Fundraising: 4 Steps to an Automated Donor Journey

With fundraising automation, you can create targeted, personalized, and donor-centered journeys. This not only saves you time as a fundraiser but also positively impacts your relationships with donors through ongoing communication.

1. Identify and Define Donor Segments

Start with the target audience: Who are the donors, what interests them, and why do they donate? Where are the similarities and differences, and what specific groups can be identified from the data?

To ensure your donor journeys are as donor-centered as possible, the right perspective is essential:

It’s not about whom you want to send communication to, but which donors want to receive which communication.

A great deal of empathy (supported and reinforced by understandable data) is needed to create effective, donor-centered journeys.

Donation History

Donors are often segmented solely based on donation history (e.g., new donor, recurring donor, etc.). This is an important criterion that greatly influences the goal of each journey. You might want to encourage new donors to make a second donation, while asking recurring donors for an upgrade.

However, don’t make the mistake of using these categories as the only criteria for segmentation – the differences within these groups in terms of donation motivation, involvement, and interests can be significant. These factors are crucial for determining the content of the journey: A new donor who donated for marine conservation is likely less interested in your traffic campaign than in your North Sea project.

Demographic Characteristics

Demographic characteristics (e.g., location, age, gender, etc.) should also not be the primary factor in donor segmentation but rather used as additional refinement of the groups. Our society is diverse and heterogeneous, and demographic characteristics are becoming less significant. Not every woman prefers to donate to children’s causes, and not every 25-year-old is interested in gaming – so beware of stereotypes!

However, it can be beneficial to analyze your own data regarding these characteristics and incorporate these insights into your automated donor journeys (e.g., in relation to topics, content suggestions, storytelling, etc.).

Donation Potential

A key criterion in segmentation is the potential of your contacts. For example, someone who has never donated but always opens every newsletter and clicks on the links is likely more engaged and has more donation potential than someone who donated €100 once in two years and does not interact with your content otherwise.

Some non-profits calculate a “score” for each donor based on a specific formula, indicating their level of involvement. Criteria such as donation frequency, donation amount, newsletter open rate, social media interaction rate, fundraising actions, participation in events, etc., can be used.

This makes it possible to tailor the journeys accordingly: highly involved individuals might need fewer facts and background information about your work than those who are less familiar with your topics.

Interests & Motivation

Equally important as potential is aligning your donor journeys with the interests and donation motivations of your supporters. This ensures that your communication is relevant to them.

For example, people who primarily read your newsletters about new medical findings on a rare disease are different from those who mainly respond to emotional content like a young family’s experience with children’s rehabilitation. They are likely to donate to a research project rather than your direct aid program for affected individuals.

Donation motivation is a bit harder to discern – after all, you can’t ask every donor about their “why.” However, you can get clues by surveying a representative group to identify possible motivations. These could include:

Personal impact
Compensation
Philanthropy
Passion for a topic
Search for meaning
etc.

Key Questions in Donor Segmentation

Which donors want to receive which communication?
Which contacts are highly involved and interested, and which are less so?
Who donates based on what motivation?

Only then do factors like donation history, donation products, preferred touchpoints, and demographic characteristics come into play.

2. Defining a Concrete Goal for Each Target Group

Once you know the different donor groups in your CRM, consider how you can develop them further. What do you want to achieve with these people – and in return – what do these people want from your organization? Always remember: a relationship is always about give and take. Only by meeting the wishes and expectations of your donors will you achieve your goals.

You should set only one goal per target group. For example, a goal might be to upgrade loyal recurring donors or reactivate inactive donors. Maybe you also want to encourage affected individuals to volunteer with your organization.

These goals should contribute to your overall fundraising strategy and not “exist in a vacuum.” For example, if sponsorships play a central role in your strategy, your donor journeys should aim to make your different target groups sponsors in the short or medium term.

3. Creating Donor Journeys for Each Target Group

Every automated donor journey has three key points:

a) Trigger

The trigger is an action you define that donors must perform to start the journey or trigger other actions. This could be the first donation, signing up for the newsletter, or 12 months of inactivity.

b) Condition

You determine the conditions that must be met to proceed with an action. These are usually the criteria of your segments.

c) Action

After the trigger is activated and the conditions are checked, automatic actions are set. You define what should happen next and at what intervals. For example, a first-time donor receives a thank-you email immediately, a welcome email a few days later, and two weeks later an email showcasing the impact of their donation through storytelling.

The text, images, and call-to-actions of your emails should be tailored to the respective target group and their donation motivation.

How many actions are set and the best timing for them can be derived from your previous experiences with donors or tested specifically. You could set up an A/B test to find out which of the two journeys works better.

Reaction or No Reaction?

To make your journeys flexible and automatically respond to possible reactions from your donors, you should also determine what should happen in case of a reaction or if the journey ends without a reaction. The reaction/non-reaction is thus a trigger that can start a new journey.

For example, if an inactive donor donates again during the journey, the reactivation journey should end. Another journey could start – perhaps you want to encourage these donors to consider a sponsorship after a few weeks?

People who do not respond to your emails could be excluded from all journeys for 6 months and then contacted again. Recurring donors who did not agree to a phone upgrade could be automatically excluded from the telefundraising program for 12 months.

You might already realize: to create truly meaningful automated donor journeys, you should have a long-term fundraising strategy and consider all eventualities in the journeys.

4. Writing the Communications

Now that all steps, timelines, actions, triggers, etc., are defined, it’s time to get to work. Write the communications you’ve planned for each target group and each use case. Always keep the goal for each target group in mind and formulate appropriate call-to-actions.

Differentiate the content depending on the target group: Which topics are suitable? What language and wording work best for this group?

Always try to evoke emotions – storytelling works best for this.

Work That Pays Off

Creating automated, donor-centered journeys requires a lot of work initially. However, this time is well invested – once everything is set up and running, you will benefit from time savings, better donor relationships, and higher donation revenues in the long run.

Here is another recommended article on donor segmentation: „Are you doing „segmentation“ or Segmentation?“

Fundraising Automation: 4 Steps to an Automated Donor Journey