4+ keys to great year-round fundraising campaigns
- Digital communications & marketing
- Fundraising ideas
- Nonprofits
- Guided Fundraising
Major and planned gifts are crucial sources of funding for nonprofit organizations, and both types of donations require thoughtful prospect research and solicitation strategies. However, many nonprofits’ strategies rely on outdated tools that can hamper these efforts.
This is why data-informed donor screening and segmentation practices are so important. With the right tools and practices, your team can optimize fundraising efforts to raise more money, spend fewer resources, and increase your impact on the communities you serve. Here’s how—and why—your nonprofit can elevate your donor management practices to create cutting-edge, data-driven major gifts and planned giving programs.
The right donor data can provide a full picture of donors’ capacity and affinity to give, allowing you to target the right donors for your major gifts and planned giving programs. Nonprofits often focus on data like donor net worth or income, but this information only provides limited insights. Even if you know a donor’s income, do you understand their expenses or current net worth?
Consider one donor, Janet, who earns $300,000 per year, and another donor, Bethany, earning $200,000. Based solely on income, Janet might seem a more promising prospect. But what if she has $250,000 in annual expenses, while Bethany only has $100,000 in expenses? Now, Bethany has more capacity to give.
Many nonprofits use outdated strategies that don’t take details like these into account. Fortunately, with the right tools and practices, you can tap into more nuanced information and use data to more effectively screen and segment donors.
Whether you’re looking to acquire new donors or retain or upgrade existing ones, using data to optimize your asks can help you reach the right supporters at the right time. The more personalized each donor’s ask is to their specific capacity and affinity to give, the more effective your ask becomes.
Segmenting by income data is an effective start, but it’s only a start—income alone misses other nuances of a donor’s ability to give. Use these three techniques to uncover the right data and use it to guide your decision-making:
The ideal fundraising system leaves no donor behind. That said, some donors are more likely to give, and to give more, than others. Donors without children, in particular, often have more capacity to give.
Beyond supporting their children now, many parents want to leave behind substantial inheritances to help ensure that children, grandchildren, and future generations prosper. Many people without children also want future generations to prosper, so they fund nonprofits and social programs.
With the right prospect research tools, you can uncover these donors and offer them an avenue for ensuring that the resources they provide are put to good work today and well into the future.
Another useful way to screen supporters for major and planned giving is to uncover donors with donor-advised funds (DAFs) and those engaged in estate planning. Here’s what these reveal about your donors’ capacity and affinity to give:
Understanding your donors and the tools they already have at their disposal will help you craft better requests and strengthen relationships. You can also focus more of your efforts on donors who are ready to act immediately.
With specialized data services, you can also leverage career data including job titles, employers, and other resume insights to find eligible donors for your major and planned gifts. Here are a few examples of how your nonprofit can leverage career insights:
By better understanding your supporters with career data, you can improve both your fundraising appeals and your interactions with them, which helps you advance your purpose.
By using data platforms built by data scientists and designed specifically for fundraising, you can put your organization in the best position to successfully steward major and planned gifts. When your organization uses data efficiently, especially when paired with a unified fundraising and engagement platform like Bonterra Donor Engagement’s Fundraising solution (formerly EveryAction), your nonprofit can act on that data across all your supporter interactions to advance your purpose.
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