TechTalk: Why Silver Surfers Use Phablets

Demographic data has never been as easily available to online fundraisers as it is now. If you haven't already, make sure someone on your team enables the Demographic and Interests tracking on your Google Analytics account. Once this is done, you can start to answer questions such as: How female is our general website audience? How does that compare to the people who donate? How old is the website audience who spends more than 60 seconds on our legacy page?

Facebook is another source of rich demographic data for your team. If you spend some time exploring the Facebook Insights tab of your administrator login, you'll find a new set of reports that will help you shape your stories to better fit your audience. Notice the gender and age breakdown of people who like your page. But also compare that view to the demographic breakdown of people who are most engaged with your page (measured by comments, posts, etc.). You'll find they are not the same.

We can use demographic data to segment our online audiences, which will allow us to become more effective communicators and therefore better fundraisers. Some of you are building your major gifts capacity and may be spending a fair amount on building that part of your team. Are you using your websites to deliver qualified lists to that person or team? It's now possible to do this in a very cost-effective way.

Let's all try to be better at using demographic data to dispel old myths and make fact-based decisions about how to allocate our precious time and budgets.

Philip King is founder of The Donation Funnel Project, an experiment in online and mobile fundraising. Reach him at philip@donationfunnelproject.com