4 Ways to Improve Digital Marketing With Donor Data

Nonprofits are investing more time and resources into digital marketing avenues than ever before. According to the 2024 M+R Benchmarks report, nonprofits invested 13% more in digital advertising in 2023 than in 2022.

Digital marketing connects nonprofits to new audiences and strengthens their relationships with existing supporters. However, your digital marketing plan is only as powerful as the data you collect to inform your decisions.

Collecting and leveraging donor data to improve your digital marketing efforts allows you to develop content and outreach strategies that speak to your audience more effectively. This guide explores four strategies for incorporating donor insights into your digital marketing plan.

1. Gather direct and indirect feedback from donors.

The first step to incorporating donor data into your digital marketing efforts is knowing which data points are most useful for your strategy, and how to collect them. We’re going to focus on two types of input that will provide a well-rounded view of how donors feel about your online content: direct and indirect feedback.

Direct feedback is any input you gather from directly asking donors. This could include information collected from:

• Surveys, such as a website user experience survey
• Polls
• In-person interviews or focus groups

Direct feedback allows supporters to offer insight into the user experience on your nonprofit’s website. You can also understand their thoughts and feelings about other online marketing channels, including your email and social media efforts.

On the other hand, indirect feedback draws inferences from how online audiences engage with your digital marketing content. Track indirect feedback via:

• Website analytics, including bounce rate and time spent on a page
• Online user behaviors and heatmaps using tools like HotJar
• Social media engagement metrics, like followers, likes, and shares
• SEO results

Indirect feedback allows you to determine how effectively your online marketing efforts are connecting with your target audience. For example, website heatmaps can help you determine how users engage with specific web pages, including the links they click, areas of the page they linger on, and areas they ignore.

Pay special attention to indirect feedback for important conversion pages like your online donation page and volunteer registration form. If these pages have high bounce rates or low visibility across search engines, that could mean your nonprofit is missing out on crucial opportunities to recruit new supporters to join your mission.

2. Refresh your online content based on donor input.

The insights you gather through direct and indirect user feedback can also help you refresh your website’s content to ensure it’s driving engagement. Use this information to update any old content and provide new content that aligns with your audience’s interests and needs.

Donor input can allow you to update your content by:

• Making SEO enhancements to ensure your priority content ranks highly on search results pages
• Refreshing old content to align with your audience’s current interests
• Making accessibility adjustments based on your audience’s needs
• Incorporating multimedia elements to make pages more engaging
• Adding diversity to your content to reflect your audience’s life experiences
• Improving your CTAs to align with user intent

Continually gather audience feedback over time to make small adjustments to your content strategy. This allows you to avoid major content overhauls, which can be costly and time-consuming.

3. Create smart donor segments.

Accurate donor data allows your nonprofit to develop a smart donor segmentation strategy. According to Bloomerang’s nonprofit CRM guide, you can use your CRM to store data in donor profiles. Then, you can easily create donor segments, or “groups of donors who share similar characteristics.”

Using donor data, you can segment donors based on:

• Communication preference
• Geographic location (to conduct both local and non-local marketing)
• Demographics, such as age or profession
• Length of time involved with your nonprofit

This is just a small sample of segmentation ideas; you can group donors in a wide variety of ways based on your marketing goals. After creating segments, develop tailored content for each group that speaks to their unique needs and preferences. We’ll dive into a few personalization examples in the next section.

4. Personalize marketing content based on donor characteristics.

Once you’ve developed your donor segments, reach out to each group with personalized content that appeals to them based on their distinctive characteristics. 61% of people expect brands to cultivate tailored experiences based on their preferences, so this is an effective way to align with supporters’ expectations while increasing engagement with your nonprofit’s mission.

For example, let’s say you want to craft an email marketing campaign to promote an upcoming peer-to-peer fundraising opportunity. You can create donor segments based on how long each supporter has been involved with your organization to send personalized content to each group. These emails could include:

• New donor outreach that showcases the peer-to-peer fundraising opportunity as a great way to learn more about your nonprofit’s cause.
• Established donor outreach that presents the upcoming fundraiser as a chance to take their involvement to the next level.
• Long-time donor outreach that thanks supporters for their past fundraising participation and highlights the upcoming peer-to-peer campaign as an opportunity to break their past fundraising records.

As you can see, each type of outreach meets donors where they are and provides them with personalized motivation to get involved in the fundraising process.

Your donor data is among your most valuable resources for building a digital marketing approach that grows and strengthens your online audience. By actively collecting and updating your donor data, you can work with your donors to create a digital marketing plan that meets your audience’s needs and helps exceed your marketing goals.