As a nonprofit, your biggest asset is your relationship with the donors supporting your mission. Your next biggest asset is the data you collect on those donors.

Nonprofit fundraising is a practice of continuously improving practices to thrive with limited resources. Donor data, and how you manage it, is critical to creating long-term relationships with your donors to create impact.

But, this doesn’t mean raw data. Jumbled donor data will do little in helping you perfect your practices— it needs to be organized in a viewable, actionable manner. This is where segmentation enters into the picture.

Segmenting your donor data allows you to use more targeted messaging that will motivate your community to act. From nurturing your email list, to inspiring the start of major donor stewardship conversations, segmentation can affect your success in scaling your organization's impact.

We’re going to examine segmenting your donor list through the following points:

What is segmenting donors?

1. How do you segment your donors?

What are some powerful ways to segment your donor list?

1. Type of donor. 
2. Engagement level and method.
3. Preferred communication method.
4. Motivation or topic interest.
5. Age and demographic.
6. Giving capacity.

We’re going to begin by exploring the basics of segmentation, including the online donation tools and other software that can help guide your efforts. Then, we’re going to explore seven segmentation strategies that can help improve the responses to your donor outreach. Let’s get started!

What does it mean to segment your donors?

Donor segmentation is the process through which nonprofits organize their donor list into groupings of common characteristics. This allows organizations to target their communications to the groupings with messaging that drives engagement, saving time and human resources while increasing success.

Further, segmentation is a powerful tool in prospect research. It can reveal valuable insights that might not be as obvious when examining your donor base as a whole. From identifying opportunities for major gifts to discovering supporters who might be interested in beginning the planned giving process, applying segmentation practices to your donor data is worthwhile. 

How do you segment your donors?

When you segment your donor list, you take the raw donor data and organize it into more useful groupings around characteristics that all those individuals share. Even if you’re not a data expert, there are a few tools that can help guide your efforts.

Your online giving platform, CMS, volunteer management tool, and social networks can all gather data on your donor interactions. Ensure all of these tools integrate with your nonprofit’s CRM solution whenever possible, so all of the data collected can flow seamlessly into your central database system. This gives you easier access to the full picture of your data, and most CRM platforms include robust segmentation, filtering, and sorting functions to help you get started.

From there, follow a few best practices when segmenting your donors:

• Start by building donor personas through stakeholder interviews or surveys.
• Assign meaningful segments to those audiences. Don’t just assign groupings for every trend you notice but instead corresponding to your nonprofit’s goals. For example, if you’re looking to engage younger supporters this year, create segments by generation.
• Maintain your donor database. This means regularly cleaning your data of any duplicates or out-of-date entries and creating uniform systems for data entry, ensuring you’re working with updated information at all times.
• Regularly revisit your segments to make sure they still represent your donor base and your nonprofit’s goals.

Once you’ve created your segments, it’s simply a matter of contacting donors through the correct marketing channel(s)! Let’s look at a few particularly helpful segments to consider.

What are some powerful ways to segment your donor list?

Type of donor.

One of the easiest, most obvious segments to apply to your donor list is the type of donor. This includes first-time donors, recurring donors, major givers, etc.

For example, all of your first-time donors should be directed through a welcome series following their first instance of support. However, recurring donors should be approached in a way that reflects their history with your organization and in a more frequent manner.

Engagement history.

There are two legs of this segment— engagement level and engagement method. 

Engagement level corresponds to how much a donor interacts with your nonprofit, such as someone who regularly communicates via social media versus someone who donated once via a peer-to-peer campaign and never returned. Engagement method refers to the ways a donor interacts with your nonprofit, such as acting as a volunteer versus never interacting in person and exclusively giving through your donation page.

There are many segments that can come from this category: highly engaged/loosely engaged, high communication frequency/low communication frequency, donor/volunteer/board member/social fundraiser, and even preferred giving method such as card/cash/check.

Preferred communication method.

Consider the preferred communication methods of your donors when segmenting your data. This will help you to contact them in the way they prefer, drastically increasing the chances they see your communications and respond accordingly.

Consider the following:

• How are supporters reaching your website? Organic traffic? Referral traffic? 
• Which social media networks do your donors frequent?
• Are your donors smartphone-savvy, or maybe more responsive to text message giving methods?
• Have the majority of your donors opted into your email newsletter?
• Have you had much success with direct mail? Phone calls? In-person asks?

Contact the segments you create using the communication methods they’ve preferred in the past and you’ll have a higher response rate going forward.

Motivation or topic interest.

If you’re a nationwide organization collecting online donations from members across the country, you may be talking to donors that are motivated to work you're doing in their region. Connect your message to that region specifically.

If you're a nonprofit that works in several different issue area, try to tag your donors based on the issues that they have expressed the most interest in before.

This segment is less concrete than the others and might be harder to quantify with data points. Surveys and interviews will be great ways to begin your research.

Age and demographic.

There are major differences that pop up across generations, and it’s valuable to be cognizant of those when communicating with your donors.

For example, your youngest supporters may fall into Generation Z. This generation is hardly in its 20s yet, and contacting them with major or mid-level giving initiatives is going to fall on empty bank accounts. You’d be better off contacting them with peer-to-peer opportunities and volunteer programs.

However, targeting older segments with major giving, or planned giving, stewardship is likely to have much higher success overall. Your nonprofit needs supporters of all types, from volunteers to major supporters, and segmentation simply helps you market initiatives to those supporters most likely to fill each role.

Type of entity.

If your segments are singularly targeting individual donors, there’s a decent chance you’re missing out on segments of your support network.

Create segments for different supporting entities your nonprofit communicates with, including individual donors, corporate sponsors, other nonprofit partners, and grant-making foundations. From how you communicate to which opportunities you present, interacting with these various segments will be drastically different.

For example, your individual donor communications should be more personal and include smaller asks that one person could reasonably fulfill. Meanwhile, your corporate sponsors might be interested in contributing in a larger manner (such as sponsoring a whole event) and will probably want to receive something more substantial (like public recognition on your branded materials) in return.

Giving capacity.

