Spring Cleaning for Your Nonprofit Marketing Segmentation

Why do we segment data?

Mentioning the word segmentation among a group of nonprofit professionals usually elicits quite a few groans. This rings especially true from the direct mail veterans who cringe at the thought of building queries, refreshing queries, merging queries, exporting data, and then spot checking huge spreadsheets of data. As time consuming and arduous as it may be, segmentation is necessary. We do marketing segmentation because we recognize that our donor base is a diverse group of individuals and must be treated as such. By segmenting constituents for our appeals, event invitations, or even newsletters, we’re able to better target our messaging and ultimately make a more personalized ask.

How do we segment data?

Do you use the tried and true RFM segmentation that assesses recency, frequency, and monetary values? How about segmenting based on a donor’s relationship to your organization? Are they a Board member, volunteer, or alumni? What about segmenting based on how they came to be a donor to your organization in the first place? We all know that someone who attended an event and someone who gives in response to a couple of direct mail pieces each year are motivated to give by very different reasons. Why not segment on the source of your donors so you can target them with the best possible messaging for generating the highest response rates?

Is our segmentation stale?

Has it been years since your marketing segmentation strategy has changed? Are you segmenting on just recency and monetary values? If so, you may be overlooking your organization’s best asset. You probably have a wealth of information about your donors at your fingertips that may be going to waste. Perhaps it’s because of the difficulty determining where to begin or because there is simply too little time to develop new queries for refreshing you segmentation strategy. Regardless of the reason, it’s probably time to freshen up your segmentation with a little spring cleaning.

What if there was an easy way to fix stale segmentation?

Gone are the days of building out overly complex queries in The Raiser’s Edge, merging them all together to get the right inclusions and exclusions, and then hoping that you’ve got the right folks in your final export. Our segment software, SegmentOmatic, gives you unlimited segmentation options; including the use of templates for creating your recency, frequency, and monetary segments, as well as the ability to segment on any query in The Raiser’s Edge. Want to segment your donors by a constituent code and an attribute within the RFM segmentation? Piece of cake! Want to re-use a previous segmentation, but make a few tweaks? Just load the existing segmentation template into your new segmentation, make your changes, and save the new segmentation profile.

SegmentOmatic also allows you to easily navigate the results of your segmentation, reviewing how many records fall into each segment and even drilling down to the level of seeing exactly which constituent records appear in a given segment. Assign appeal and package information segment by segment or to several segments at once. You can also create custom segmentation codes that allow you to see exactly which segment a donor appeared in – are they an event volunteer who gives at the $250-$500 level once a year? You can have that reflected in the segment code that appears on the donor’s appeal record in The Raiser’s Edge.

Finally, SegmentOmatic includes the world’s best appeal analysis report. This report allows you to determine how effective your marketing has been across different segments, which empowers you to be agile with your marketing and segmentation strategies! With SegmentOmatic, your segmentation possibilities are endless and your days of manually merging queries in The Raiser’s Edge are a thing of the past.