New Strategies for Segmentation

Demographic and transactional data are givens, but they're not the be-all and end-all of donor-information gathering.

In essence, a channel-preference segmentation allows you to focus dollars on a particular channel and target the audience most likely to respond to that channel. Instead of mailing, e-mailing and calling every donor, you can spend money to punch up direct mail and e-mail for a subset of your target audience and put more calls toward each donor in your telemarketing campaign.

Motivation
Different people are motivated in different ways. When it comes to charitable giving, some donors are motivated by shock messaging, some by sympathy, some by an intellectual argument and so on. Conversely, donors might be put off by certain styles of creative. Over time, it should be possible for you to establish a pattern — at donor level — of what works and what doesn't work for your donors.

You might be able to revisit past appeals and retrospectively code them with the styles of creative used. Then by analyzing the responses, or lack of them, you should be able to identify what style of creative appeals to each donor. This helps you communicate with donors in the styles that work for them, with the benefit that appeals can be even more precisely targeted and ROI can be enhanced.

Piecing it together
The devil in the details with donor segmentation is data collection and storage. If you can't easily access demographic, transactional, activity, channel-preference and motivational data, you obviously will have a hard time using this data for segmentation purposes. If the technologies you use for managing your donor database and Web site and performing e-marketing are disparate point solutions that don't integrate well, you might need to consider a business-intelligence tool that can extract, combine and store data from these separate solutions to provide you with comprehensive information.

Another alternative is to consider an enterprise solution that provides your organization with donor management, Web site management and e-marketing capabilities based on one database. The functionality you might give up going from a specific point solution to a more general enterprise solution often is a trade-off for getting a more accurate and comprehensive donor picture.

Whichever route you choose, it's important to remember that good segmentation begins with thorough data collection. FS

Robin Fisk is senior charity technology specialist at ASI. Reach him at robin@advsol.com

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