Gifts of all sizes and types are greatly appreciated in nonprofit fundraising, from major capital campaign supporters to a smaller social fundraiser contribution. Your nonprofit is probably interacting with supporters at all levels, and it’s important that you’re completing outreach in a manner that doesn’t deter any of those various levels from giving.

For example, it’s important that you don’t scare off mid-level donors from giving by asking for donations that are simply way outside of their giving capacity. Similarly, avoid suggesting low gift amounts to major givers as that may lead to them giving less than originally planned, thinking you’re not in need of the larger gift.

Segment your donors by giving capacity to ensure your donation communications are targeted to the right demographic to achieve the most success. 

Your donor data is your nonprofit’s most valuable tool to continue fundraising successfully in the future. Segmentation is the method of translating that data into actual next steps and successes.

Consider whether the above seven segmentation strategies will yield valuable insights for your nonprofit. If so, it’s time to start organizing your data! Even if you apply just a few of these strategies, you’ll be gleaning actionable information about your donors in no time.

After You've Segmented Your Audiences, What Next?

The next steps in the process is figure out what motivates donors within your segements and generate messaging that motivates them to act. Watch this video to learn more about getting started with a messaging strategy.

Guest Author: Andrew Berry

Andrew is the head of marketing and customer success for Donately. After getting involved with nonprofits at a young age, he discovered a passion for helping the organizations that are making the world a better place. Knowing how vital online fundraising has become, his goal is to help nonprofits raise more money online each year! In his spare time, you will find him cooking up dinner, playing with his dog or cheering on Boston sports teams.

Sample Slide Deck Outline/ Template

Social change isn’t easy. Your organization may have the best of intentions, but unless you can convince others to join you, you’ll never make the impact you’ve been dreaming of. You need volunteers, donors, and advocates—and the only way to get them is an engaging pitch.

So, how do you condense the complexities of your work into a concise and compelling argument? We’ll walk you through it.

Brand Matters

As we shared in "Simple Steps to Authentic Brand Strategy," branding is really just a fancy word for personality. A strong brand thinks about, interacts with, and wants to be seen by the world in a certain way. It’s critical to building operational capacity, galvanizing support, and maintaining mission focus. So, before anything else, you’ll want to:

Develop a clear value proposition and brand position to establish reputability.

• • High levels of trust contribute to greater organizational capacity and social impact. In 2015, 90% of corporations indicated to America’s Charities Snapshot that partnering with reputable organizations enhances their brand. Great read, "The Role of Brand in the Nonprofit Sector." -- Stanford Innovation Review

Create a compelling storyline.

• • Identify your audiences and develop personas

Once you know the positioning, core beliefs and values of your venture, you can begin creating conversations. The question is, with whom?

If you’re not aware of what a persona is, think of it as a semi-fictional character that represents your ideal customer, donor, or supporter. To create one, simply group your audiences based on:

• • Behavior patterns
  • Common motivations or pain points
  • Shared goals or outcomes

As you identify these figures, you’ll want to start brainstorming things like:

• • What will capture this persona’s attention?
  • What motivates them?
    • Think compassion, finding community, statistical impact, broad systems change, prestige and status, improve economic opportunity, children/family, better health, political outcomes, strengthen community fabric, stability, etc.
  • What is their vision for the world, and how can you help them get there?

Lastly, it’s time for a gut check:

• • How might people of different ethnicities identify with what you’re creating?
  • Who has historically been under-represented or marginalized?
  • Are you focusing all of your audiences on donors and funders, or are you thinking about clients and partners as well? Are there people your work may impact indirectly that need to be considered?

Knowing your audiences and messaging to them based on their motivations, wants, and needs, will compel them to engage with you. 

Preview our Persona Spreadsheet here.

Be considerate in your messaging.

Your brand needs a consistent tone. Whether it skews casual or formal is up to you, but either way, you should always be mindful of how you phrase things. You don’t want to unintentionally hurt someone. If this is a new concept, work in a group to check your language and possible biases—like we did in this example:

A few points to focus on:

• • “Generational health crisis” - How do you create messaging that is not inadvertently criticizing culture?
  • “In our community” - Are we victimizing?
  • “Obese” - Are we alienating individuals or treating size as a health crisis? Instead, let’s focus on health issues, i.e. the diabetes-specific statistic.

The differences are subtle but meaningful. We’ve changed the focus from shaming what children eat to leveling the playing field to create opportunity.

Have a compelling and inclusive visual language (photography, fonts, color palette, iconography, etc.)

Like written messaging, visual language conveys a lot about the organization, but how do you develop it? Design is such a complex arena. Logos, icons, photography, fonts, and colors—it’s enough to make your head spin, but don’t worry. We’ve got you.

If you haven’t already, take a look at our “Quick and Dirty Guide to Color Theory,” and then consider the colors that best represent the feeling you want as your first impression. Need help getting creative? Mood boards are an effective way to discuss ideas, share insights, and clarify communication. They help visually explain a feeling and, in turn, develop a more authentic and successful brand.

So, now that you have the framework, how do you turn it into an engaging pitch? Start building.

Below, you’ll see a few example personas we’ve created for clients; for the purpose of this post, we’re going to focus on Darren. What would this professional giver/investor want in a pitch? 

1. Your ‘Why’

In his TEDx Talk on inspiring action, Simon Sinek shared that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. This is grounded in biology. Decision-making is emotional, so paint your vision in a way that helps people imagine your better world. Skeptics will still want proven results (your cynical majority), but your fellow visionaries will become your brand advocates. This ties in to the second point.

2. The Problem

Clearly articulate the problem you are trying to solve, using simple terminology (no jargon). Why does your organization exist?

Problem statements are important, because often times, they are the lead-in to your messaging and meant to capture your persona’s attention. Think of it this way: If you were stuck in an elevator with Bill Gates, how would you start your pitch for him to support your new venture? You’d probably lead with the wrong you’re trying to right in the world.

Note how the iconography used is gender-inclusive.

3. Your Unique Approach

Why is your organization best suited to tackle this problem?

4. Your Impact

What measurable difference are you making?

