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Personalize Communications With These 4 Data-Driven Tactics

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A guest post by Gabrielle Perham of DeepSync

Imagine you’re an avid monthly donor and volunteer at a local animal shelter. You open your email inbox to see you’ve received an email from the shelter entitled “Learn more about our organization!”

You open the email to a summary of the nonprofit’s background and a list of ways you can get involved. Don’t they know you’ve been part of their community for the past five years?

Unfortunately, this situation happens all too often. To resonate with people on an individual level, nonprofits have to dig deep and personalize their messaging.

That’s why it’s important to adopt a data-driven marketing approach. With data, you can cater to different groups within your broader audience and seamlessly increase engagement. Check out these data-driven communication tactics your nonprofit can leverage.

1. Segmentation

To speak to supporters as individuals, you have to first think of them as individuals. While you may not be able to write an entirely unique message for each donor, you can target your communications using segmentation.

Segmentation refers to the process of grouping your audience based on shared characteristics, and there are many different ways to do it. Getting Attention’s nonprofit marketing guide recommends creating groups based on:

  • Level of support
  • Location
  • Age
  • Engagement rate

For example, you may create a location-based segment so you can reach out to local supporters about events you’re hosting in the community. If you don’t have enough information to create these segments, consider enriching your database.

Deep Sync defines data enrichment as “the process of supplementing your first-party data with third-party data to confirm you have the most accurate, reliable, and comprehensive database possible.” By enriching your database, you can learn more about your supporters and add valuable information to your database that helps you better reach them, including:

  • Demographics
  • Contact information
  • Income
  • Net worth
  • Lifestyle information

Let’s say you’d like to run an SMS marketing campaign but don’t have phone numbers for some of your donors. You can source this information through data enrichment, allowing you to easily get in contact with your supporters via text.

2. Marketing Audiences

Sometimes, the audience you’d like to reach isn’t reflected in your current supporter base. In this case, you can work with a data provider to create and reach a custom marketing audience. This way, you can expand your reach and unlock a new base of potential supporters who will align with your current campaign.

For example, imagine you run a political advocacy group that’s gearing up for an upcoming election. You want to encourage young people who can vote for the first time to support your cause, but your mailing list currently consists of adults over the age of 50.

To reach this group, you can use carefully compiled third-party student marketing data that grants you access to contact information for those in your target audience. Then, use this audience across online and offline channels to ensure your messaging reaches them.

3. Automation

While segmentation and custom marketing audiences can help you actively tailor the content of your messages, automation can play a supporting role in personalizing your communications. There are several ways you can use automation in this context, including to:

  • Insert personalized elements for email campaigns. Use automation to quickly add a personal touch to your emails. Individualize each message with elements like donors’ names, donation amounts, and past activities.
  • Trigger communications. Send automated communications such as thank-you emails, post-event follow-up, and event registration confirmation. That way, you can promptly communicate with donors before following up with more in-depth messages later on.
  • Send reminders. Automate reminders for upcoming events, recurring donations, and membership renewals. These messages keep your donors in the know without disrupting your team’s workflow.

When you use automation, you save your team time and energy while still improving your communication with donors.

4. Surveys

You have plenty of tactics for gathering information about your donors. Now, go straight to the source! Send surveys to hear directly from your supporters. Surveys allow you to collect constituent data that you can use to shape your communications strategy.

You may ask your supporters questions about the following:

  • Communication preferences. Ask donors how often they’d like to hear from you, through which channels, and about which areas of your organization. Communicating on their terms shows you’re committed to building one-on-one relationships with them.
  • Events and programming. Learn about supporters’ experiences with your events and programming. For instance, get their thoughts on the items you offered at your latest auction or ideas to improve your volunteer program.
  • Overall satisfaction. Lastly, ask your supporters about their overall satisfaction as members of your nonprofit’s community. Here, you can open the discussion for more open-ended feedback to glean insights into what you’re doing well and where you have room for improvement.

After collecting responses, store the results in your donor database for future reference.

To maintain a personalized, data-driven communications strategy, continuously fine-tune your approach. Constantly follow up with donors, employ A/B testing, and experiment with new tactics to improve your strategy and further individualize your messaging.

Gabrielle Perham, MBA

Gabrielle is the Director of Marketing & Sales Operations for Deep Sync. She joined the organization in 2017 and brings 20 years of experience in strategic marketing, branding, communications, sales enablement, and digital marketing. With a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done attitude and a big-picture mindset, Gaby loves solving marketing and business challenges. She earned both a B.S. in Marketing and an M.B.A. in Marketing Management from the University of Tampa. Gaby enjoys spending time with her fiercely outspoken daughter; hiking and kayaking; rocking out in the first row of a live show; and giving back to her local community.

