Data-driven is the ‘and’ to your fundriasing

(not the or)

Fundraisers are so used to working by feel. Without the tools and resources their for-profit sales and marketing counterparts enjoy. The issue is that this has been the way for so long that now, when sophisticated tools have become affordable and available to the nonprofit sector, they are ignored and even worse shunned.

Fundraisers know a lot about donors and what they are giving to their organizations, and have names for many different types of donors they are interested in. (prospect, first time, lapsed, LYBUNT, SYBUNT etc.) And fundraisers know that, on average, it costs 7x more to acquire a new donor than it does to keep an existing one. They have KPI’s for the number of donors, the amount of donations, and even the percentage of donations by donor type, but when it comes to actually tracking donors through the different stages and types, they are relying on feel because they lack the tools or resources to put that kind of effort into each and every individual donation.

Case in point. With all of the different types of donors mentioned, and knowing that it’s more effective to renew donors than find new ones, there is no standard name or type for donors that had lapsed but have now returned to giving to the organization. Even though these donors should represent a prime target of low hanging fruit as it were. The work involved in figuring out who these people are, segmenting them and targeting them with a campaign is seen as prohibitive. Any modern CRM and marketing automation system can not only identify these prospects but also include them into an ongoing campaign automatically.

The fundraisers who adapt quickly and take advantage of a modern marketing stack stand to benefit their organizations substantially, while the rest keep feeling around in the dark.