fundraising

4 Key Steps to Hyper-Personalize Your Donor Engagement

Brian GaworVice President of ResearchNovember 20, 2019

You’ve heard us say before that personalizing the donor experience is the #1 key to success with 21st century donor engagement. When I talk with people about making the transition from “send everything to everyone” to a truly donor-driven communication plan, I often get the response that it seems impossible, or “we’re too small to do that.” But new technology at a radically lower price point is now available to gets over these hurdles so you can hyper-personalize donor engagement quickly and precisely. Here are four steps to get you started.

  1. All your content are belong to us.”* Your campus and associated organizations are already producing a ton of content, from web stories, magazine articles, videos, even social media content. You’ll need to find where all of it lives and get each source catalogued. RSS feeds make this easier, and working with your web team to get a handle on everything that’s being produced and where it lives is crucial.

    *(For those of you who don’t know the meme that inspired this, here’s a little internet history lesson.)
  2. Get your tag on. Each piece of content, from all areas of your campus, needs to be categorized. This includes what it talks about, such as “cancer research” or “social justice.” So an article about internships dealing with corporate responsibility for business students at a pharma company might be tagged with all three of these, and also with “internships.” This multi-categorization of content will be crucial when it’s time to vary content by the interests of the donors you’ve been listening to.
  3. Start listening. Implement one of the powerful, AI-powered automation platforms now as your primary way to engage donors, and start sending communications through it. In days, you’ll start identifying your supporters and tracking what they do to get a better idea of what they care about—what they are clicking on and reading right now—rather than what you’ve coded them in your system by major, previous donations, or what you think they care about.
  4. Let the robots help you scale. You now have an idea of what your donors care about, and you have content ready to match that interest. It’s time to start creating your first personalized communications. This can be as simple as designing a newsletter that drives to your core messages, and also includes several variable blocks of stories and content tailored to what each donor wants. I’ve seen these communications created in about five minutes. My mind was blown.

To hyper-personalize donor engagement at scale, you need automation

RNL QuadWrangle Alumni Engagement

Don’t worry if assembling all your content, tagging everything or listening to donors seems like an impossible thing to start. The best solutions, relying on powerful AI, begin to do these things automatically once you get them started and then pointed in the right place to collect and curate relevant content by donor interests that will fuel your personalized communications. No, the robots are not going to take over our fundraising or communications positions—but they are going to allow for powerful personalization at scale, making it easier for you to focus on creating the best content and fine tuning the messages. The steps above can be completed by many, “average” organizations within 30 days with the right technology and a little help.

We’ve finally reached a point where this powerful personalization technology—linking the tagged content to the interests of the donor that you’re watching over time — is usable by any organization. What used to be reserved for big spenders like Amazon or the big media conglomerates is now in the hands of even “average” donor engagement teams. The user-friendly marketing and content automation solutions that are now available do the heavy lifting of personalization, constantly analyzing and updating data to maximize engagement and response. This lets you spend more time listening to donors and creating content to keep them engaged.

Start engaging more donors through hyper-personalization now

Our AI-powered platform RNL Quadwrangle accomplishes this by making donor engagement easier, faster, and smarter, using the the content resources you already have to get hyper-personalized campaigns created and launched in minutes — yes, minutes.

It’s time to join the big companies and big charities with the power of user-friendly and accessible AI and marketing automation technology. In the 21st century, being donor-centric means listening. And when you do, you’ll see better results immediately. Schedule a demo of RNL QuadWrangle now and see how you can elevate donor engagement and your fundraising results.

Hyper-personalize donor engagement with RNL QuadWrangle

About the Author

Brian Gawor

Brian Gawor’s focus is research and strategy to help propel both alumni engagement and fundraising results of RNL clients. Brian has 25 years of higher education experience in student affairs, enrollment management, alumni engagement and...

Read more about Brian's experience and expertise

Reach Brian by e-mail at Brian.Gawor@RuffaloNL.com.


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