This guest post was written by Nandini Singh, Marketing Content Specialist at WealthEngine.Using actionable wealth and lifestyle insights, WealthEngine fuels highly-targeted campaigns that continuously deliver measured outcomes. The WealthEngine platform is powered by more than a half-trillion data points and uses proprietary learning science to create unique profiles for more than 250 million people in the U.S.For more than 20 years, WealthEngine has helped clients engage in highly personalized and precise conversations with their audiences to find their next best prospect and drive growth. 

Best Ways to Hyper-Personalize Donor Outreach to Forge Lasting Connections

Marketing is no longer used as a transactional tool to identify donors and persuade them to give. If anything, marketing and marketing automation strategies are now focused on the donors themselves, and what they bring to the table, individually. By understanding the interests of your existing and potential donors, and personalizing your donor outreach to reflect their values, you have the ability to cultivate a life-long donor base. 

Getting to Know Your Donors and Prospects: Personalization and Wealth Insights

Personalization enables you to produce something of value to a donor, tailored to their individual interests. On a very basic level, personalization allows us to leverage generalized demographic data, such as a donor’s name, location, giving history, to appeal to donors and prospects. With this information, we are given a starting impression of who we are communicating with and where they’re coming from. 

You can gather more personal insights by integrating wealth and lifestyle data into your strategy for donor outreach. This will let you receive real-time customer data that allows you to understand how your existing and prospective donors are evolving, making you more well-equipped to communicate with individuals in an accessible and authentic way. 

Communicating with Donors and Prospects: Integrating Personalization into Your Fundraising Strategy

Personalization is now a necessity for donor outreach. But, the question remains: how best do you tailor your fundraising and marketing strategy to reach your donors and prospects in ways that are relatable? It’s important to focus your efforts on the following areas: 

1. Focus and Individualize Messaging

To appeal to different personas, it’s imperative to speak to individuals in ways where their values are highlighted so they feel seen. By segmenting and targeting your prospects, and then tweaking your messaging, you can show donors how and where your values overlap with theirs. Doing this allows you to express your appreciation and knowledge of their ideals while simultaneously showing them where you fit into meeting those goals. 

2. Leverage Wealth and Lifestyle Insights

By leveraging wealth and lifestyle data, you can engage with donors in a more focused way. These insights emphasize how likely your donors’ propensity and capacity to give. After determining if a prospect is likely to your organization based on your overlapping values, you can gauge the size of the gift they may be willing to give to your campaign. Tools like WealthEngine Connector for Salesforce provide access to more than 250 million wealth profiles directly within Salesforce, which can help you find, understand, and connect with wealthy donors and prospects. 

3. Name Your Values and Purpose

When it comes to giving, donors want to feel personally connected to your cause. What is your organization’s greater vision? How do you see yourselves involving your donors on that journey? If donors feel connected to your cause, that’s when they’ll feel inclined to give however much they can. It’s about bridging that gap between what you are trying to achieve, specifically, and how only your donor’s or prospect’s values can help you meet those goals. 

By personalizing your donor outreach and marketing automation strategies, you are acquiring a deep understanding of your donors and prospects. This focused and continued engagement results in conversions and lays the foundation for long-term relationships. Not only does personalization allow you to create present connections, but it helps you cultivate a loyal base that will only grow and strengthen as time goes on.