As we learned during our educational webinar on Using Donor Data to Drive Donor Growth, each donor has his or her own story, passion, reasons for giving, interests, and circumstances. Targeting your ask to those criteria will help you better drive giving across your donor program. In order to target your donors properly you need to ensure that you’re doing 5 important things.
When you’re targeting your donors and your asks, you want to make sure you have the cleanest data possible. You can make sure to do that by removing duplicates, running spell-check, standardizing titles, running National Change of Address checks regularly, eliminating junk contacts or aspirational prospects, and making sure your addresses are complete including zip code.
Make sure you are house-holding your constituents (primary and secondary individuals), recording pledges as the total amount of the pledge, using hard and soft credits appropriately, and that you’re capturing all gift dates and amounts (including restrictions)
Segment your donors by giving history, frequency of giving, and whether or not they are prospects. This will help get your data ready for the next tip: Analyzing it.
Targeting your donors gets even easier when you begin analyzing your segmented and sub-segmented data. Are they major donors, or annual donors, do they tend to give just to the capital campaign or do they tend to give for specific items? All of this will help you better target your donors using the data you’ve captured, cleaned, and segmented.
One of the key takeaways from our webinar was that cleaning your data regularly is essential to running a data-informed fundraising campaign. Think about how frequently things change in your life -- your donors are people just like you so keeping their data clean and up-to-date will help you better target your donor solicitations.
While running a data-informed fundraising program can seem intimidating, following these five tips can help immensely in making sure you’re building the most targeted fundraising program possible.