Speaking Your Audience’s Language

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When your nonprofit speaks, do the people in your audience say, “They’re like us?” Or do they say, “That group doesn’t speak our language?”

Little turns of the phrase can make all the difference.

I grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, where the carbonated stuff you buy in bottles was called “pop.” It had nothing to do with the performer Iggy Pop. It was just a drink.

To my surprise, when I moved to New England, people were calling it “soda,” a word I’d only ever heard after “baking,” or before “fountain.” And Coke was a brand name. Pepsi could not be Coke.

Obviously, I wasn’t from New England. Or the South!

Language differences are not just regional

Pop, soda, coke: all of these are English. All are proper English, somewhere in the U.S. But the U.S. is not the only place where people speak English. George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said, “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.” If you don’t believe him, ask a Brit and a Yank what a rubber is.

I read a lot of British murder mysteries, and I pride myself on understanding the King’s English. Recently, though, I finished an Inspector Rebus mystery set in Scotland, and I had to keep looking up words and phrases. How they say it in London and in Aberdeen may be two different things entirely! (Not to mention Melbourne or Lahore.)

Language differences are not just geography

Even people who live in the same geographical area may hear a phrase and react completely differently.

The actor Jamie Foxx didn’t mean anything wrong when he tweeted about #fakefriends and said, “They killed Jesus, what do you think they’ll do to you?” As an African American, he was just using a common phrase to express how untrustworthy people can be.

Unfortunately, white Jewish people and their allies heard that phrase with an entirely different inflection. Outside of the Black community, “They killed Jesus” has been used by Christians for centuries as an accusation against Jews. It has led to pogroms and slaughters.

When white Jews called Foxx out, many Black Christians could not understand how his phrase could ever be antisemitic. Many white Jews could not understand how it could be anything but. (And a lot of Black Jews were stuck in the middle, which happens way too often!)

That’s why you have to know your audience

Nonprofit organizations cannot say everything in a way that everyone will understand the same way–at least, you can’t and still say anything interesting! So, what’s nonprofit to do?

Know your audience.

You are not writing to everybody. There’s either one specific audience that’s interested in what you do, or there might be a few. In either case, you need to be able to picture the people you’re writing to, hear how they talk, and speak their language.

Developing Your Nonprofit’s Branding Strategy: 5 Tips

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A guest post by Ryan Felix, of Loop

A nonprofit’s brand is what sets it apart from the crowd. It’s the identifier that supporters use to recognize the organization and everything it stands for.

Brand recognition is a valuable factor in the marketing plans of all types of organizations. Larger companies have the most recognizable brands, like the Nike “swoosh” or the Apple logo. Even some large nonprofits are immediately recognizable, like the Red Cross or Girls Scouts.

Just like these massive organizations, your nonprofit brand is integral to your organization’s identity. When your supporters come across your logo on the web or social platforms, they should immediately recognize that the message is associated with you.

However, your brand isn’t just about your logo. We’ve compiled this guide of five tips to create a consistent and recognizable brand identity:

  1. Identify your target audience.
  2. Get inspired by brand elements you admire from other nonprofits.
  3. Create a style guide for your nonprofit’s brand.
  4. Maintain your brand across all channels.
  5. Work with a nonprofit brand agency.

This succinct guide summarizes some of the tips in the complete nonprofit branding guide from Loop: Design for Social Good. After you’ve read this article, you can see examples of these tips at work in the more complete guide.

1. Identify your target audience.

Consider who you interact the most with. Do you work primarily with low-income youth in New York? Middle-aged women in Montreal? These two audiences will respond differently to visual design choices and should be taken into account when you make decisions for your brand.

To be even more accurate, involve your audience in your branding process. Ask for their input using surveys and conduct A/B testing to better understand how they interact with different design elements. Be sure to only test one element at a time so that you understand which elements caused better engagement results.

2. Get inspired by brand elements you admire from other nonprofits.

Even if you’re not a designer, you can identify brands that you like versus ones that you don’t. Take that instinct a step further by analyzing the brands you do like and identifying the elements that make them appealing.

Look at top nonprofit websites and start looking for the elements that make them stand out to you. After you’ve looked through several websites, make an initial list of the sites you find visually appealing and another of the sites you dislike visually.

Then, consider each element on the individual sites to determine what you like about the designs on your “visually appealing” list. Some elements to consider include:

  • Colour palette
  • Font type
  • White space
  • Patterns
  • Shapes
  • Images

After you’ve identified the elements you prefer over several sites, you’ll likely start seeing some overlapping features. For example, you might find that you prefer a friendly, lowercase font over a bold, all capitalized one. Or, you might prefer bright, warm colours more than cool, subdued ones. Adopt these preferred elements for your nonprofit’s brand to develop your own style.

3. Create a style guide for your nonprofit’s brand.

Once you’ve completed the prep work, establish your brand by developing a style guide to follow for your nonprofit. This style guide defines the brand elements that you’ll leverage for consistent, strategic communication.

