With practically every move we make on the internet, organizations and businesses collect data about who we are, how we think, and what we like so they can send us ads they think will resonate. Like it or not, collecting data is an integral part of marketing and nonprofits and responsible companies can use it to their advantage when the goal is to raise money or increase brand awareness.
Here are some strategies nonprofit marketing professionals can use to make informed data-driven decisions:
Identifying Targets
Marketers break down their customers, or donors, into groups based on their demographics, psychographics, or behaviors. They call this “segmentation.” One segmentation tactic is to “identify your best bets and double down,” meaning segment donors by their behavior (giving history), rather than by their demographics (age, location, gender, etc.), to find high-value donor segments and put more marketing dollars toward them.
The Children’s Literacy Initiative used their analytic software to organize their donor segments into tiered groups. One group, entitled “Upwardly Mobile,” was comprised of donors who are high earners and new to charitable giving. This allowed the organization to pay extra attention to them when they engage because of their giving potential.
Personalization
Remember all that data I mentioned in the first paragraph? Marketers can use it to personalize their audiences’ experience. Personalization is a marketing practice through which advertisers tailor marketing messages, content, and experiences to individual consumers and consumer segments based on their specific preferences, behaviors, and characteristics, such as their donation behavior.
Nonprofits can use what they know about donors to create personalized emails/newsletters, personalized ads with CTAs, personalized offers, and even a personalized app experience. Companies that use personalization generate 40% more revenue from those activities, according to research from McKinsey. National Audubon Society discovered a segment of their donors were really interested in the migrations of backyard birds so they developed an app that tracks the migratory paths of birds. This app allows donors to feel more deeply connected to the cause and more likely to give higher amounts.
By leveraging customer data, nonprofits can save time and deliver tailored experiences that make their donors feel valued and understood, and thus more loyal to the organization.
Experimentation
Every marketer, no matter their industry, should embrace experimentation. Experimentation is the basis of most successful marketing campaigns, and also the foundation of science. While campaigns should use the data available, marketers shouldn’t be afraid to get creative, test new approaches, and push the envelope. You remember the scientific method, right? Create a hypothesis, test the hypothesis with an experiment, analyze the results of experiment and form a conclusion about the hypothesis. This can be translated to: create an assumption about your donors/their giving behavior, design your marketing campaign, run the campaign, analyze the results, and determine if your hypothesis or assumption was correct. Then do it again.
Overall, your campaigns will improve when you keep applying the scientific method. You will learn some concrete truths each time about your donors, what they like, what they’re interested in, what CTAs they respond to, etc.
In the increasingly data-driven world of marketing, nonprofits have a valuable opportunity to leverage data and analytics to optimize their marketing strategies and revenue, enhance their outreach efforts, drive engagement, and ultimately achieve their goals.
