How to Use Your Email Platform to Prospect Research and Encourage More Gifts

Nonprofits have troves of data right at their fingertips to help identify more prospects and better personalize direct response programs.

A successful donor prospect has three key qualities: affinity, capacity and inclination to give. But how can nonprofits use data they already have to enhance their prospect research data and personalize their outreach? The email platform often holds valuable engagement data that can be incorporated into prospect and persona modeling. 

I encourage you to consider how your unique digital data can help uncover potential prospects or lead to better engagement and stewardship to grow your revenue.

The Role of Digital Data in Prospect Research

Just about every organization is tracking opens, clicks and response rates to determine the effectiveness of an online fundraising campaign. However, these data points can also be used for prospect modeling and improving personalization. 

Most email platforms allow you to create a scoring methodology to identify personas. Personas can range from your most engaged constituents to your most unengaged constituents to anything in between. You could base the persona on any combination of opens, clicks and donations over a certain time period. For example, you might define a “super engaged” persona as those who have opened at least three emails and clicked six times over the past 90 days. 

Some email platforms let you go further, whereas you can include specific links in the persona and scoring methodology. For example, if a constituent clicks on an article about heart health, they could be given a “cardiovascular research” persona. Or if a constituent clicks on a planned giving link, it can lead to an automation or create a prompt for the planned giving team.

The most advanced scoring includes donation history and donation amounts in the scoring calculation whereby you can combine opens, clicks and donation history to define a specific persona or group.

The resulting scores and personas can be fed into your modeling platform to help identify and score prospects. In the past, digital engagement data was not typically included in prospect research, but now, especially with new artificial intelligence (AI) prospect research tools emerging, this type of data can help you uncover hidden prospects.

From a digital fundraising standpoint, it can also be used to improve personalization, automation and the overall donor journey. 

Personalization and the Donor Journey

Once you’ve established new ways to score and determine personas, you can turn your strategy into revenue. Here are a few examples of how personas and digital data can lead to a more thoughtful and personalized donor experience.

For constituents who are identified as super engaged, consider automating or including them in more upgrade campaigns and/or automations. Or gamify their experience by rewarding them with badges or access to different perks and content. These are your most loyal followers.

For constituents who are identified as only somewhat engaged, consider surveys and value-added content to move them into the super engaged persona group.

Consider personalized messaging to constituents where you’ve identified an affinity toward a specific topic, such as heart health or cancer. Those constituents could be presented with full campaigns tailored toward their persona, or a campaign can be conditionalized to substitute different stories by persona.

If you choose to include gift data in your scoring and persona methodology, consider an automated upgrade ask for a mid-level gift for donors who are engaging with your content with a recent gift that was more than $500. 

The Result

I believe that a program that incorporates digital data into a nonprofit’s direct response strategy can improve personalization leading to better retention and upgrades across your digital and direct mail program. If you are not sure this is the right strategy for your organization, consider dipping your toe in slowly with just one new persona and/or automation, and testing the results.

By including scoring and personas as part of your overall prospect research process, it can lead to more actionable wealth screening and prospect data. Even more so,  if you are able to have digital engagement data flow in real-time into your constituent relationship management (CRM) or prospect research tool, you can alert gifts officers immediately to take action. 

The preceding post was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.