guest post // Nonprofit Cloud Automation: Donor Communication Tips
By Karin Tracy, Fionta
Nonprofit technology allows your team to do more with less, and software like Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud provides an increasing array of automation tools. These features can handle everything from rote administrative work to data analytics to program management.
While technology can play a key role in donor communications, nonprofits should be thoughtful and intentional about their strategy. Many standard good practices exist for supporter outreach, but donor engagement isn’t an exact science. Advanced tools like Nonprofit Cloud are at their best when used by professionals who understand both software and human relationships.
To help craft your automated communication strategy, this guide will explore strategies for leveraging technology like Nonprofit Cloud in your supporter relationship-building efforts.
Map the donor journey.
One of your first questions when automating donor communications should be: What parts of the donor journey can be automated?
Map out the average donor lifecycle at your nonprofit to pinpoint moments in their journey where automation would improve their engagement with your nonprofit. The donor journey can be roughly divided into three main phases:
Discovery. Consider how supporters discover and engage with your nonprofit before donating. For example, a prospective donor might explore your website, follow you on social media, or subscribe to your newsletter before committing to give. You might create an automated welcome series to engage donors in this phase.
Conversion. How does your nonprofit communicate with supporters when they convert by donating? For example, you likely have automated donation thank-you messages for completed gifts, or you might use ad retargeting tools to encourage supporters who abandoned your donation page to return.
Follow-up. Most of your automated communication will likely occur after a supporter donates, helping you cultivate a relationship and encourage them to donate again. These might include campaign updates, routine appeals, event invitations, and monthly newsletters.
Note that the donor journey will look different for various supporter segments. Your Salesforce platform can help you track your relationship with each donor and properly categorize them.
For example, prospective major donors will likely receive similar levels of automated communication to small-dollar donors in the discovery and conversion stages. Once they’re identified as major giving candidates, you would reduce automated follow-up communication in favor of personalized outreach.
Personalize outreach.
360MatchPro’s guide to fundraising automation cites a loss of personalization as one of the most common challenges associated with automated communications, explaining how, “Fundraising requires personalized, emotional appeals to be successful. Using software to automate fundraising processes can seem risky on the off chance that it removes a human touch from communications.”
However, automation can also aid in creating personalized messages. Avoid generic email blasts by:
Creating donor segments. Leverage your donor database to categorize donors by key characteristics, such as their past engagement with your nonprofit, giving level, location, interests, or other relevant traits. Nonprofit Cloud enables nonprofits to add custom tags to donor profiles, allowing them to filter and organize supporters to create email lists.
Writing thoughtful templates. Create message templates for each unique segment when reaching out to your donors. Ensure the templates speak to that donor group’s interests and include areas that can be populated with personalized details, pulled from your Nonprofit Cloud platform.
Leveraging data to create personalized journeys. Use your donor database to track where each donor is in their supporter journey, so you can send targeted messages that push them toward their next gift. For example, your fundraising appeals might ask donors to make incrementally higher contributions to persuade them to increase their giving.
Software like Nonprofit Cloud is especially useful for personalizing communications due to its many integrations. Ensure your entire nonprofit technology stack is connected so that donor data collected by one platform flows smoothly to your CRM, enabling you to personalize communications better.
Automate recurring communications.
Stay connected to supporters with consistent, recurring messages, such as thank-you messages for donations, routine newsletters, and donation appeals. Set up triggers for specific messages, such as sending a “We Miss You” message if a recurring donor misses their usual gift.
AI tools can also help you handle many recurring messages. For instance, Salesforce provides users with Agentforce, which can handle various nonprofit tasks, including basic donor outreach. Fíonta’s guide to Agentforce describes a few use cases related to communication:
Personalized thank-you messages
Donation receipts
Responses to frequently asked questions, like “Where is my donation going?”
Agentforce can also pull individual supporters’ data to create personalized impact summaries, match volunteers to opportunities related to their interests, and help recurring donors change their usual gift amount.
Ensure data quality.
Automated and AI tools rely on high-quality data to send targeted, accurate messages. Routinely clean up your database to minimize mistakes and maintain donor relationships.
A few data hygiene best practices include:
Checking data consistency. Assess your database to find duplicate, missing, and inconsistent data. For example, you might have only recently standardized how supporters share their addresses, and previous data may include multiple formats for apartment numbers and ZIP codes.
Analyzing error metrics. Check for messaging errors that signal bad data, such as email bounce rates.
Updating data. For long-term supporters, consider reaching out every few years to ask them to check their donor information – this outreach helps you stay in touch with supporters as their addresses, emails, phone numbers, and payment information change.
Automated software can help you complete many of these tasks. For example, look for Salesforce apps to identify duplicate supporter profiles and help you consolidate them.
Evolve your approach over time.
Donor communication preferences change over time, and your nonprofit should adapt to meet these changing needs. Make targeted adjustments to your outreach strategy by:
Following the data. Leverage the data Nonprofit Cloud gathers about your supporters to assess what channels and message types are effective and what needs work. Track metrics like email open-rate, donation conversions, and subscriber list growth.
Experimenting with message types. Pause your automated messages occasionally and try a few unique kinds of outreach. These changes might be as straightforward as conducting A/B testing with email subject lines, or you might try entirely new content formats and messaging strategies.
Collecting donor feedback. Reach out to donors directly to ensure your automated communications have been serving their needs. Ask questions about your communication cadence and content to check if messages are delivered correctly and provide personalized information.
As new software comes out that further improves your ability to automate donor communication, experiment with features, but don’t lose sight of what makes donor outreach effective in the first place: personal, human connections.
Nonprofit Cloud unifies your nonprofit’s technology, allowing you to have a complete view of your supporters and send targeted, automated messages. Assess your supporters’ donor journeys to ensure you send meaningful messages that speak to their interests at the right moment. Then, check that your approach is working by keeping a careful eye on your data, and make improvements that fit your supporters and your technology.
This guest post was written by Karin Tracy.
Karin Tracy, VP of Marketing at Fíonta, is a seasoned designer and marketer with a passion for serving nonprofit organizations and being a small part of bettering the world. She is a certified Pardot Consultant and Marketing Cloud Email Specialist, a fan of automation and reporting, a lover of animals, and devourer of popcorn.
At Fíonta, Karin drives marketing efforts for all internal and external projects. Her direct service work is focused primarily on marketing strategy and automation for Fíonta’s MCAE (Pardot) clients.
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