Your guide should include the stylistic elements that define your nonprofit’s visual identity, including the following:

Colour palette

The colours you choose should be aligned with the tone you’d like to convey to your audience. Different colours inherently communicate different characteristics. For instance:

  • Red communicates strong emotions like strength and health and conveys urgency.
  • Orange tends to be a more playful colour, representing friendliness and energy.
  • Yellow represents sunlight, communicating warm and happy emotions.
  • Green traditionally represents growth and prosperity, often linked to climate and sustainability.
  • Blue is associated with a number of feelings, including calmness, tranquility, and trust.
  • Purple is often associated with innovation.
  • Black tends to represent more serious brands going for a bold or activist-driven look.

Choose the colours that best represent the message you’d like to convey, then add them to your style guide. These colours will be used repeatedly on your website and throughout your other marketing materials.

Logo

Your nonprofit’s logo succinctly encompasses your entire brand in a simple, single design. When your audience encounters your logo, they should immediately relate it to your mission.

Here are some tips to make sure your logo is impactful:

  • The design is simple. Too many small details will be challenging to copy and repeat in varying qualities and scales across multiple marketing channels and different materials.
  • It looks good in greyscale. If you’re printing your logo on a black-and-white letterhead, it should still be recognizable and attractive.
  • You have multiple versions. Certain circumstances may require your organization to use your logo with or without a tagline or in a different colour. Create these versions up front so they’re available when you need them.

Typography

Typography encompasses both the typeface (fonts and font families), style (ie. capitalization), and hierarchy. How you combine these elements will display tone just as colour decisions do.

When you choose a font, consider both usability and tone that is conveyed. For example, serif fonts tend to be more challenging than sans serif to read on computers. So, if your organization operates primarily on digital platforms, it’s easier for your audience to read paragraphs of text in a sans serif font.

Tone can be conveyed depending on the weight and feel of the typeface. Advocacy organizations may speak with urgency, calling for a bold font. Meanwhile, a children’s charity may speak softer, using a more lightweight, geometric font.

Choosing the style of your typography also depends on the tone you wish to convey. To communicate a friendly, approachable tone, you might choose an all lowercase font. Meanwhile, to communicate urgency or action, you might choose all capital letters instead.

Personality

While colour, typography, and logos primarily focus on the visual elements of your brand, your personality comes from the way you communicate and market your content to your audience.

Choose a consistent tone of voice that aligns with your organization’s identity to communicate with your audience. Then, carry this tone across your platforms, from your website content to your social media posts.

 

Save your completed style guide as a PDF so that it can’t be altered by others. Then share it with your design team, vendors, and marketing team. This will help you maintain a consistent brand across your team.

4. Maintain your brand across all channels.

While the content of your fundraising asks and messages may change depending on campaigns and programs, your brand should be immediately recognizable on each communication platform.

  • Nonprofit website. Your website is the central place from which you’ll build out your brand. Include your logo across all website pages, leverage your standard colour palette, and be sure all content portrays your brand personality.
  • Direct mail. Design a letterhead for your direct mail to use on every letter you send. For guidance, you can use letter templates like those offered by Fundraising Letters. Templates can be helpful to be sure all important information is included in the letter. However, customize the text to align with your personality before sending it.
  • Email. Leverage email software that provides more visual customization options than a generic email account. Mailchimp or similar solutions provide visual options to adopt your visual brand for every email you send.
  • Social media. Use your logo as your profile picture on social platforms. Customize your cover photo to also represent your brand. You might choose to include an image of your work, your team, a campaign, or constituents to personalize your social media page further.

When you adopt new audience-facing nonprofit software, choose solutions that offer customizable visual elements. This will ensure you can maintain your brand across any and all platforms, including crowdfunding pages, donation pages, or other fundraising opportunities.

5. Work with a nonprofit design agency.

While there are tips and tricks you can use to make impactful design decisions, you won’t become a design expert overnight. But you can have access to industry experts when you work with a design agency.

The best agencies will walk through the various design steps with your organization, getting to know your mission and personality in order to reflect them in the visual decisions you make. By working with an agency, you’ll see benefits such as saved time, access to expert advice, and increased confidence in design decisions.

 

While an agency is the most efficient choice to establish your brand, you can choose a more DIY approach. If you decide to go with the DIY method, ask other nonprofits if you can view their style guides or search for examples online. This will help guide your design decisions, ensuring you don’t forget any important elements in your own brand guide.

 

Ryan Felix head shotRyan Felix is a co-founder of Loop: Design for Social Good who brings a strong intuition and insight to create bold, creative & impactful websites. Ryan has led design studios in Toronto and New York using his knowledge of Human Centred Design to increase meaningful conversions and design enjoyable web experiences.

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