Making sure that your donor data is clean and organized can be a large project, but it is key to putting together email and social media campaigns that work. If you haven’t already cleaned up your database, now is the time to merge duplicates, update your email lists, and make sure that you can access the segments of your supporters that you want to focus on. 

Three Easy Ways to Target Your Donors This Year

By Affiliation:

Your database should have an easy method to bring up lists of supporters who fall into different categories that make sense for your organization. Examples: volunteers, board members, club members, VIPs, alumni. 

In CommitChange, these categories are organized through tags. They’re easy to set up; just go to Supporters and click on the Settings tab, then add tags that make sense to your organization. Then, you can search for individual supporters to tag or create filters to find large groups of related supporters and bulk-tag them. You can then manage your email lists via Mailchimp Sync (by syncing your tags into Audiences via Mailchimp) or exporting a list for each tag and importing into your email client. 

When you’re ready to send emails, focus your message to each specific group. Volunteers might have a call to action focused on sharing the campaign with their friends, while VIPs might have a suggested donation at the higher end of your giving options. 

By Past Giving Tuesday Insights:

If you ran a Giving Tuesday campaign in past years, you can use that data to drive your campaign this year. In this case, your appeals will become more nuanced and may contain more personal messages, including phone calls. One strategy is to make lists of people who donated under a certain amount for your last campaign AND over a certain amount. This is simple within CommitChange; just filter your Payments dashboard by campaign and amount. 

For example, you may send a focused email blast to everyone who gave less than $25 and personally call everyone who gave more than $500. For everyone at the lower end of the scale, you can let them know that every donation counts and ask them to commit to the same or a higher giving level as last year’s. For the higher end, let the donors know you’re creating a matching gift program and ask if they would be willing to match or exceed their donation from last year to drum up excitement during your campaign. Let them know how much their donation meant to your organization, and tie in the number to the direct impact it had. Writing something like, “Your donation of $500 paid for one student’s books for Spring Semester,” will go a long way towards building a bond between your organization and a supporter. 

By When They Last Donated:

A list of people who gave last year but not this year (or two years ago, or three years ago, etc.) is a powerful thing. They may not have given because you fell off their radar or their financial situation changed. They might have moved or experienced a birth or death in the family. Giving Tuesday is the perfect time to re-engage folks who haven’t given in a while and to remind them that any donation, no matter how small, can have a big impact. 

If you need to pull this information from CommitChange, just go to your Supporters dashboard and filter by the last donation before 12/31/2018 (or your own strategic date) then move the resulting list to your email client (by tagging and Mailchimp Sync or exporting). Remind those donors who have fallen away why their support is so important to you, especially during the giving season. 

Next week, we’ll provide you with tips on how to pull off a last-minute Giving Tuesday win.