5. Your Expertise

Why are you qualified to drive this mission? Are you a cutting edge leader? Break it down for us, and then back it up with headlines of mass scale impacts.

6. Who You Serve

Who’s on the receiving end of this effort?

The Ask

Of course, all of this leads up to the one thing too many organizations dance around: the ask. We’ve established what WorkIt does, as well as how and why they do it. The only thing left is what kind of help they need to fuel their mission.

If they’ve correctly identified their personas and built upon each point above, chances are, the “Darrens” they’re pitching to will respond favorably. Onward and upward!

That said, we understand how intimidating the process can seem. If you’d like help with any of the above, don’t hesitate to reach out!

We are excited to announce our 2019 brandUP participating organizations.  

Atma Connect is an award-winning creator of software products and digital services that connect people to report problems, share solutions, and improve their communities from the ground up. Their free mobile app, AtmaGo, has reached more than 1,200,000 Indonesian users since 2015, delivering real-time, crowd-sourced content. Citizens share everything from traffic updates and job postings to breaking news during national emergencies.

City Surf Project connects underrepresented youth to the ocean—and themselves—through surfing. Their programs support those who may not otherwise have the opportunity to experience swimming lessons, ocean recreation, stewardship activities, and environmental education. They encourage healthy lifestyles and active global citizenship. 
(2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

The Environmental Volunteers organization inspires people of all ages to learn about the wonders of the natural world. They train volunteers to lead hands-on science and nature programs in schools, community organizations, and at the EcoCenter—their public nature center in the Palo Alto Baylands Nature Preserve. They also have a transportation fund to provide affordable and easy-to-schedule transportation for low-income K-12 students in the San Francisco Bay Area who would not otherwise be able to access science and environmental education field trips.

GAIA is a worldwide alliance of more than 800 grassroots groups, non-governmental organizations, and individuals in over 90 countries whose ultimate vision is a just, toxic-free world without incineration. They focus on three initiatives: promoting zero waste, reducing problematic waste streams like plastic, and putting an end to the ineffective and hazardous practice of burning waste.

LitLab creates connected and interactive early learning environments by deploying books, digital content, and blended learning solutions for under-resourced children, their caregivers, and educators. They engage parents and caregivers as a child’s first teacher, mobilize early learning advocates, empower teachers with training, and provide blended learning interventions customized through pre-survey data for each child. Through combined resources and integrated, yet customized programs, they are revolutionizing early learning.

Mobile Pathways’ team consists of immigration attorneys, technology experts, and immigrant advocates. They help undocumented and under-documented immigrants gain access to reliable legal information via mobile phone technology. A proprietary “decision tree” texts users potential paths for legal immigration status. Once they understand their options, they are given a list of qualified immigration advocates who can assist them.

MotherCoders helps women with college degrees and work experience get on a career track in tech that leverages their unique skills, experiences, and passions. Whether it’s acquiring a particular skill-set for career advancement, re-entering the workforce after a pause for motherhood, or accelerating the growth of a startup, their training program enables students to gain enough skills, knowledge, and community support to confidently take the next step (or 2 or 3) toward a career in tech.

New Left Accelerator empowers emerging, progressive organizations and leaders working to strengthen civic engagement and advance a more just and equal society. They accomplish this by running an accelerator program and serving as a resource clearinghouse for these promising, new organizations.

Partnerships for Trauma Recovery (PTR) aims to reduce the mental health gap by addressing the psychosocial impacts of trauma caused by war, torture, forced displacement, human trafficking, and persecution due to identity and beliefs. Their model is built on three complementary components: mental health care for international survivors of human rights abuses, clinical training for globally-minded clinicians, and policy advocacy for efforts aimed at reducing trauma.
(2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center empowers and increases the entrepreneurial capacities of socially and economically diverse women and men, thereby strengthening communities through the creation of sustainable new businesses, new jobs, and the promotion of financial self-sufficiency. They offer low-cost office space and ongoing business support to emerging and established small businesses at several locations. They also offer free one-on-one financial consultation. 
(2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

Richmond Promise is a community-wide college success initiative to build a college graduating culture in Richmond, CA. Through a college scholarship, collaborative cross-sector partnerships, and supportive programming, they aim to ensure all students in Richmond excel to and through higher education, reach their career goals, and become change-making leaders in the community.

RYSE creates safe spaces grounded in social justice for young people to love, learn, educate, heal, and transform lives and communities. Their youth center has free programs in education and justice; community health; media, arts, and culture; and youth organizing. Programming at RYSE is anchored in the belief that young people have the lived knowledge and expertise to identify, prioritize, and direct the activities and services necessary to thrive.

Shawl-Anderson Dance Center provides Bay Area dance students of all ages and levels with high caliber training in both contemporary and traditional movement forms in a welcoming, non-competitive environment. The Center is a non-profit organization, committed to nurturing and mentoring the growth of dancers and choreographers; cultivating a healthy and supportive atmosphere for creative expression; sustaining traditions essential to excellence in the field; and fostering the evolution of the art of dance.

Sirum saves lives by connecting organizations with surplus medications to patients in need. in the U.S. there is often a large supply of unexpired drugs that are collected from manufacturers, wholesalers, pharmacies and health facilities. Sirum helps connect that surplus supply with clinics and pharmacies that serve low-income families. 
(2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

The Social Justice Sewing Academy (SJSA) is an art program that bridges artistic expression with activism and empowers youth to amplify their voice through art that advocates for social justice. By using textile art as a vehicle for personal transformation and community cohesion, SJSA empowers youth to become agents of social change. A unique part of their program intentionally bridges generational, racial, and socioeconomic divides by sending youth art blocks to embroiderers all over the world.

The Spanish Speaking Citizens’ Foundation empowers East Bay families to improve their lives, embrace their heritage, and develop as civic leaders. They provide educational and workforce development services, as well as help navigating immigration and citizenship. They also partner with government and community organizations to assist families and youth in securing programs, services, and resources to enrich their lives.

