How CRMs Assist with Donor Segmentation? Essay

How CRMs Assist with Donor Segmentation
In the old days, it was enough to send a flyer to a donor's door along with a personal acknowledgement and thanks for their donation. But in today's technology-driven world, donors want something different. They want communication that's not only personalised, but that which is also unique. Segmentation is a way that you can provide your donors with this type of communication. And CRM can help with all of that.
What Donor Segmentation Helps You Do
By segmenting your donors, you are able to implement targeted fundraising. And once this has been implemented, your organisation can be in an even stronger position to receive regular and long-term donations.
How to Segment Donors
There are several ways you can segment donors, most of them achievable by using your CRM.
Amount Given per Year
You can segment donors by how much they give your organisation yearly. Knowing who is giving how much allows you tailor all of your communications to the donor's potential, capacity and ability. It also allows you to ensure that you don't ask for too low or too high a donation. Understanding how much a donor can give per year also helps you gain a further understanding of their position. This provides even more assistance to you, allowing you to ensure that your organisation gets as much as possible of what a donor can give.
Preferred Communication
Donors can also be segmented by their preferred communication type. Your CRM's contact management feature will most likely reveal to you which forms of communication are most frequently accessed and acted upon by donors. You can use this information to ensure you're reaching them where they are most likely to donate.
When segmenting donors by preferred communication, it's important to keep in mind that engagement, and not quantity of solicitations received is the key to donations. Communication with donors that are aligned with their expectations and values and inspire them to take action in their community can benefit your cause in innumerable ways. Therefore, consider the cultivation of a long-term relationship that may lead to future donations.
Frequency of Communication
You can engage in donor segmentation by using your CRM to flesh out the communication frequency preferences of each donor. You will find that although some may want to know what's happening with your organisation all the time, others may be content with one or two updates per year. Either way, you can use the information from your CRM to plan communication based on what your donors prefer and expect.
Not only will doing this allow you to appropriately time when you engage with donors, but it also increases the possibility of your communications being accepted by the donor when you send them.
Communication Channels
You will find that your CRM likely reveals a wide range of preferred channels for communication amongst your donors. For example, some may prefer communication by post because it gives them a tangible means of staying in touch with your organisation.