The best person to answer the question, ‘How do I find the right people to target?’, should be you. These questions are answered by looking at who interacts with your organization and why; from there you can build targeted campaigns to make sure you are getting the right information to the right people.

It’s often easier to define segmentation when each individual is also an end user, but what about when your base is made of businesses and organizations? Here are five basic segmentation strategies to help you use your Raiser’s Edge data for more effective campaigns targeted to businesses and organizations – so make sure your are collecting this data!:

  1. Industry: If your donors/customers/end users come from multiple industries a great strategy to make sure communications are as relevant as possible is to tailor your information so that it’s specific to their industry.
  2. Job Title: Tailor information to specific roles or job fields within your base to make sure that you are providing information that is relevant to the requirements of their role.
  3. Geography: though information may be relevant across all geographies, segmenting by location allows for you to evaluate the effectiveness of response rates in different regions. Often the greatest tool to grow a base is through word-of-mouth, often leading to clusters of contacts within specific regions. By tracking this data you can report on where you are doing well and where you can improve.
  4. Donation/Purchase/Subscription Value and History: How much is that contact worth to your nonprofit, what are they using, what have they purchased, how are they interacting with you? By tracking this information you can make sure offers are tailored to what end users found valuable from your nonprofit. This is especially important if you offer a range of services/products. If they are using one service, would another related service be beneficial?
  5. Last Contact Date: When were you last in touch? No one likes to be forgotten. It’s important to be able to quickly identify whom from your base is being neglected and then get in touch. Everyone is busy and it’s easy to forget to keep in touch, don’t let your base forget you, get in contact and keep them top of mind.

Need help getting your database ready so you can get in touch with your customer base?