TalkingPoints drives student success in low-income, diverse areas through building strong partnerships across parents, schools, and communities. Their goal is to impact 3 million students and their parents by 2020. 
(2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

Tandem® engages the community to ensure all families have the resources, skills, and confidence they need to support their children’s kindergarten readiness. StoryCycles®, their school-to-home book-sharing program, provides families with access to high-quality children’s books and support materials. They also offer free, community-based workshops for families, caregivers, and educators to deepen their knowledge of early childhood brain development and share simple, effective strategies for building language and literacy through everyday activities. 
(2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

Tarjimly means “translate for me” and was founded in 2017 in response to the Syrian refugee crisis and the US Refugee & Travel Ban. Their mission is to improve the lives of refugees and the efficiency of humanitarian services by eliminating language barriers. The Tarjimly mobile app allows the world’s 3 billion multilingual speakers to remotely volunteer their language skills as translators and interpreters for the 65 million displaced people. 
(2019 Full Circle Fund Grantee)

Turn Out maximizes the impact of volunteerism to strengthen LGBTQ+ communities. They accomplish this via three main programs: recruitment, matching, and events. Through their biweekly newsletter, which highlights new opportunities, and their online platform, volunteers can join the projects that are right for them.

Urban Ed Academy leverages community partnerships in education to drive culturally reflective experiences for students of color in schools as a means of closing the opportunity gap. They use hands-on, interactive, and culturally relevant approaches to ensure students gain an understanding of themselves, the world around them, and how it applies to various academic and social settings. 

Urban Strategies Council is a regional research and advocacy organization, dedicated to social, economic, and racial equity. Their mission is to eliminate persistent poverty in the Bay Area by working with partners to transform low-income neighborhoods into vibrant, healthy communities. Issue areas include: criminal justice reform, boys and men of color, economic opportunity, pathways to career and college, and violence prevention.

The need to boost donor retention is necessary to keep your nonprofit organization up and running. This is one fact we can’t ignore.

Cultivating a strong and lasting relationship with donors proves valuable for nonprofit organizations in acquiring funds and creating a community of supporters.

There are several ways nonprofits can increase donor retention and one of those is by optimizing the power of email marketing automation. But before we delve deeper into how you can implement automated welcome emails, let’s first run through on the foundational pieces.

Email marketing is critical to the success of nonprofit fundraising.

Given its effectiveness in generating ROI, email marketing is an important channel of communication for nonprofits to connect and engage with donors and supporters. In contrast to other channels, email marketing is inexpensive, and more and more donors are growing comfortable with completing donations online.

Communication is of high importance for nonprofits. Email marketing lets your organization thank donors, entice more volunteers to join, and spread your mission to a wider audience with ease through tailored, auto-generated emails. This way, you can focus more on your goals and less on online engagement.

Another thing to highlight is…

The importance of increasing donor retention in your organization.

Acquiring first-time donors is both time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, cultivating relationships with existing donors is essential in keeping them more involved with and connected to your mission.

A recent study showed that only 46% of donors have given to the same organization two years in a row - a figure that signifies there’s more room to level up your donor retention strategy and bring in more funds down the line.

If you focus more of your efforts on a strong retention program, you spend fewer resources, gain more sustainable funding, and can increase your organizational productivity.

Boost your donor retention with email marketing automation.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: email marketing is one of the most effective methods in generating ROI, as well as connecting and engaging your organization with the right audience.

Email marketing helps you build and nurture genuine, two-way relationships with your donors.

How do you make it work for your organization?

Optimizing email marketing by using automated email series as part of your donor retention strategy holds the key to increasing the number on your donor’s list.

Automated email series can help increase your donor retention.

Suppose you have new supporters who just donated. The first thing you would want to do is to make them feel welcome right away. How do you do this? By sending a series of automated welcome emails.

The first few messages you send to your new contacts are crucial because one, it sets expectations about your organization and two, it paves the way in keeping your donors committed to the cause.

The beauty of automated emails is that you don’t have to do it manually, thus saving precious staff bandwidth. You only have to set the stage once, key in certain user actions (or triggers), and the relevant email will automatically send once a contact has taken action.

Think of it like having a direct dialogue with both your current and prospective donors at the right moments.

By now you might want to start rolling out your automated welcome email series. But first, you should know what to send.

You can start your automated welcome series with…

A welcome and thank you message

You should send the first email immediately - after they sign up or donate - or within 48 hours the latest. It’s clear what this email should be about, which is to welcome and thank the donor for their gift.

This email is also a good way to reinforce the fact that their donation is helping your nonprofit make an impact.

A follow-up email that informs and engages

Give your donors the opportunity to get to know more about your organization, its mission, and current and planned activities. Showcase the impact of their donation on your efforts through interesting information about your work.

It’s important to let your donors know what their gift is making possible. It opens an opportunity to further inform your donors of the kind of work you’re doing and how their donation helps. You can also ask your donors a question or invite them to follow you on social media.

Sending follow up emails can go a long way in establishing loyalty and support for your organization.

This email by charity:water is a perfect example of an email that informs and engages with the recipient.

A story with impact

Nothing gets someone’s attention or interest better than a good story. Share compelling stories you’ve encountered along the way, stories of people whose lives were changed, stories of how your team works to achieve your organization’s goal.

Show your supporters your progress and accomplishments made possible with their help. Share your success with them.

An invitation to stay involved

After some weeks of connecting and engaging with your donors, it’s time to present them with other opportunities to engage. You can invite them to your events, inform them of different volunteer work, or open the opportunity to donate again.

Invite them to be more involved and engaged. Doing so makes them feel that they’re part of your mission and your work.

Just don’t spam them with donation appeals. You wouldn’t want to give them the impression that it’s all about getting a donation.

The one thing to keep in mind when doing your automated welcome series is to make it personal. Your welcome emails should be short, sweet and interesting to keep your donors engaged.

Before you start planning your welcome email series, come up with a checklist of the important things to do and consider first.

Below are some key ways to optimize your automated welcome emails to further increase your donor retention.

1. Segment your audience.

Not everyone in your list has the same motive when they give. Their first moment of contact with your organization, as well as their interests and attributes, vary. Use segmentation to send the right email to the right person at the right time. If you segment your nonprofit’s list, you get to deliver relevant content and reach more donors effectively.

