When creating a campaign, it’s essential to accurately identify your supporters so that your messaging reaches the right audience. Impersonal, vague communications can leave key stakeholders feeling disconnected from your core mission. In contrast, communications that reflect potential supporters’ priorities and values incentivize them to continue supporting your cause and may even inspire them to become advocates.
Creating distinct audience profiles allows your organization to tailor communications to specific interests, delivering highly relevant messaging that resonates with individuals most likely to support your cause. This guide outlines four concrete steps your team can take to identify your ideal audience, sharpen your outreach, and turn more supporters into active participants.
1. Identify Who Is Currently Engaging
The first step to identifying your nonprofit’s target audience is to assess who is currently engaging with your campaigns, and why. Then, you can use that information to ensure future campaigns target and broaden your base of support.
To learn about your current supporters, you can:
- Assess past engagement data: Engagement comes in many forms, from donations to interacting with your website. Monitor your digital presence, in-person events, and fundraising campaigns to gather information on who is seeing and interacting with your organization.
- Analyze demographic data: Compile information regarding the geo location, age, and interests of individuals who typically engage with your content to understand the broader context of your supporters' lives.
- Evaluate volunteer involvement: Identify individuals who often volunteer and what causes they support, as they can benefit from different engagement strategies than strict donors. Your volunteers show you what motivates people who support your cause with their time rather than their wallet.
- Capture field interactions: Door-to-door conversations, phone calls, petition signatures, and event check-ins are rich engagement signals that may never make it into your database with segmented tools. Log them alongside your online actions to see the full picture of who is showing up for your cause.
- Monitor donation histories: Financial support is a clear indicator of interest in your organization. Monitor who donates, their average amount, how often they donate, and the causes they give to in order to determine the average lifetime value of your donors.
Understanding who already champions your cause and why allows you to create highly accurate profiles of your ideal prospective supporters. Armed with these data-backed personas, your development team can stop broadcasting appeals to the general public and instead strategically target the specific digital spaces, professional networks, and communities where people who share these traits and values already congregate.
2. Create Segments for Your Nonprofit Audience
Once you’ve identified your supporters, you can group them into specific segments. This makes it easier to create personal, tailored messages that increase the likelihood that recipients will take action on behalf of your mission.
Generally, nonprofits create audience segments based on:
- Campaigns and initiative interest: Create different segments for recurring donors, participants in capital or fundraising campaigns, and annual or major donors. According to Meyer Partners’ guide to donor analytics, effectively segmenting your donor base according to “giving, engagement, and predictive data… ensures appeals have a high conversion potential” and can drive up to a 760% increase in revenue.
- Past volunteering: Volunteers are often among your most engaged supporters, with a high potential to contribute to your cause through their time and energy, as well as future donations. Your volunteer segments should receive communications about upcoming ways to serve your community, as well as volunteer grant opportunities and other ways to increase their impact.
- Event and program attendance: Sort attendees by the events they attend, event types (such as virtual or in-person, and panel-based lecture versus community dinner), and registrations. This lets you send personalized event invitations, as well as invitations to volunteer or donate to causes related to events that supporters have previously attended, to turn your community members into advocates for your cause.
- Age groups and other demographic information: Age, location, employment status and history, and financial capacity can all affect how supporters interact with your organization. For example, a recurring donor who doesn’t live locally may only engage through giving, while a new local supporter may be interested in attending volunteer events to learn more about your cause before contributing. Use demographic segments to create campaigns that resonate with specific groups.
Log each of these segments in your donor database to help your teams precisely identify which audience to target for future messaging. For example, if you are planning an upcoming food drive, you could send an informational newsletter to your supporter segments who contributed to past food drive initiatives, live in your local area, and have previously volunteered at food drives, inviting them to participate. While you should still advertise to your larger support base, targeting a specific audience segment with tailored communications increases your likelihood of garnering support.
3. Track Your Nonprofit’s Engagement Trends
Simply sending communications isn’t enough to guarantee supporter engagement. Different audiences engage more frequently on certain communication channels, at various times of day, and with different calls to action. Use engagement trends and data to coordinate your message timing and formats to reach supporters on the platforms they’re most active.
To track your engagement, your nonprofit should:
- Monitor open rates for digital platforms: Check your email and SMS tools to determine which days and times of day drive the most engagement. Additionally, monitor which communication types and subject lines receive the most engagement.
- Tailor your email and SMS messages based on engagement: According to Mogli’s guide to SMS vs. email marketing, text messages have a 98% open rate, compared to email’s 21%. Compare engagement across your email and SMS messaging platforms to determine which audience demographics are more likely to respond through each channel.
- Assess social media engagement data: Who is liking, sharing, and following your online posts? This data can help your team determine if your posts are reaching audiences likely to engage with your cause.
- Evaluate event attendance patterns: Observe historical RSVP data to see which activities draw the largest crowds. Use this data to shape your future event calendar to host events people are excited to attend and maximize engagement.
Monitoring and gaining insight from hundreds or even thousands of touchpoints can quickly overwhelm small nonprofit teams, which is where automated systems can step in. In particular, AI tools can apply predictive analytics to forecast future behaviors based on past engagement patterns. Consider using AI built into your supporter data to track engagement across channels and predict which ones will reach each audience. For example, you could send working professionals an SMS message at around 6 PM, when they’re off work and most likely to check their phones.
4. Continuously Refine Your Audience
Just as your nonprofit shifts and changes, so too does its audience. As you build your stewardship matrix, continue to prioritize creating highly personalized outreach campaigns that appeal to your supporters interests. Review your supporter demographics and segments regularly to assess any changes and determine how to alter your strategy accordingly. To do that, you might:
- Conduct annual supporter surveys: Gather direct feedback on what your community wants to see from your future initiatives and communications. Proactive feedback-gathering lets you catch changes in supporter preferences and perspectives more consistently.
- Review your demographic information: Conduct a quarterly review of your social media demographics, email open rates, and supporter profiles to assess if anything has changed. Regularly analyzing your supporter makeup helps your team prepare initiatives that reflect their interests without getting derailed by sudden shifts.
- Compare campaign projections against actual results: Measure whether your segmented appeals deliver the expected financial ROI, and which messaging delivers the best results. Use A/B testing to determine which subject lines, formats, calls to action, and platforms resonate best with your audiences, and use your findings to help your targeting grow sharper with every campaign.
As you refine your audience, establish a quarterly schedule to clean your database. Remove inactive contacts, update mailing addresses and contact information, and merge duplicate profiles across your system to make sure you’re pulling accurate data into your supporter segments. A clear view of your current supporters will help your team identify trends and common interests among your database.
An organizing platform like Qomon brings your donor, volunteer, event, and field data into one place, so your segments stay accurate and every campaign reaches the people most ready to act.
With a strong understanding of its target audiences, your nonprofit can develop effective communication strategies that keep your supporters connected and engaged with your mission, no matter how their preferences shift.