Ultimate guide to successful donor relationships

This covers factors such as where people live, their age, gender and how much they earn.

Pros

It’s data that’s already available and easy to access. It doesn’t require any additional research or work.

Cons

It’s very general. You won’t have much to go on. For example, it might tell you where the highest earners live, but it won’t give you any insight into their needs or motivations.

This segmentation looks at people’s past actions and behaviour. You might divide audiences based on when they last donated or how much they gave. Did they sign up for an event or respond to your latest campaign?

Pros

It helps you make assumptions about how people will behave in the future, so you can tailor the way you communicate with them.

Cons

It tells you the ‘what’ but not the ‘why’.

This segmentation focuses on how people feel – their values, attitudes and motivations.

Pros

It gives you the most in-depth information about why someone has or might support your charity.

Cons

It requires extensive research to gather the data. It’s more complex to analyse. You’d usually need to use a specialist agency to segment data in this way.

We’re used to getting things immediately these days, so don’t miss the window to communicate with your new supporter while you’re fresh in their mind. You can use your CRM to track donations and start that journey straight away.

Ideally you’ll have asked people in their welcome email how they prefer to be communicated with. Action this immediately. A good CRM will allow you to record their preferences, as well as manage your emails, letters and texts in one place, so this should be quick and easy to do.

Be upfront and acknowledge their concerns. Don’t be afraid to say things like: “You’ve told us you’re concerned about us spending money on printing and postage, so from now on we’ll only contact you by email”.

Offering locally relevant content – on and offline – can increase support. Local fundraising group having a bake off in Barnes? Make sure your south Londoners know about it. Looking for volunteer fundraisers? Inspire people with stories about services in their local area. You might do this via an insert in your newsletter, targeted Facebook ads or personalised emails.

Spend some time looking for clusters of similar supporter behaviour. For example, using the map on your CRM, you might notice a certain area of the country where you have a lot of recently lapsed or inactive donors. Do some research into why this might be. Perhaps you signed people up at a local event, but didn’t follow up well enough afterwards. Consider an online awareness campaign in the area.

Using a combination of cookies and information from your CRM, you can look how users are interacting with your website. Use this insight to help you ‘cross-sell’ events and encourage donations from people who’ve gone on to your site for a different reason, such as getting information or taking part in a campaign.

The information you have about your actual and potential supporters needs to work for all your fundraising colleagues. Integrating your systems can help keep everyone in the loop. For example, is your email marketing platform talking to your CRM? Set it up correctly and you can import metrics back into your donor records. Then you can easily see which donors opened the email. Did they click the link for more information about an event? Did it lead to a donation? This is really useful data for future communications planning.

What if there’s a last-minute issue with an event for donors? Using your CRM to contact them all with a personalised text message will help them feel valued and connected – and could avert a crisis. You can keep track of GiftAid declarations by integrating your CRM with HMRC systems. Once a donor signs a multi-year declaration, you should be able to use your CRM to backdate previous claims on GiftAid – so you won’t miss out on extra funds from every eligible donation. Integrating systems will mean all supporter records are automatically updated, saving time but also helping you collect information about your donors and measure behaviour.

Your emails, letters, fundraising materials and social media messages need to look and sound like they come from you – no matter which area of your charity has written or sent them. Committed supporters could be hearing from lots of different teams at any one time. Coherent, consistent messages will hit home quicker with greater impact. Don’t recreate messages and guidelines for every communication or channel. Focus on your audiences and aims – put your donor in the centre and work around them.

Talk to your colleagues at the planning stages of any fundraising or marketing campaign. How can you work together to save time and money? Is everyone’s thinking aligned? Remember, you should all be working towards the same aim.

Data for data’s sake is pointless. The more you have, the more that can be mismanaged or misinterpreted. Have a clear question you want to answer or outcome you want to measure like finding out what day of the week donors make a donation, or the number of donors who watch TV regularly.

There’s nothing more off-putting than personalised communications with errors, like a mistake in someone’s name or how much they’ve raised in a thank you message. It damages trust. So collect, code and use your data carefully – and check, deduplicate and clean it regularly.

Analytics tools can give us so much information – from what time of day people use Twitter or open an email, to the route they take through a website. Pick one or two things to look at each time, for example what social media channel works best for a specific audience.

This is vital if you’re going to get clear answers about what’s improving your outcomes. Split testing, for example with two different email subject lines, is an easy way to get instant feedback on what messages inspire action. If one is getting more opens, use that – it could well lead to more donations, event participants and even more long-term donors.

Personalise actions and messages based on what you’ve found out from your data. For example, you might check who opens your event email, clicks on the link but doesn’t go through with the final registration. Revisit those supporters and find out why. Build on what you’ve learned from each analysis you do, and apply your findings to new campaigns. Make adjustments to your fundraising strategy based on what you’ve learned.

You don’t need experienced data analysts to interpret data. CRMs have easy-to-use tools to help you find out what you need to know. Get your CRM provider to do some in-house training and share the knowledge within your team.