2. Understand donor’s motivations.

Aside from using segmentation and creating a compelling subject line to grab your donor’s interest, you can go deeper by understanding their motivations and priorities in joining your cause. This study will help you identify five main reasons people give - also known by the acronym T.A.S.T.E.

Trust. Emphasize the idea among your donors that your nonprofit will make the best use of the resources they gave. You can reinforce this in your subject line emails to start with.

Altruism. An altruistic concern for the wellbeing of others may be the most powerful reason that compels people to donate or volunteer. You can include photos of your nonprofit’s actual work in your welcome email series.

Social. One of the motivating factors for donors to give is when a loved one cares about or is involved in the cause. Use testimonials or stories from your staff, volunteers, or people you’ve helped to emphasize the impact of their donation.

Taxes. Charitable gifts often qualify for tax deductions so consider stressing this point as you approach the end of the year. Create targeted campaigns around the holiday season to generate awareness and drive donations.

Egoism. This refers to the positive feelings that linger on people when they display charitable behavior. Make your donors feel like they’ve done a good deed in your welcome email series.

3. Optimize your welcome email campaigns.

Test and review what works for your emails and then use the results to improve your fundraising campaigns. It’s important to personalize your nonprofit’s message and segment your audiences.

But remember, the more personalized your emails are, the more likely donors are to respond. This goes without saying that you must respond to their feedback. Don’t make your donors feel like they’re being ignored.

4. Send different types of content.

Don’t just ask for donations. Raising funds might be the biggest challenge most charities face, but it’s not ideal when people associate your emails with an ask. You can create and send different types of content that cover a variety of topics - expressing gratitude to donors, telling specific stories with emotions, showing the effects of their donation, inviting them to be involved, and so on.

The Canadian Red Cross informs their audience about the many ways data and tech can make it easier to help those in need. At the same time it also encourages their audience to like, follow and engage with their social channels.

Understanding the value of donor retention and how email marketing can boost it helps you come up with a strong retention strategy that will grow and maintain your list of supporters. Setting up and sending automated welcome emails lets you cultivate and nurture the early stages of your relationship with donors, which will then lead to a strong belief and loyalty in your organization.

Author Bio

Jericho Gonzales is a Content Marketing Specialist at Campaign Monitor. After seven years of being unhappy with his career in the financial industry, he decided to follow his dreams and become a writer. Besides writing, he is also passionate about all kinds of martial arts and practices whenever he can.

Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing channels that nonprofits have at their disposal.

According to research, the amount of revenue generated by nonprofits through email marketing continues to grow. In 2017, email donations increased by a strong 23%!

At the same time, our supporters are more bombarded with email than ever before.

As a result email open rates and click through rates (CTR), have dropped dramatically over the last 5 years.  According to the MailChimp benchmark report, the average email open rate for nonprofit is only 24.11%.

The same report shows that the average email click through rate is just 2.57%.

This blows my mind!

To put it another way, 97.43% of people on your list will not take action when you send them an email. Ouch!

The good news is there are specific strategies to overcome these problems.

What is a Click Through Rate (CTR)?

Measuring your marketing efforts is the most important thing you can do in order to get better and more efficient.

Click through rate, is one of the most important things to be measuring.

Put simply, if you send an email to 100 people, and 10 people click on a link in that email, you will have a Click Through Rate, or CTR, of 10%.

Why is Click Through Rate so important? 

To understand the importance of CTR, let’s look a fictious example.

Let’s say our nonprofit is looking to raise a $10,000 online.

If you send an email to 2,000 supporters and you get a CTR of 5%, 100 people will donate as a result of that email. Let’s assume that everyone that clicks also donates (this is not usually the case and an effective donation page has a huge influence on this, but for the sake of example, we’ll keep it simple...).

For this example, each user donates $50.

This campaign would gross $5,000.

Not bad!

Now, let’s say that same email campaign, was able to achieve a CTR of 10% instead of 5%. This time 200 people donate. Again, or average donation is $50.

This time we met our goals of $10,000.

We doubled our revenue by simply increasing our CTR.

So, you can now see why as marketers and fundraisers we should be so focused on our CTR. 

Use Email List Segmentation to Increase CTR

So, you've built a email marketing list for your nonprofit. But, how do you get people to take action?

The most powerful lever that you have as a marketer to drive action is your understanding of your audience.

Most nonprofits have several distinct personas that they are speaking to. Each persona, or audience has a motivation, or topic of interest that originally brought them to your organization.

You need to know what that motivation is, and leverage it in your email marketing.

How do you do this? 

There are several ways.

First, it’s important to capture their motivation when they initially sign-up for your email list. You can use email marketing automation to capture this information, or use checkboxes on your sign-up form to capture this.

Second, you could use stakeholder interviews or surveys to help generate supporter profiles.

Once you capture this information, use it to segment your email lists based on those motivations or interests.

Most Email Service Providers (ESP's) or CRM’s will allow you to tag your constituents with this information.

Once segmented, use this knowledge to your advantage.

If you know a donor is motivated by your work saving the polar bears, frame your email to them using that motivation.

If you can identify several different areas to segment your donors, then use those segments to develop your email campaigns, your CTR will increase dramatically.

The Secret Sauce to Crafting Better Email Subject Lines

Your first battle in email marketing is to get the user to open the email. If they open your email, then they're one step closer to clicking on your email content.

It sounds simple, but it’s not as simple as you think.

As we said at the beginning, nonprofit industry average for email open rates is just 24.11%.

Here are a few tips to constructing a better subject line to beat that average.

Mystery – Don’t give it all away up front. Leave the user wanting to know more. For example:

“A Special Offer Awaits You!” 

“Your Next Opportunity is Here!”

Utility – Email can be an escape or quick win for people as much as it is a necessity. Make the email something that can help the user with their day. For example:

“A Quick Win for You Today!”

