Fundraising Imperatives: Mastering the Constituent Experience

The development and delivery of a personalized and optimized experience, aided through unknown and unattributed customer insights and behavioral patterns, takes place in the mid-funnel. Personalization involves planning for optimal customer experiences that begin with context (who they are and where they are in their journey), content (the message that you really want to deliver), and the relationship between these two—namely, connectivity. It’s here in the mid-funnel where we are able to create a single, more holistic view of the constituent through his or her engagement with the brand, whether it is participation in a special event, volunteerism, sponsorship, advocacy, survey responses, call center interactions, general contribution, a tribute gift, web or website activity, social media, and/or participation in a clinical trial, etc. With this new insight, the constituent’s profile, relationship, preferences, attitudes, behaviors, etc. are now suddenly at the center of every interaction, informing, driving and enabling relevant targeted experiences across a multitude of media and devices.

The mid-funnel affords nonprofits the ability to simultaneously focus on individual-level performance while ensuring the most rewarding constituent experience possible. To maximize both, organizations need a person (a chief customer officer, for example) who understands how to drive quantitative, ROI-based outcomes through qualitative, creative, big ideas, and who has total command and ownership of the competencies to support the development of integrated, data-driven mid-funnel experiences that are enabled by the appropriate context, content and connectivity.

Before nonprofits can deliver a seamless, personalized experience, they must first re-engineer their marketing supply chain to plan, create and deliver one, and to do so requires nonprofits to overcome the financial and capacity constraints and structural challenges that continue to plague the sector. It also demands a financial commitment to the development and deployment of a mid-funnel technology solution, which is an inherent and fundamental component to an effective integrated fundraising and constituent engagement strategy.

Nonprofits consistently rank engaging communities, retaining current donors/constituents, acquiring new donors and general brand awareness among their most important organizational goals—this aligns perfectly with the objectives of the marketing funnel—from top to mid to bottom. By embracing the attributes of the mid-funnel specifically, and the behavioral analytics that stem from this platform, fundraisers have a much clearer understanding of their supporters, which in turn allows for the development of more relevant, customized and personalized experiences and relationships that will result in far greater dividends to the organization.