Knowing your donors: The key to nonprofit marketing

Recent fundraising trends demonstrate that nonprofits that create hyper-personalized messages reflecting donors’ interests, behaviors, and engagement history are more likely to develop flourishing supporter relationships. 

Of course, to create hyper-personalized messages, you need to know your audience. This guide will explore key strategies for gaining insights into your donors and using that information in your communications to improve your overall nonprofit marketing strategy.

Why defining your audience matters in nonprofit marketing

The first step in any marketing strategy is defining your audience. It may be tempting to insist that anyone is a potential supporter in order to cast as wide a net as possible. However, this train of thought can leave your marketing materials unfocused and vague. 

Instead, by determining your nonprofit’s target audience, you can experience: 

• Increased engagement. When your marketing strategy is tailored to a specific audience, that audience is more likely to respond to calls of action, such as donation requests, event attendance, and volunteering. 
• Higher loyalty. An audience who connects with your marketing materials will likely continue engaging with your nonprofit, leading to lower donor lapse and unsubscribe rates for your mailing lists.
• Streamlined strategy. When you don’t have to guess who your audience is or how to get in touch with them, you can create targeted marketing campaigns and see results from them much more quickly.

Building an engaged audience takes time, and when first creating a formal nonprofit marketing strategy, it’s normal to be unsure exactly who that audience is. As such, your first steps should be to assess the data you already have to get to know your donors.

How to gain donor insights for marketing

1. Assess your data

Your donor database should be your source of truth when it comes to understanding your donors, their engagement history, and why they support you. To get to know your donors, make strong use of this data by:

• Keeping detailed profiles. Your donor database is only useful if it contains detailed, organized supporter information. Customize your donor profiles to include the data fields you need and plan how to gather that data, whether through your donation form, surveys, or engagement tracking tools. 
• Pulling reports. Most CRMs and fundraising software come with basic reporting features that allow you to gain specific insights into donor behavior. For instance, you might pull a report on retention for new donors over the last six months to see if a new welcome series had the desired impact. 
• Using analytics tools. Tech-savvy nonprofits may find success by turning to sophisticated analytics applications. For instance, you might use AI to analyze donor behavior and predict future giving trends. 

Additionally, your donor database likely contains sensitive information about your supporters, such as personal identifying details and their payment information. As such, implement proper data security measures to keep your supporters’ information safe. Doing so can help prevent data breaches, which may harm your ability to gather supporters’ data in the future. 

2. Conduct market research

Data your nonprofit has collected on donors can help form the foundation of your marketing strategy. However, relying only on this data can be limiting, and you may end up unintentionally neglecting potential audiences and avenues for growth. 

Look outside your organization by conducting market research. For nonprofits, this process might involve:

• Benchmarking other organizations. To expand your data, analyze nonprofits comparable to yours in terms of sector, size, and location. Assess their Form 990s, read their newsletters, and monitor their social media accounts to gain insight into how other audiences respond to different strategies. 
• Surveying donors. After analyzing quantitative data in your donor database, reach back out to your supporters to get answers to specific questions. Fifty & Fifty’s nonprofit branding guide recommends leveraging a feedback loop where your nonprofit continually surveys donors, implements suggested changes, and then surveys donors again to hear their thoughts on those changes.
• Conducting focus groups. For specific, detailed feedback, consider hosting focus groups. These might consist of volunteer supporters, or you might pay to have a marketing agency conduct a professional focus group on your behalf. In these discussions, you’ll present participants with specific marketing materials, such as your brand assets, and ask for direct feedback.

Compare the data you gather through your research to the information in your donor database. By doing so, you can get a fuller picture of your current audience and potential audience. 

3. Build audience personas

While gathering data on your diverse range of donors, you may realize that it’s difficult to create highly personalized messages for a diverse group of people. This is where audience personas come in. 

An audience persona is a profile of a hypothetical member of your audience. The persona is not real but possesses many traits shared by your audience, condensing them into one simplified person. Many marketing agencies use personas as a tool for honing into their audience’s needs, preferences, and potential reactions to marketing materials. 

Double the Donation’s direct marketing fundraising guide provides this helpful example of an audience persona for a nonprofit: 

• Name. Personas are usually named to help them feel more like real audience members and to differentiate numerous personas if you have them. 
• Demographic information. A persona should share demographic information, such as age, profession, and location, with the majority of the donor segment it represents. 
• Goals. What does your average audience member want, and what motivates them to achieve these goals? Consider goals both related and unrelated to your nonprofit, such as wanting to make the world a better place, leave a legacy, or improve their community. 
• Challenges. What is stopping your audience from achieving their goals? This might be broad ideas, like lack of resources or knowledge, or highly specific, such as difficulties navigating an online donation process. 
• Other relevant data. Every marketing strategy focuses on unique aspects of its audiences. As such, your nonprofit’s personas will likely include details that another nonprofit wouldn’t. For instance, you might add prior knowledge of your cause, advocacy potential, or networking prospects to your personas. 

Once you’ve created your personas, use these to shape your marketing materials. For example, rather than writing an email for your donors in general, you can write several versions tailored to specific personas and audience segments. This helps improve your ability to personalize content and ensure messages fit their recipients’ interests.

The first step in any effective marketing plan is learning who your audience is. Get to know your nonprofit’s supporters by assessing your data to discover their characteristics, wants, and challenges. Then, create marketing materials that appeal to your unique audience and continually collect data to learn more about your donor community.