Have you ever received a completely irrelevant email from a nonprofit? Perhaps it references the wrong location or an event where you don’t live, asks you to donate to a program you have no interest in, or spells your name wrong (yikes). This one-size-fits-all approach leads to lower engagement rates, missed opportunities for meaningful connections, and ultimately, higher donor churn.
When supporters receive communications that don’t speak to their interests, giving history, or preferred engagement style, they’re more likely to disengage entirely. Not all donors are the same. Segmenting them into groups according to similarities helps you keep your donor base engaged, motivated, and ready to support your cause.
What Is Donor Segmentation?
Donor segmentation is a strategy that divides your supporter base into distinct groups based on common similarities or characteristics, such as location, program interest, or level of giving.
By grouping donors of similar qualities, you’re able to develop marketing and fundraising initiatives that more deeply resonate with the individual donor. This results in higher engagement, happier donors, and—you guessed it—more donations to your cause.
Proven Benefits of Donor Segmentation
Stronger engagement rates: When content is targeted to your interests or demographics, you’re much more likely to open and engage with the content. In fact, 72% of consumers only engage with messages that are tailored to their interests.
Increased retention rates: When donors are engaged with your nonprofit, they’re more likely to donate. Personalizing communications through donor segmentation is a cost-effective way of retaining donors. Retention of newly acquired donors averages only 7.1%, so segmentation offers an opportunity for nonprofits to nurture and engage their one-time donor base.
Higher fundraising effectiveness: Segmenting allows your nonprofit to make asks that are in line with a donor’s giving capacity and past behavior. It also enables major gift officers to better identify major donor prospects and nurture those relationships for larger contributions. According to research from McKinsey & Company, fast-growing companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue.
Efficient use of resources: Instead of sending generic messages to everyone, which can be wasteful (many email service providers charge per email sent), segmentation allows you to focus your time, effort, and budget on the most relevant donor groups for specific campaigns. This can save time and reduce costs, especially for expensive tactics like direct mail.
Better understanding of your donor base: Analyzing donor segments provides valuable insights into donor behaviors, motivations, and preferences. This understanding helps you track patterns, develop personas, and refine your overall fundraising strategy.
Enhanced trust and loyalty: When donors receive communication specific to their interests and involvement, it builds trust and credibility. This demonstrates that your organization “gets” them and values their unique connection to the mission.
Tried and True Donor Segment Types
The following segments allow you to create nuanced communications that engage your donor base. Try combining multiple segments for an even more targeted approach.
Giving Level
Consider the donors in your database—first-time donors, loyal, multiyear supporters, monthly recurring donors, major donors, etc. It would be odd to send a multiyear supporter a welcome email, just as it would be odd to send a major donor an appeal for a $50 donation.
Segmenting by giving level allows you to tailor your communications to a specific donor level, sending welcome emails and newsletters to first-time donors, program updates to recurring donors, and highly individualized appeals to major gift donors.
Demographics
Demographics such as location, age, gender, occupation, and income can be helpful in grouping donors. Here are a few examples of these qualities in action:
- Income: Understanding a donor’s income and their potential capacity to give can help you create targeted appeals. You could create an email nurture for donors who have the potential to be major donors.
- Location: Knowing a donor’s location can help you with event planning to determine where an event should be located and who to invite. It can also help you set up meet and greets.
- Occupation: Collecting data on a donor’s occupation and place of work can help you identify matching gift opportunities and relevant volunteer opportunities.
Interests
For organizations with multiple programs or causes, segmenting donors by their specific interests and passions can improve engagement. A health-focused nonprofit might segment supporters interested in research, patient care, or prevention programs, while an educational organization could segment by grade levels, subjects, or program types. Segmenting by interest helps you share information that your donors truly care about.
Engagement
Some donors prefer to stay informed from a distance with simple impact updates and straightforward giving opportunities, while others want hands-on involvement through volunteering, advocacy, or event attendance. Segmenting by engagement level helps you share opportunities for involvement beyond financial support.
As part of engagement, you can also collect donor communication preferences to understand from them how they most want to hear from you or be involved with your organization. While many people assume that younger generations prefer digital communication types such as text or email, and older generations prefer more traditional communications such as phone calls or direct mail, this may not actually be the case. Allowing your donors to choose their communication preferences can help you align with your donors’ expectations.
| Segment Type | Engagement Activity |
| First-Time Donors | Welcome email series, impact storytelling, and gentle follow-up appeals |
| Major Donors | Personal outreach, exclusive briefings, recognition events, and customized proposals |
| Monthly Donors | Automated thank you messages, program updates, and special member benefits |
| Lapsed Donors | Reactivation campaigns, “we miss you” messages, and re-engagement events |
| Volunteers | Behind-the-scenes updates, volunteer appreciation, and hands-on opportunities |
| Occupation | Matching gift appeals, volunteer opportunities that match skillsets |
| Location | Event invites, volunteer opportunities, and meet and greets |
| Event Attendees | Event invitations and thank-yous, social opportunities, and community-building activities |
→ Watch our webinar for more donor segmentation best practices.
How to Use Segmented Donor Groups: 7 Engaging Ideas
Segments allow you to craft a variety of personalized communications and experiences. Use the following ideas and examples for inspiration to craft your own segmented marketing and fundraising campaigns.
- Personalized email campaigns: Create email series tailored to each segment’s interests and giving history. Email is one of the best one-to-one communication tools for using donor segments. From informational newsletters to giving season appeals, you can tailor each email campaign to the donor segment.
