Supporter Engagement: Audience (strategic)

A mapping project helps fundraising organisations understand their audience better through a number of different outcomes. In getting a more thorough understanding of the distribution of supporters it can help to identify areas to target in order to contact potential new donors.

The information can be used along with behavioural activity and demographic profiling to tailor messaging and fundraising strategies to specific segments. As well as personalising communications and products to improve the overall response rates.

By gaining these insights, fundraising organisations can enhance their fundraising strategies, build stronger relationships with supporters, and achieve their goals more effectively.

Understanding the size and movement in your database can be a great starting point to thinking about your different audiences. A simple break down of your file by active status can reveal large amounts about your programme. We also highly recommend reviewing the trends in your file size by looking at new donors and lapsed donors, at both an overall and a product level, to understand how it is changing.

By gaining these insights, you can optimise your program, refine your targeting, and effectively adapt your strategies to achieve better results.

Looking at the level of crossover on your file can also be revealing and a first step towards segmentation and engagement scoring. How many supporters engage in more than one way and what are the most common combinations? In gaining a better understanding of this, the learnings can be applied to scale up the crossover opportunities and work towards deepening the engagement of supporters through multiple products and channels.

The findings from the crossover analysis provide actionable insights that can inform your approach to targeting and messaging. By tailoring your communication efforts based on the identified combinations of supporter engagement, you can effectively optimise your outreach and enhance the overall impact of your campaigns.

A good segmentation will help you understand more about the behaviour, demographics, attitudes or motivations of your supporters and optimise your stewardship of different audiences. What type of segmentation will depend on your overall aims and in our experience no single segmentation will answer all your questions, but we can help you develop segmentations for appropriate uses or source the data needed to provide the extra layers that you need. For example, a behavioural segmentation will help you understand who best to target with specific offers, or where your opportunities for cross sell are, whilst a motivational segmentation will tell you more about why people support your charity and help you develop targeted messaging for different groups.

Break down your supporters into robust and actionable segments to optimise engagement. Through a deeper understanding of different groups you can plan strategies and activities to provide a more personalised experience.

At Sequoia we believe that supporter engagement is key in the fundraising strategy and we have developed our proprietary Engagement Score based on three key dimensions: Depth (how frequently a supporter engages – through financial donations or other actions); Duration (how long they have been supporting) and Diversity (how many different touchpoints they have with the charity).

Combining this with Lifetime Value analysis and assessing engagement scores across your database, and breaking them down across different segments of supporters (by product, recruitment channel or demographics), will enable you to better understand who your most engaged supporters are.

Score and rank the engagement of different supporter groups to see where your programme is being most successful and identify any potential for improvement.

Understanding how the lifetime value of supporters differs depending on how they are recruited can help you make informed decisions on where to make future investments.  Lifetime value not only looks at a supporter’s initial gift to your charity but also what they go on to do in subsequent years and will also include any income as a result of cross-sell activities, upgrades, reactivations etc.

By conducting this lifetime value analysis, you will be able to identify the most effective recruitment channels and strategies that yield supporters with higher long-term value. Armed with this knowledge, you can allocate your resources strategically, focusing on the channels and activities that have proven to generate supporters who contribute significantly to your organisation’s mission over the long run.