“We Can Help You Do More”

Use “You” – Make it personal. Especially in today’s world, making your message personal gets a much better response. As often as possible use “You” in the subject line.  For example:

“An Idea for You”

“A Gift For You”

Time – Research has shown that anything that uses time reference is going to inherently increase open rates. It doesn’t necessarily have to be “today” or “tomorrow.” You can also use days of the week.  For example:

“This Sunday Things Will Change for You”

“What’s Special About Today?”

Avoid Opportunistic Tone – People don’t like to feel hustled. You may need to test the boundaries on this as it is a fine line, but you want to sound authentic and natural.  So, for instance:

“Time is Running Out” (NO)

“It’s Important That We Remember…” (YES!)

There is a fine line here, but it’s important to get this right.  You can put supporters off quickly if you sound pushy or like we’re hustling them. 

Tips to Write Compelling Email Content to Improve CTR

Once you've got your audience to open the email, how do we improve the clicks? Here are a few tactics.

Leave a Little Mystery - Don't tell the user the entire story. Leave something that they need to click through to find out more.

If you're showcasing how one of your programs changed a client's life, setup the problem they face, but don't reveal the struggle to victory.  Use the copy, or better yet video, on your website to tell the rest of the story.

Users are more likely to click through if they don't have all of the information yet. Make them want to click through!

Keep Your Copy Focused - Don't write a novel. People today are distracted (squirrel!), and they don't have a lot of time. Keep the email copy to no more than 3 paragraphs. And, a paragraph should be 2-3 short sentences max.

Focus on Audience Motivations - We mentioned that segmentation is a powerful tool. Make sure you're using your understanding of users to craft copy that specific to them.  Don't send the same email to your entire list. Segment your list by motivation, and craft your copy based around this.

For instance, if you have a program that saves the polar bears, and you have a donor segment that love polar bears, send them an email with copy specific to your polar bear program, not your marsh restoration program.

Makes sense, right? 

Use Buttons for Call To Actions - Most ESP's provide an option in their editing interface to add call to action buttons in your copy. There's a reason for this. They're WAY more effective in driving action.

According to a test that CampaignMonitor performed, they increased their email click-through-rate by 127% by including a button at the bottom of one of their emails. Wow!

A/B Testing Emails

Build. Test. Measure. Repeat.

If you’re not testing your marketing content, you’ll never get better.

Most Email Service Providers (ESP’s) have the capability to A/B test your email content. This could be the subject line, content, or “from” field. 

If you’re not using this, you need to be.

No one knows your audiences better than you. So, being able to test subject lines and email content will continue to improve your open rates and CTR over time.

Once you’re committed to testing you’ll be amazed what you can learn.

During each campaign, take time to think about what strategy you’re going to leverage in your email – think about what we talked about in the subject line section. 

Be intentional about your subject line and content.

Make sure that you record the subject lines and content that you’ve used on emails over time. Then record your open rates, and CTR’s for each campaign.

After 8-10 campaigns you’re going to start seeing trends based on what type of content performs better.

Use that information to continue to improve your content.

Over time, you’ll be amazed to see how your online fundraising and email campaign improve. 

Now Take Your Email Marketing to the next level…

Want to continue to get better with email marketing.  Here are a few additional resources:

1. Tips to Grow and Nurture a Bigger Nonprofit Email List
2. Use a Nonprofit Welcome Series to Onboard Donors
3. How to Start Making Data Driven Marketing Decisions

Understanding your target audience is critical to building effective fundraising and marketing campaigns.

But, it’s hard to know where to begin with the research process when building nonprofit personas.

Stakeholder interviews and donor surveys can help a lot in developing your nonprofit’s personas.  However, sometimes there are still gaps.

That's where data from Google Analytics and Facebook play an important role.

In addition to filling in the gaps, data can also confirm findings from other research methods. You may even be surprised by some of the trends and behaviors that pop-up in your data.

If you’re only looking at pageviews, traffic growth, and Facebook Page Likes, you’re missing the full story.

We've all been there... looking at Google Analytics and Facebook reports can be overwhelming.

So much data! How do you know what matters?

This guide is here to help you get started sorting through what matters and how to use the data effectively.

By setting up just a few simple reports we can dig deep into data that will help you learn more about your donors, volunteers, members and other target audiences, so that your communications efforts can be more effective.

Use Segments To Compare Behavior and Find Trends

Google Analytics segments are a way to look at discrete user groups based on demographics, type of device, location, behavior and a lot more.

Why is this important?

Take a look at this example of our client’s data.

This data shows that over 865 conversions took place on their site from traffic that originated on Facebook.  

In comparison, traffic that originated on Twitter converted just 12 times! 

Clearly, their ideal audience is spending time on Facebook, not Twitter. This is critical information when making campaign decisions, right?

How do you use segments?

At the top of almost every report, you’ll see an area where you can add segments. Choose the ones you want to compare, then click apply.  

Segments may be one of the most important features that you can use when doing research.

It's important to realize that this process is about looking for trends and anomalies. Not all reports are going to give you a nugget of information.  But, keep digging and you can find incredible insights.

Take some time to explore the different segments that are available. You can also make custom segments.

Some other popular segments that Google Analytics provides out of the box are:

1. Organic Traffic

2. Paid Traffic

3. Social Traffic

4. Referral Traffic

5. Convertering Traffic

6. Non-convertering Traffic

7. Return Visitors

8. New Visitors

9. By Device

Pro Tip: Segment Traffic By Conversions

When researching your target users, you should be looking for users that have completed a transaction or taken an action on your website to engage with you.

This could be a donation, volunteer sign-up, newsletter sign-up, or any other action you want users to take on your site.

These are the people you want to target, right?

In Google Analytics these are referred to as "conversions."

If you don’t have conversion goals setup on your website already, do this first. Start by using your nonprofit logic model to decide what actions on your website contribute to your business goals. Then setup a goal and goal value associated with that conversion.

When performing research, we use segment to learn trends and behaviors that are specific to your audience.  

After segmenting by converting traffic, think about the following questions:

1. What external marketing channels do they come from?
2. How often do they come back to the website?
3. What pages do they land on?
4. What topics are they interested in?
5. What actions do they take before they convert?