- Customized direct mail appeals: Design mail pieces with messaging, imagery, and ask amounts appropriate for each segment.
- The University of Georgia (UGA) conducts two major leadership mailings each year for its Presidents Club, one in the fall and one in the spring. These mailings aim to renew existing leadership donors, upgrade current donors to higher giving levels, and attract new leadership donors. Using Blackbaud’s advanced segmentation and predictive analytics, UGA increased the number of Presidents Club donors via direct mail by 910% year-over-year.
- Targeted social media content: Develop social media strategies that speak to different donor segments through platform choice and content type. Younger donor segments might receive Instagram stories and TikTok content, while older segments might engage better with Facebook posts and LinkedIn articles.
- Exclusive stewardship events: Host different event types for various donor segments. Major donors might receive intimate dinner invitations with organizational leaders, while volunteer segments could enjoy hands-on service projects combined with social time.
- Habitat for Humanity Fort Collins, for example, created a segment for emerging prospects and sent them specialized postcards inviting them to visit their largest development. The organization wanted the donors to see the impact of their support firsthand, and one donor gave a $10,000 gift after the tour, 10 times that of their previous total giving.
- Program-specific impact reports: If you have multiple programs, share impact information specific to the program that the donor supports. If you want to take it a step further, you can test different messaging approaches, such as research-focused analyses of program outcomes and statistics versus story-driven testimonials from beneficiaries.
- Tailored volunteer opportunities: Match volunteer opportunities to donor segments based on their skills, interests, and availability. Professional segments might prefer board service or pro bono consulting, while family-oriented segments might enjoy group volunteer activities.
- Major gift nurturing: Because major donors require much more donor relationship management than other donor types, having a major gift segment and strategy can be incredibly helpful in developing those relationships.
- The University of Kansas Health System identifies high-potential prospects for further screening and eligibility for their Grateful Patient program. By looking at patient prospect profiles and segmenting those profiles for giving potential and propensity, the health system created a short list of grateful patient prospects. They then automatically assigned the prospects to major gift officers who reach out within two weeks of a patient’s successful discharge. One of these patients committed to $1.1 million in planned giving.
The Data You Need to Create Donor Segments
Before you get into the specific data points you need for donor segmentation, review the data within your CRM. Has it been kept up to date, or is it a jumble of inaccurate information? If it’s the latter, step one will be to clean your CRM data. The quality of your data directly impacts your donor segmentation efforts. Start by removing duplicate fields and outdated information.
Once clean, review your CRM data to look for common patterns and opportunities. Map these patterns to your organization’s goals. For example, if one of your organization’s goals is to reduce donor churn, identify segments such as one-time donors, multi-time donors who have not signed up for a donation, and recurring donors whose credit cards may expire soon.
To help guide you, here are a number of common data points that organizations collect. You don’t have to collect all of these. Start small and add on as you get comfortable crafting advanced donor segments.
- Giving history: You could track total lifetime giving, average gift size, giving frequency, most recent gift date, and preferred giving methods to understand donor behavior patterns and capacity.
- Demographic information: You could collect age, location, profession, income indicators, and family status to better understand donor characteristics and propensity to give.
- Communication preferences: Record preferred contact methods (email, mail, phone), communication frequency preferences, and opt-in status for different types of messages.
- Engagement activity: Monitor website visits, email opens and clicks, event attendance, volunteer hours, and social media interactions to gauge interest levels and preferred engagement types.
- Interest and motivation: Gather data on which programs, causes, or initiatives donors care about most, often through surveys, giving designations, or engagement with specific content types.
- Acquisition source: Track how donors were originally acquired (events, online, referrals, direct mail). This helps you understand the effectiveness of your campaigns and where you should focus your acquisition resources.
Tips and Tools for Implementing Donor Segmentation
Consider the following tips and tools when building out your donor segments.
- Use a robust CRM: Without a CRM to capture data, set up workflows, and connect your platforms, donor segmentation would be nearly impossible. Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge NXT® helps you develop personalized engagement campaigns with features like prospect insights, segmentation workflows, and custom analytics that support every step of the donor lifecycle.
- Keep your data clean: A CRM is only as good as the data within it. Regularly audit your CRM to check for any inaccuracies. Look for CRMs that have automatic data health tools to help you keep donor information current and correct.
- Develop donor profiles: Donor profiles can help you identify new donors or classify current donors in your database. By developing donor profiles, you can more easily determine your top segments to nurture.
- Use wealth screening and prospect research tools: Get insights into donor wealth and their propensity to give to help you better segment donors and tailor your messaging to each group based on their donor profile.
- Leverage AI: With AI in your toolbelt, you can streamline tasks, analyze large swaths of data, and get predictive insights. Blackbaud’s Prospect Insights Pro offers powerful analytics and artificial intelligence to deliver insights and recommendations, including suggested ask amounts for fundraisers.
Donor Segmentation for More Effective Stewardship
When nonprofits move beyond generic approaches and embrace personalized, data-driven engagement strategies, they can build experiences that resonate with donors’ values and interests. This, in turn, gives your organization more sustainable fundraising success as donors feel motivated and engaged with your nonprofit.
Want to explore advanced donor segmentation techniques and ways to foster even stronger donor relationships? Download Blackbaud’s free donor segmentation whitepaper.
The post Donor Segmentation: The Key to More Engaged Donors first appeared on The ENGAGE Blog by Blackbaud.
