area of your organization, by all means, try to segment them out.

For example, a large medical nonprofit might send a research-focused newsletter to their science lovers. Another segment might be focused on education initiatives, patient success stories, or tales from the front-line workers.

No matter the size of your organization, segmenting by interest can keep engagement up and help reduce the number of unsubscribes to your email list.

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.