Hacks to Find Donor and Volunteer Demographics

Now that you understand how to use segments, you can segment to learn a lot about your target audience.

Demographics are critical to getting your messaging and campaigns strategy correctly.

Compare the campaign strategy for communicating with a 60+ year old versus a 30 year old. Different channels. Different messages. Different asks.

Demographic information lays the bedrock for much of what we do in communications.

You may already have a pretty good grasp on your donor and volunteer demographics based on other research that you’ve done.  But are you getting the full picture?

How do you know your intuition is accurate?

Use Facebook Audience Insights to Perform Donor Research

Facebook Insights is a little-known tool in Facebook that will provide all kinds of amazing information about people that like your Facebook page or have interests in your mission.

In addition to demographic information like age, marital status, and education, Facebook Audience Insights will tell you about their additional interests so you can start to put together a full picture of your personas.

It can also help you identify potential strategic partnerships.

Go to your Facebook Ads Manager. You can find the Audience Insights in the main menu under Plan.

Once on the page, add your page name into field “People Connected to” field.

This will bring up your audience information. In addition to age, gender, marital status and education level, you can find out location information and additional page likes.

We like to focus on additional Page Likes, as this can tell you a lot of additional information about their interests.

Use Google Analytics Demographics Information

Google Analytics has also developed an interface for analyzing demographic information of users visiting your website.

Some information, like location, has always been available.

However, more recently, Google has given us information on things like age, gender and interests.

Google does not have access to this data on all users, so it is not nearly as accurate as Facebook. Regardless, Google Analytics can be a nice compliment to that information.

Find this information under Audiences -> Overview.

How Should You Use Google Analytics Demographic Data?

Demographics are one of the foundations for understanding your users.

If you don’t understand your nonprofit “customer” (meaning donor, members, clients, etc.) then your marketing campaigns aren’t going to be successful.

Here are a few ways we’ve used this information to develop personas with clients:

Demographic data supplements stakeholder survey and interview information. If you aren’t doing regular surveys or stakeholder interviews, you need to start.

Demographic data will help you create your almighty donor and client personas that underpin your marketing efforts.

Location data focuses your campaign approach. One of the advantages of digital marketing is that you can fish in a targeted area of the ocean, rather than casting a wide net to see where you might find fish.

Location data allows you to identify new locations where you might expand your marketing efforts and find new constituents. It also allows you to see how campaigns in particular locations might be lifting your overall performance (think radio PSA, billboard, newspaper ad or article).

Don't forget that all of this is in context of your work.

Perhaps you're wondering if your target audience is urban or rural.

Perhaps you're interested in knowing what regions you need to target for an acquisition campaign.

What are some creative ways you can use this data in your marketing efforts?

Using Event Tracking To Understand Behavior

Google Analytics events are ways to track behavior on your site that may not be business critical, but do show user engagement or behavior trends.

In particular, it can help you understand how users are engaging with content topics and how users are using your user interface.

Here are some common events that we setup on client sites:

Page Scroll Tracking. Using a tool like Google Tag Manager you can setup events to fire based on how far down the page users scroll.

This can help you learn more about how users are navigating your landing page, or you can use this to find out which blog posts are getting the most engagement. This could help you adjust content strategy and the topics of your content.

Video Watching. Events can also be fired when users what a video. This would give you insights into which videos are most popular, and the topics that resonate most with your users.

Track UI calls to action. For example, let’s say that you have a banner image on your homepage with a button that has a main call to action.  

You can track the number of times that users click on that button versus using the main navigation to get to a location on your site.  You could do the same thing for sidebar call to action buttons, etc. Again, these are not main conversions, but it would inform you how users are navigating your site.

Using Traffic Channel Analysis to Research Your Target Audience

How is traffic coming to your website? More importantly, which traffic is most engaged and converting on your website?

You can see an overview of traffic by channel under Acquisition -> Overview in Google Analytics.

Use Traffic Channel Segments to Dig Deeper

Instead of using the overview report, I prefer to use segments and compare behaviors.

Some questions that are helpful to ask yourself:

1. Which channels drive the most conversions?

2. Which channels drive the most engagement with content?

3. Does a particular channel drive most of the conversions for one goal? Meaning do volunteer sign-ups come from Twitter, but donations come from Facebook? If so, this can lead to two distinct personas.

4. Are there clear demographic patterns based on channel?

Use Organic Search and CPC Campaigns to Learn More

When you connect Search Console and your Google Grants account, Google Analytics will provide really powerful information about what users were searching before they landed on your site.

Why does this matter?

Search queries can provide a really clear view into a user’s motivations and concerns.

If you can connect traffic to search queries and behaviors, then this can help you model your target audience's motivations and concerns.

If you have connected these services to your Google Analytics account, go to Acquisition -> Search Console -> Queries  to see organic search queries.

You can see your Google Grants data by going to Acquisitions -> Google Ads -> Search Queries

You’ve Done Your Research. Take the Next Step…

If you have completed surveys, stakeholder interviews and done your data research, don't let implementation paralysis stop your next steps...

You’re now ready to build your persona!

Here are some tips to creating your personas:

1. Create your personas with a group of colleagues. Each individual in your organization has a unique experience with your personas, therefore a unique perspective. Bring those experiences together to build a 360 degree view of who your persona is.

2. Spend a minimum of 20-30 minutes per persona. It’s worth taking time to get the details right. Don’t assume anything, and make sure your assumptions are backed up by data and survey results.

3. Think outside the box. Don’t just hone in on donors. Think about strategic partners, press, clients, board members and others.

Building donor personas can be challenging if you don’t clearly understand your audience motivations.

We hear from our clients all the time: “I don’t know all of our donors in a one-on-one capacity, so how can I figure out their motivations?” This is a legitimate question.

This is where using both stakeholder interviews and surveys can help. 

The benefit of these strategies is that they give you data directly from the source that can help you build out your marketing personas in order to build better messaging and campaigns.

How Stakeholder Interview Help Build Donor Personas

Stakeholder interviews can be with any type of constituent - donors, board members, strategic partners, and all types of audiences. The goal of stakeholder interviews can vary a lot.

