In the high-technology world of data-driven fundraising, it’s normal to feel insecure — and wonder if your organization is running behind the competition. Many fundraisers feel that way, even those at large organizations who have long incorporated complex data analytics into their work.
There’s no perfect solution. To get the best results, data analytics needs to be tailored to an organization’s mission, activities, fundraising style, and budget.
The Chronicle spoke with fundraisers and data administrators at a wide variety of nonprofits — such as a community-based social-service group in Los Angeles and a historically Black college in Virginia — who highlighted some common themes. Here’s advice from these groups and consultants who work with them that can help you use donor data to boost giving.
Focus on what makes your donors different.
Many nonprofits use addresses or ZIP codes to assess donors’ wealth and giving potential. In another fundraising shortcut, educational institutions often focus on graduates, not those who dropped out.
But those typical indicators didn’t work well at Norfolk State University in Virginia. Natalia Pierson, associate director of prospect-management research, learned to give both factors a low priority when assessing possible donors. Decades of redlining, the banking practice of not issuing mortgages in majority Black neighborhoods, meant ZIP codes were not reliable indicators. Weak financial aid in the past for Norfolk State students meant many of them had to leave college early. Those dropouts, however, often still have a strong institutional affinity, Pierson learned.
Shifting fundraising strategies to be more inclusive helped grow Norfolk State’s fundraising revenue from $3 million a year in 2020 to $10 million a year. “We’ve been blowing it out of the water with small gifts, and a lot of them are people who never graduated,” says Pierson.
The lesson? Don’t assume the analytics that work for other nonprofits will work for yours.
Track donor ‘journeys.’
Savvy nonprofits focus on understanding donors’ “journeys” with their organization — how they met the group and how their relationship with the nonprofit has evolved — so they can determine how best to keep them engaged.
Sharon Kamegai Cocita, director of development at the Little Tokyo Service Center, which offers an array of social services in Los Angeles, needs to know which of its many programs appeal to donors. “It’s important for us to see how a person became connected with us,” she says, “so we can project from there and see what kind of interests that they might have.”
Understanding donor journeys doesn’t mean bombarding donors with data requests. “We don’t collect a lot of data at the beginning because we found that can lose people,” says Brittany Veneris, director of fundraising, U.S., at Movember, a men’s health organization that sponsors an annual fundraiser in which men grow mustaches in November. “We really only ask the questions and gather information that we’re going to use in one way, shape, or form.”
At first, Movember requires only a donor’s name, email address, and physical address on online forms, with the option to provide a phone number.
Eventually, Veneris maps donor journeys and compares them with engagement. For example, she might look at which communications inspired a donor to get more involved and whether they returned the next year. “It all comes down to retention,” she says. “A lot of times people give because they feel passionate in the moment and then they move on to something else. And that’s going to always happen, but how do we minimize that?”
Listen your way to a gift.
Last spring, the American Indian College Fund asked its marketing partner to call every existing donor or lapsed donor from the previous three years. The marketing firm reached around 12,000 people to ask what inspired their first gifts to the fund. No request for an additional gift was made.
In a second round of calls, the firm contacted fewer donors and asked only: “What about our work is most inspiring to you?”
NancyJo Houk, chief marketing and development officer for the college fund, sorts through the call transcripts looking for information she can use to help place donors into groups and build relationships with them. First she searches for common inspirations for giving. Then she creates other segments based on traits such as geography, wealth, age, or profession. She hopes to use A.I. to help write communications tailored to those groups. The fund might send lawyers a story about a scholarship student who is going to law school, for instance.
Houk used to emphasize telling donors the organization’s story. But she shifted to listening to build deeper, longer relationships. “People like to feel they have been heard,” she says. She and her team have gone from raising $14 million a year in 2013 to being a $50 million organization, with a spike last year to $81 million.
Don’t focus too much on high-dollar donors.
Many organizations crave major gifts. But high-dollar donors often start out small. At Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Jon Thompson, associate vice president of philanthropic strategy and technology, found that four out of 10 of its million-dollar donors started with gifts of $100 or less.
At the American Indian College Fund, Houk says her “passion project” is looking for donors who have been forgotten by other organizations because donor screening may rule them out. She believes many fundraisers’ obsession with return on investment contributes to the very problem many nonprofits complain about — a shrinking pool of donors masked by a few big gifts. One of the traits she looks for as part of her new project is “historical loyalty” — those donors with potential to stick around for the long term.
Integration of data systems should be your holy grail.
