In the increasingly competitive world of fundraising, nonprofit professionals are constantly searching for ways to maximize the impact of their efforts. Enriching your database with wealth and career data—or even artificial intelligence (AI) propensity modeling—can help give your organization a leg up by providing deeper insights into the financial capacities and interests of your donors. Studies show that data-driven fundraising strategies increase donor retention, result in higher email engagement, drive high-value donations and even increase event attendance.
The real power of third-party data enrichment is the capability to segment and prioritize your donor database more effectively. This approach ensures energy and resources are focused on the prospects with the highest potential to make a meaningful impact on your cause.
To help you make the most of your data, we'll explore the value of using wealth screening data to build a strategic, data-driven fundraising plan that will help you engage the right donors at the right time, with the right ask.
Here are the top four ways to prioritize and segment your nonprofit’s data like a pro:
Whether segmenting data in an excel file, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform or another tool like Windfall’s new SaaS application, putting data into action is key to success. Using wealth screening data alongside your organization’s data, you can identify and remove duplicates, create, sort, and filter reports and lists, and even use conditional formatting or color scales to highlight trends. It’s essential to make your segmentation immediately useful when building your team’s use of data and data-driven strategies.
Segmentation helps you unearth all types of prospects, including new major donors and current donors with the potential to upgrade. Prioritization by net worth, in relation to past giving, can help you uncover the hidden gems within your database. One example of a hidden gem report might look at donors who have high net worth but have given less than $500 a year. Another example would be a report of past event attendees who have not donated outside of events to prioritize personal outreach.
Through segmentation, you can group like constituents together to create more personalized and effective outreach without having to make one-off solicitations for every level of prospect. Windfall suggests looking at a constituent’s previous philanthropic giving interests as a key filter to ensure your communication opens the donors’ minds to how their donations make a difference with your organization. In our new application, it’s easy to create lists based off of multiple data points to create bespoke groups for every type of donor.
Increasing campaign effectiveness requires segmentation and prioritization, grouping donors by wealth and donation recency, and targeting each group with the optimal ask amount. Creating ask amounts should be data-driven and easily replicated. Look at median gift sizes based on net worth ranges, or create your own rating based on net worth. Most professionals consider 5% of net worth to be an individual's total philanthropic capacity — the estimate of the amount an individual can give to all nonprofits over five years. By sorting your constituents by net worth and segmenting them into groups, you can customize outreach methods for each category, boosting the effectiveness of each campaign or solicitation.
Interested in learning more about prospect prioritization and segmentation? Watch our on-demand webinar dedicated to this topic and learn more about our new Nonprofit SaaS & Artificial Intelligence (AI) Application created to make it easy for nonprofit fundraising professionals to leverage wealth data, career intelligence and AI in daily workflows.