In addition to gathering information about the individual and their relationship to the organization, interviews can be a great time to get feedback on messaging and brand ideas.

When you’re using stakeholder interviews to build a persona, you want to get at the heart of their motivations. Remember you are going to use that motivational information to build the persona, and eventually your marketing messaging.  

Some examples of questions that can help get to the bottom of motivations are:

1. How did you originally find our organization?
2. What attracted you to our work, and why have you stuck around?
3. What do you think the most critical element of our work is?
4. Where do you see us making the biggest impact over the next 5 years? Why is that important to you?

There are a lot of different types of questions that you can ask based on what the goals of this interview are.  

Download our list of 106 different survey and stakeholder questions to ask.

The Benefits of Stakeholder Interviews

One huge benefit to interviews, is that they are a powerful engagement tactic with donors, partners or anyone else you want to build a relationship with.

Think about it...  

First, asking to interview someone shows that you care about what they think.  

This gives them a bit of prestige. They are a special person in the mind of your organization. That makes them feel good.

Second, it’s in our human nature to like to talk about our opinions.

Rather than sharing their opinions or gripes at the family dinner table, this stakeholder has special access to you!  What they share with you may change the course of the organization, its brand or its work. Who knows!

Lastly, it gives you a chance to share the organization’s vision with a constituent. If you’ve ever seen Simon Sinek’s TedTalk on the importance of “why” then you know that donors that share your organizational vision will become loyal supporters.

Using Surveys to Build Personas

Not everyone has time to do a one-on-one interview with your organization.

Surveys are a great way to collect a large amount of data from people across your organizational ecosystem without a lot of staff bandwidth.

Remember surveys don’t have to be a million questions long.

In fact, I recommend you keep the number of questions between 5 - 10. This allows users to feel helpful by taking the survey without taking up their entire day. Most users are not going to be able to take more than 2-3 minutes to take a survey.

View our example donor survey on SurveyMonkey.

Note that this example has all freeform responses. We tried to keep it general for the example, but for your organization, you may want to use multiple choice to get data that is easily analyzed.

However, if you want to provide more freedom for donors, you can stick with freeform responses.

A good way to analyze freeform responses is copy all of the responses and drop them into a word cloud provider like WordClouds.com. This will help visualize the results of freeform text.

Here's one we did with BaconIpsum text.

If you survey frequently, as you should, you don’t need to make them long, because you may be focused on just one topic for each survey.

Where to Use Surveys in Your Marketing

Surveys are powerful because you can use them for so many different purposes.  

They can help you assess brand messaging, the effectiveness of events, the effectiveness of your website, and much more.

For the purpose of this post, we’re going to focus on why surveys are critical to building personas.  

Additionally, a survey, as you’ll see below, can be used to segment your supporters as an onboarding engagement tactic so you can deliver a customized experience.

If you’re starting out with no personas for your organization try to think about how to phrase surveys in a way that will bring motivation to light. You can ask questions like:

1. What is the biggest problem that our community faces today is: [freeform response]
2. What is the biggest impact that [your org name] provides in our community: [freeform response]

In addition to motivation, it is important to ask questions that will help with your campaign tactics. By this I mean, where can you find more of these same types of supporters.

So, questions like this can be helpful:

1. How did you first hear about our organization?
2. Why did you want to get involved in our work?

When you’re planning acquisition campaigns, questions like these will help you identify what channels will be most effective in acquiring more supporters, and what type of messaging to use in the campaigns.

You may be thinking: “Where should we deploy surveys to get the best results?”

Here are a few ideas:

• Have a stand alone survey that you send to donors by email once a year
• Include a survey on your donation thank you page
• Use website pop-ups for engaged users to answer 1-2 questions about the content their consuming
• Use surveys as part of an automated email drip series for newly acquired users
• Use the Facebook polling tool to get information and engage your social followers

Recommended Tools for Surveys

There are a lot of different tools out there that can get you started with surveys.  Here are a few ideas:

SurveyMonkey - You may have heard of this service before. It’s probably the most popular and well known survey provider. SurveyMonkey allows you to build free surveys up to 10 questions, and you can embed them on your website.  They also have great reporting!

TypeForm - This is another popular survey provider that has similar features to Survey Monkey, and provides a Freemium model. You can build free surveys up to 10 questions and 100 responses per month. TypeForm integrates well with services like Google Sheets and MailChimp, so you could use these surveys to build reports or automated marketing campaigns.

Google Survey - As with everything Google, this is a simple and useful product.  They do charge 10 cents per survey completed. So, be aware that there is a cost.  But, the surveys are easy to create and really simple to embed on your website.

Your CRM (Warning: can be POWERFUL!) - Many CRM’s have a way to create web-to-lead forms which can be used to take surveys or add data to a CRM user profile.  This means that if you were surveying someone that already exists in your CRM, the survey answers would be stored in your CRM.

Why is the CRM method so powerful?

Imagine using your survey in a welcome series to new donors. If you were able to use surveys to find their biggest motivations, than you could tailor content to that individual.

Let’s say through surveys you find a donor is more interested in your program X than in your program Y.  Then next time you ask for a donation, tailor the ask to support program X.

Talk about improving response rate!

What to do next…

First, make sure you avoid implementation paralysis. We recommend getting your team together and start to think about what personas are priority based on your organization’s goals.  

Meaning, if you’re ramping up a partnership program this year, prioritize doing some surveys and stakeholder interviews with partners and potential partners. This will give you a strong foundation of understanding before you do your big marketing push.

Second, take your survey and interview findings and build personas.  

Why is this important?

Not only will writing this out clarify your thinking, but it will also serve as an internal document that your whole organization can work from. If program managers are working with a particular persona, this document will help them build better relationships with their target personas.

Finally, after you’ve built a persona, start to work on your messaging.

Think about content tone, and start to put together your elevator pitch using, what we call the problem and solution statement formula.

Once you have some really good messaging, start to test it. You can use stakeholder interviews or surveys to test messaging as well!  Or use a/b testing in emails, on your website or through advertising to test the effectiveness of your messages.