Fundraisers often use a dizzying variety of vendors and services to help with their data work, sometimes leading to a tangle of software, lists, databases — and frustration. That can make it easy to forget what you set out to do.
The goal, says Chris Cannon, chief strategy officer at the Zuri Group, a consulting firm, should be to have “everyone dedicated to using a central source of data that is a source of truth and is as trustworthy as possible.”
Jennifer Filla, a prospect-research consultant, recommends nonprofits seeking to improve data analytics start by hiring a database administrator. That can help them integrate multiple systems and tailor software to an organization’s needs.
The American Indian College Fund’s Houk has a monthly online meeting and a couple of in-person meetings annually with its data-analytics vendors and other partners to make sure they stay aligned with the fund’s needs and tactics.
At Heifer International, an Arkansas-based organization focused on easing world hunger through community development, Michelle Dusek Izaguirre, vice president of marketing and resource-development operations, has used internal programmers to achieve what many groups seek: user-friendly portals for the organization’s customer-relationship management. The portals are custom designed to be easy to use and understand for particular groups of users, such as senior management or frontline fundraisers.
Make sure events data feeds into the central database.
Individual departments within organizations often have events — walkathons, golf tournaments, or lectures, for example. But it can be hard for fundraisers to get data back from those events, including who registered, who attended, who gave money, and what donor follow-up took place.
“It’s our job as a development team to take those donors and develop them as philanthropists for the full organization,” says Kamegai Cocita of the Little Tokyo Service Center. “We need to remember where they came from and tailor our communications that way.”
Use data visualization for strategic impact.
Senior nonprofit leaders have come to expect data visualization, such as charts, infographics, or animations. “Nobody wants to look at a list anymore,” says Jacqueline La Gamma, director of prospect research and analytics at Northwell Health Foundation, which supports New York’s largest health care system.
Visualizations can deliver fresh insights, including ones that overturn an organization’s traditional thinking. One nonprofit that Filla, the consultant, worked with thought it was getting more donations from foundations than from individuals but learned through visualization that the opposite was true.
Marry good design with a deep understanding of what’s relevant to produce meaningful visualizations. “Pretty data isn’t any better than data in a spreadsheet,” says Dusek Izaguirre of Heifer International. “It’s still overwhelming unless you show the right things.”
For nonprofits on a tight budget, inexpensive tools are available, including visualization features in spreadsheet software and low-cost or free resources like Fundraising Report Card and Tableau Public, the free version of the visualization software Tableau.
Build personas of who your donors are or might be.
Some fundraisers are looking with a fiction writer’s eye at what sort of people might give to their organization.
Movember has done an audience analysis of its donors and volunteers, looking for common traits and behaviors, to imagine look-alike audiences it could cultivate. That audience, the organization found, is likely to be 30-something men whose interests include sports. They prefer spicy, cheeky marketing and wellness content, says Movember’s Veneris, rather than darker disease themes. A testicular cancer awareness promotion, for instance, asks, “How’s your pair hangin’?”
Use A.I. — thoughtfully.
When experimenting with artificial intelligence, many smaller nonprofits are relying on outside vendors who combine the organization’s donor data with “big data” gleaned from the internet. The analytic results can be useful, but since vendors don’t typically tell their customers which external datasets they are using, it can be difficult to know if the analysis is trash or treasure.
To get more relevant results, experts say, look for vendors who will provide lists of broad interests that you can select for use in searches, such as fine arts, higher education, or children’s issues, and whether someone has given money through crowdfunding sites.
At Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Thompson says he focuses on using A.I. and other complex data analysis to optimize the highest donor “lifetime value.” Rather than focus on what a donor might give in the next year, he seeks a view of their potential giving for the rest of their lives.
To avoid analysis paralysis, he decides which information he initially gives to fundraisers. Prospects might be ranked, for instance, in terms of how aggressive the fundraiser can be in pushing for a gift because of the individual’s likelihood to give.
“Can A.I. make a really meaningful contribution to philanthropy and philanthropic strategy?” he asks. “Absolutely. But it’s at its infancy.”
Include information gathered during personal interactions.
Data can come from conversations, focus groups, and email interactions.
Human prospecting can uncover potential donors that no data screening can. A religious leader whose income isn’t in public databases might be capable of six-figure donations even though wealth screening says he isn’t worth bothering with.
“It’s easy in the conversation around data to get focused on big, intimidating analysis,” says La Gamma of the Northwell Foundation. But “fundraising, no matter what stage you are in, is very much a people game.”
