In my last blog post, I wrote about how we are leading our clients to modernize their fundraising through new creative approaches that drive performance. I framed a multistep approach that I used in the commercial world that focuses on data-led audience personalization to create relevancy in the content that we are delivering to audiences to accomplish this goal.
I also discussed how target audiences would be defined based on the individual fundraising challenges we were looking to solve, such as reacquiring lapsed donors, seeking younger donors, converting one-time donors to a sustainer model, etc.
In this conversation, I wanted to take a deeper dive into who those audiences could be and how to reach them via creative technologies. Fair warning: This may seem overwhelming at first, but the time you invest in setting up this automation will pay big dividends in increased performance and time saved afterward.
Fair warning: This may seem overwhelming at first, but the time you invest in setting up this automation will pay big dividends in increased performance and time saved afterward.
Who are the audiences that fundraisers can target to improve performance?
The reality is that most nonprofits are still sending a one-size-fits-all message to all donors today. Making this strategic, audience-led shift will help you benefit from modern marketing approaches.
This shift begins by understanding the audiences that you have available to you and who you should be reaching. And there are more audiences to target than you might expect! Here’s how to start building those audiences:
- Start with the data you have: First, as a fundraiser, you likely have been compiling data for years about your donors that you can finally put to good use—data such as age, gender, ZIP codes, past donation interests and much more.
- Compile your data into one location: If you haven’t been building your own database, it’s time that you start by compiling all the data that is available to you from your marketing efforts. Consider what data might be valuable to your future targeting goals, and tactically ask questions on donations forms, at events, etc. to grow your data further.
- Add more data with appends: The good news is, if you haven’t been gathering robust data, you have a few options to fix this based on the basic information that you have been gathering (addresses, email addresses, etc.). Performing a highly valuable—and relatively low-cost—data-enrichment exercise can help you learn more about the names that you do have, with some services offering hundreds of data elements that you can gain by appending your donor database.
- Study trends in your data: With this new information, you will be able to analyze who your audiences are, what their interests are and who else they look like to expand your target demographics. This analysis includes deriving insights, such as which fundraising and marketing efforts certain demographics have been responding to for future retargeting.
- Identify which audiences to target: With the previous insights, you can help define specific audience profiles that become your demographics to target based on the challenges you are looking to solve. It’s also good to know that you are not limited to these audiences!
- Consider adding data triggers: The additional option that you have to leverage is using third-party data triggers. Some of your audience scenarios may benefit from using alternate data sources, such as real-time mobile geo targeting, real-time weather conditions (wind/rain/flood/snow), time of day and many more data sources that you can cleverly use to develop your strategic personalization approaches.
Let’s look at how rich the list of basic demographic profiles that might be available for health- and hospital-based fundraisers is:
- Gender: Some diseases are gender-specific
- Age: Motivators and means are different with age
- Lower donor tiers: Develop targeted and relatable emotive content
- Higher donor tiers: Develop targeted and relatable research-driven, rational content
- ZIP code: Can define financial means or a location to a facility
- Donor interest: Identify the solutions or services that they have previously donated for
Other data points include alumni, past patients, family, friends, cause, wellness/health, preventative/self care, memorial giving, caregivers, grateful patients, event donors and more. Some of this data you may own, and some can be derived from third-party sources.
Now, think about how these demographics vary based on the type of fundraiser you are. For instance:
- Some nonprofits are more regional vs. national or international.
- Some, like missions and food banks, can be impacted by weather.
- Some animal care nonprofits cater toward personal animal affinities, like cat or dog (and even breed or size).
Each subset of the nonprofit sector has its own unique set of audiences that can be segmented, analyzed and targeted. And each of these subsets allows you to better personalize the messaging your donors receive.
How do I use dynamic creative automation to target messaging to my unique audiences?
Once you have the audiences that are valuable to support your goals, this is where the fun really begins!
Each of these audiences can be targeted holistically to support strong, omnichannel donor experiences by utilizing dynamic content delivery solutions. To accomplish this, it’s a creative mindset change where templates are no longer “taboo” and become part of your valuable creative approach. You develop templates for each channel, knowing that every element of each ad unit can be fully dynamic, which will create unique, personalized experiences for each donor.
To accomplish this, it’s a creative mindset change where templates are no longer “taboo” and become part of your valuable creative approach.
Now you may be thinking, “Wow, that’s just multiplies the amount of creative that I need to produce and build that I already don’t have time to accomplish.” The fact is that there are quite a few means of easily supporting the increased volume of versions, some of which can be automated in-house or automatically distributed through dynamic content technologies. In either case, each is accomplished through pairing your templates with data.
Let’s walk through the steps of building this automation:
Identify your template tool. With the many tools that are available on the market, you might design in your traditional creative design tools or build your templates within a third-party solution. Each solution available has its own strengths or weaknesses depending on your needs—from low-cost options to working in native design applications. No matter the case, these template builds and automated outputs can be accomplished for any channel, even including digitally printed direct mail and personalized video formats.
Design your templates. The next step will be to define your strategic goals and design a single or reduced set of templates that will be used for all potential versioning to accomplish these goals. Each template is designed to be highly flexible (with some elements that can easily turn on or off if data is available or not). While the creative foundation may be templated, the final automated builds can feel less structured and more appealing based on the content variations that are available for each audience.
Link each layer or design element to a data source. The data sources can be full-blown marketing databases and digital asset management (DAM) systems. They could also be as basic as a Microsoft Excel document where you simply build a content matrix with column headers identifying audiences, test versions or even language versions; and row headers identifying all of the dynamic elements of an ad unit, such as:
- Headline
- Subhead
- Primary body copy
- Supporting body copy
- Background image
- Offer
- CTA
- Brand logo
Craft content for each element. Your creative team then become content developers built for scale. Based on each audience, they craft messaging for each ad element, with nuances that will optimally appeal emotionally or rationally to each audience or test—which is an art in itself that we’ll explore in a future blog. Generative AI tools can also play a role in supporting development of these nuances. Once all of the content element iterations are developed, including image options (which will correspond to an accessible DAM or image repository/folder), then it’s time to automate.
Click to activate your automation. Now, whether you’ve built your templates with in-house tools or dynamic delivery tools, you then automate production for all brands, audiences, sizes, languages and testing versions with essentially a single click. Once executed, you’ll then route links or outputs for QA and approval (right through your workflow solution if applicable) and make any final tweaks if needed. Once approved, either output your ad units to digital or print production or, if using an automated delivery solution, you’ll follow your standard digital delivery practices with audience-centric nuances.
Then, next month or campaign, simply repeat and reuse the already established practice, with minor updates and test learnings as needed.
It's important to note that there are more mature dynamic delivery solutions available that bring additional benefits, including the abilities of selecting your audiences directly, providing advanced rapid testing or providing direct reporting on results right from the solution. Mature solutions like this usually welcome support from those providers or your agency experts to take much of the technical ownership off you, giving you as much access and hands on as you’d like in supporting the technical elements of these dynamic abilities.
Dynamic creative automation is worth the effort
It may sound like a lot of effort to initially enable personalization across your omnichannel efforts—and it is. The good news is that, once set up, the effort is fully repeatable. The time saved and speed to market is incredibly improved in each marketing effort onward.
The cost and time savings alone are enough of a benefit for any nonprofit. On top of that, the ability to deliver more relatable, personalized content to your donors has been proven to deliver increased engagement performance. That’s the primary benefit for fundraisers to accomplish.
If you are interested in accomplishing any aspect of strategic audience targeting, personalization approaches for improved performance or creative automation, please reach out to me to learn more.
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