Earlier this month I was lucky enough to co-present the monthly GG+A webinar series with two of our communications consultants, Bill O’Leary and Jeff Bradley. We focused our webinar on segmentation and its applications for structuring a communications strategy. I write that I was “lucky enough” because as an analytics consultant and former fundraiser, I seldom saw or get to see the communications side of fundraising.
The three of us began our webinar explaining the different ways non-profits are segmenting, and then used a specific example from Bill’s work at a large University to demonstrate the issues presented by imperfect data, and what conclusions and solutions can be created for segmenting your contributors. I found this part of the webinar, even as a presenter, to be educational and fascinating. We all believe that large, sophisticated universities have clean and fantastic data going back decades, but Bill shed light on the fact that this is not the case. Building off Bill’s example, he and Jeff discussed the types of data that they would collect in a perfect world. Who was on the freshman year dorm floor together? Who took classes from key professors? The three of us translated these data desires to other types of organizations; healthcare, arts and culture, social services. If you could start collecting data now, what should you collect? Sure, this data collection will not help you today, but 10 years from now your name will be praised!
The final two segments focused on appending outside data to your constituents for better segmentation, and then gave specific communication examples for utilizing the data. What messages are affective for making LYBUNTS and SYBUNTS every year givers? How do you message to move people up in a giving category? How do you approach women donors as opposed to men donors? Our webinar is free to download, GG+A Webinar 10.6.2011 – Data Segmentation and Communication Strategy,and I hope you take advantage. I found the communications information provided to be invaluable and interesting. Please post any comments or questions and I will make sure to forward to Bill or Jeff.
