Personalised fundraising – ‘look what the boy in Buganda did for you, sir’ – is now the leading edge of charity innovation. One-size-fits-all is out.
It means that the charities that attract hearts and wallets are those that personalise their appeals to resonate directly with each donor.
Yet it’s time for every charity to embrace this reality: personalisation is no longer a ‘nice to have’, but a ‘must have’ in your fundraising tool box.
Understanding Your Donors
The foundation of any individualised fundraising strategy is a thorough understanding of your donors. Not just their names and donation histories, but an understanding of their motivations, preferences and the causes that make their hearts race. Understanding your donors and segmenting your donor base through data analytics is not just smart, it’s necessary. The insights that data analytics provide charities allow them to develop a message that is tailored to the heart of each donor segment while also making these donors feel seen and appreciated.
The Magic of Tailored Communications
Not all communications should be equal: to the extent you can personalise messages to reflect the interests and history of each donor, it will engage them more effectively (such as by sending different versions of an email campaign to different segments of donors, or sending personalised video messages as thanks). Donors are people, not (just) accounts numbers, and they want to know that you have taken the time to recognise this.
Interactive and Dynamic Content
Adding interactive elements to your campaigns can turn passive consumers into active participants: run a quiz, create a survey, or an interactive story where the user influences which path the story takes, which can all provide a far greater level of engagement and a more tailored experience. As well as enhancing engagement, these additional interactions can shed light on the interests of your donors, which can lead to a virtuous circle of personalisation.
Example; Tailored Email Campaigns for an Animal Welfare Charity
An animal welfare charity has a pool of donors with different passions: some are concerned with wildlife conservation, some with local animal shelters. A charity might use personalisation by segmenting its email list by these interests – which have been inferred from the donor’s past giving history and interactions with the charity’s content.
For World Wildlife Day, the charity crafts two versions of its fundraising email:
Wildlife Conservation Version: Dear [donor’s name], Thank you for being a past supporter or expressing interest in wildlife conservation projects. We’re excited to share with you some recent stories and images from the field – including the rescue and rehabilitation of endangered species or anti-poaching efforts – with a direct appeal for support of a specific conservation project that your contribution will make a tangible difference to.
Local Animal Shelter Version: This version is sent to donors who have previously supported the charity’s local animal shelters. It contains tales of rescued pets and highlights the daily struggles of shelters as well as how they are made easier by the kindness of the community. It asks for a donation to improve the shelters or to sponsor the care of an animal still waiting for a forever home. With this version, a direct link is drawn between the donor and local animals.
Emails that feel personalised help the charity not only to communicate more relevantly but also to make a deeper emotional connection with him.
Recipients are much more likely to respond to appeals that are customised to their own interests and to donate to causes that resonate with them because they can clearly see the result of their donation. This type of personalisation enhances the efficacy of the fundraising effort, but it also strengthens the bond that donors have with the mission of the charity.
The Role of Technology: Amplifying Personalisation in Fundraising
Instead, technology enables personalised fundraising, creating what one donor described to us as ‘a cycle of discovery and action’, where technology turns good intentions into meaningful action. The judicious implementation of technological tools can turn personalisation from an idea into an actionable strategy that leads to substantially improved donor engagement and fundraising results.
Robust CRM Systems: At the heart of any personalisation strategy is your CRM system. Charity-specific CRM systems are not just data collection systems, they are live, dynamic entities that track what interactions your supporters have with you, when, where and through which channel, and their history and preferences. It’s this combination of data that allows you to segment your donors effectively and speak to them in an informed and meaningful way, ensuring you aren’t sending the same appeal to someone who has already donated, for example.
Analytics-enabled CRM UK charity management software can provide insights into donor behaviour and help discover trends and patterns so that the charity can begin to create more and more individualised fundraising approaches.
Automated personalisation: CRMs can be triggered by certain donor actions or milestones to initiate personalised communication with donors. This allows charities to stay in touch with donors at the required interval without overburdening their staff.
Digital Marketing Platforms: Digital marketing platforms are now the key enablers of personalised campaigns. Segmented data is passed from the charity’s CRM to fuel email campaigns, social media advertising, and web content, all tailored to the motivations and interests of different donor groups.
Dynamic content creation: a tool that dynamically generates your messaging, imagery and calls-to-action according to the profile of the viewer, and makes each interaction uniquely resonant.
Social Media Algorithms: Social media algorithms enable charities to deliver targeted advertising to a donor set ready and waiting in the places where they already spend time – namely their phones. By leveraging the data sets of their CRMs to inform social media campaigns and deliver ads to the right people, charities can ensure donor engagement and conversion through ads delivered to individuals who are already interested by virtue of their personal interests and demographics.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: AI and machine learning are taking personalisation to the next level in the realm of fundraising. These technologies can predict donor behaviour, automate content personalisation and even provide chatbots that allow supporters to receive quick and personalised responses to their questions and concerns. AI’s predictive powers help to pre-empt and stay ahead of donor needs to ensure that fundraising strategies are proactive and personalised.
Interoperability and integration: The real benefit of technology in personalisation is interoperability and integration. Data flowing between charitable software CRM systems, digital marketing systems, social media, and analytics tools build a single, unified strategy, where each system builds on the others. They all work together to ensure that every piece of data – from any system – is pooled so that a deeper understanding of donors is built, and smarter fundraising is driven.
Technology is key for charities that want to personalise their fundraising – from CRM that offers deep insights into donor profiles to AI that can predict future giving patterns, technology offers the tools to make every donor feel like the only donor. When personal is seen as the premium, the role that technology plays in creating a personalised fundraising campaign is not just important – it’s essential.
Timeliness and Relevance
It’s all in the timing. Contacting donors with personalised messages at appropriate times can make a huge difference to your relationship with them. If it’s a donor’s anniversary with your charity, or possibly your charity’s anniversary with the donor, a timely message can remind the donor that you care and are still around. Or it can be a crisis anywhere in the world that suddenly makes your message relevant and appears to have been timed perfectly to coincide with the crisis. In all these cases, the right timing demonstrates that you are paying attention to the donor and your donor’s world. It reminds the donor of the connection between your charity and the donor.
In Conclusion: Personalisation in charity fundraising is not a trend but a paradigm shift.
Charities that persist in using impersonal approaches risk being lost in a sea of bland appeals. It’s high time we recognised that personalisation can be the ingredient that turns your fundraising from bland to brilliant.
At a time when donors, reeling with data, are crying out for someone to understand, for someone to care, demonstrating that you’ve listened, that you care, is not a nice-to-have – it’s a must-have for success in fundraising.
