Catherine Folkes, Severn Consulting Group
[Ed. note: This article is part of NTEN's Member Appreciation Month spectacular. The most popular pieces will be featured in our newsletter. You can read all the details here.]
Personalization is the incorporation of information your constituents have provided to you in your communications. We’ve been personalizing our direct mail campaigns for decades; we talk about the kinds of programs a donor has contributed to, how long a constituent has been a member, where constituents live and the impact our organizations have in their community, but for some reason nonprofits are not incorporating the information captured within email communications.
A recent Return Path study of 50 nonprofit organizations identified that nonprofit organizations are not taking advantage of the data they collect in their web sites. Of the 50 nonprofits Return Path studied, almost none of them used the information they collected at sign-up to truly customize their messages compared to commercial organizations where more than 40% of the organizations use the information they capture to personalize their communications.
Top 5 Reasons to personalize your communications
- Show your constituents that you are listening and that you are engaged.
Did they share a specific interest in your organization when they signed on to your site? Did they request a specific newsletter, publication or service that clearly identified a need?
- Provide your constituents with the meaningful content they are looking for.
Did they tell you why they came to your site? Are they looking for specific content as the parent of a young child, the caregiver for an aging parent, the spouse of a cancer survivor?
- Integrate the appropriate social networking links into your communications.
Do they tell you that they are a Twitter follower and regularly visit Facebook? Do they share their interest in your organization with their friends?
- Increase the value of contributions from your constituents.
Are your constituents looking to donate at site? Are they looking to donate in honor or memory of a loved one or friend? Do you know who their employer is and do they match employee contributions? Are they looking for other ways to engage such as volunteering or attending an event?
- Communicate with your constituents using the methods and frequency they request.
Do you provide your constituents with the opportunity to define their communication preferences? If they are already telling you how they want to be engaged, it means they want to be engaged, take advantage of their request.
Top 5 Reasons why we don’t personalize our email communications
- Your organizational privacy practices prevent the use of the information you have collected.
Let your constituents know why you are requesting information and then use it to engage with them. Provide them with a clear privacy policy and an easy to understand guide identifying how you can use this information to better support their needs.
- You don’t have the ability to integrate the information that you have collected with your email campaigns.
Integrate the things that will allow you to best communicate with your constituents. Utilizing the information that your constituents have delivered to you should be an organizational priority.
- You don’t trust the data you have collected.
Make sure that the information you are collecting has relevance to the constituent. Your constituents are more likely to answer your questions truthfully if they think that the questions have relevance to your organization and that they will enable you to provide better information or services to the organization. Ensure that you have a process for auditing the information collected if it is being added to or combined with data in your database.
- Your database don’t share well
Do your organization’s databases talk to each other? Can you easily mash the information from your web site and your donation site so that you can communicate with your constituents in a way that makes them feel that they are being understood? Make sure that you have a vision of how you want your systems to identify and match constituents.
- Your organization hasn’t developed a plan for engagement.
Start with something simple and easy to accomplish, it is much better than nothing at all. Build a simple internal process map, a visual flow of how communication with your constituents will occur.
Look at other sites, both commercial and nonprofit and see how these organizations are making use of the information they are collecting to engage, communicate and retain their constituents.
To register to get a copy of the Return Path study go to http://www.returnpath.net/landing/nonprofit/