Leveraging Your Nonprofit CRM

As a nonprofit professional, you understand the importance of maximizing your limited resources to have the greatest impact on your mission. Your organization only has so much funding and time to dedicate to your mission, and you don’t want to waste any of it.

The desire to leverage the power of your valuable resources should also extend to the software your organization is using.    

For instance, you may have a CRM, but are you making the best use of it? Whether a technology audit revealed underutilized features or you’re looking to embrace the power of a recent upgrade, you don’t want to miss out on the extensive capabilities of your donor management software.

Feature-rich nonprofit CRMs allow you to cultivate relationships with existing donors and reach new supporters through automated processes. This allows your team to focus on the relationships, communication strategies, and interactions while the software provides the tools to accomplish these strategies.

You can take advantage of the tools in your nonprofit’s CRM by implementing the following best practices for marketing:

1. Utilize automation tools when possible.
2. Create specialized donor segments for targeted marketing.
3. Optimize marketing efforts for maximum results.

With these strategies, you’ll be well-equipped to craft marketing campaigns that make the most of everything your CRM has to offer. Let’s jump in!

1. Utilize automation tools when possible.

One of the most time-saving ways to use your nonprofit CRM is to let it handle tasks for you.

Automation tools are especially effective when it comes to streamlining your marketing efforts to ensure supporters are contacted with personalized messaging at the right moment. You’ll never have to worry about a missed chance for a thank-you note, and prospect engagement opportunities won’t slip through the cracks.

With a modern CRM, you can automatically save data from marketing campaigns in individual supporter profiles. This helps you gather data on which engagement strategies are most effective. Additionally, you can draw donor information from your CRM and automatically use it to personalize communications.

Your nonprofit CRM may also integrate completely with your marketing software, allowing you to set up automated processes like drip campaigns that are driven by your supporter data. With an automated email drip campaign, supporters receive consistent communications to drive engagement. The campaign is triggered by a certain action and will continue to run through a specified event or timeline.

These automation strategies can be helpful both for growing your donor base and connecting with current supporters. 

2. Create specialized donor segments.

Another smart way to improve your nonprofit’s marketing strategy through technology is donor segmentation.

Donor segmentation is the process of separating your supporter population into smaller groups to create a targeted engagement strategy. Your marketing campaigns will be more effective if they address the characteristics and motivations of specific segments of donors rather than the entire audience.

With your CRM solution, you can easily segment donors based on the data available in donor profiles. Look for a software solution that comes with pre-built segments but also allows you to create customized segments tailored to the needs of your organization.

Here are just a few criteria you can use to segment donors and supporters:

• RFM (recency, frequency, and money)
• Age, gender, and demographic information
• Donor status (first-time, recurring, lapsed, etc.)
• Preferred giving channel
• Preferred communication method
• Engagement history

Other characteristics you use to create your segments will vary based on the nature of your organization and your supporters themselves. There are also a few unconventional data points you may want to consider tracking. For instance, an animal shelter may want to track whether the supporter is a cat or dog person!

Using donor segmentation practices can strengthen relationships with supporters and boost retention rates because it allows for personalized messaging without the time commitment of reaching out to each person individually. Donors want to feel seen, valued, understood, and addressing them in smaller groups can help you accomplish that.

3. Optimize marketing efforts for maximum results.

Your nonprofit’s CRM can help you determine which of your marketing strategies drive successful engagement—and which may be falling flat.

Whether you’re launching a new campaign or tweaking an existing approach, use the information available in your CRM to make smarter, data-driven decisions.

Crafting your campaign based on data rather than assumptions is the best way to optimize your outreach. 

• Organization-level data. You can use big-picture data to help you find trends across all of your organization’s marketing efforts. By analyzing these trends, you can better optimize your future plans. For instance, determine if email or social media campaigns drive the most engagement, or what time of day your emails tend to perform best.
   
• Campaign-level data. Consider statistics and results from individual marketing and fundraising campaigns. By keeping a close eye on your data while in the middle of your campaign, you can adjust tactics on-the-fly. For example, if your first email to promote an event generated a low click-through rate, you’ll know you’ll need to adjust your messaging or send time next time.

You can gather these insights either from past performance metrics or through a more experimental approach such as A/B testing. 

Also known as split testing, A/B testing allows you to optimize small details like email send time or subject lines to see what performs best. Look for a CRM that has A/B testing built into the platform to save time.

Each of these strategies is an easy way to start leveraging the powerful capabilities of your nonprofit CRM. By using your available donor data, you’ll be able to create stronger marketing campaigns that generate more support for your mission. Good luck!