Building Stronger Relationships: The Role of Donor Databases

If you’ve worked in the nonprofit sector for some time, you know that cultivating relationships with donors is critical for successful fundraising. Supporters want to feel like they’re valued members of your organization’s community and integral partners in furthering your mission—not like you think of them as walking ATMs. And when donors feel that your organization “sees” them, they’re more likely to give again, get involved with your nonprofit in other ways, and develop a true passion for your cause.

Building a relationship with each individual donor can be a lot of work for your nonprofit’s already busy team. Fortunately, the right software can streamline your processes and make your employees’ lives easier while fostering stronger supporter connections. 

Let’s discuss some ways that one essential solution in your organization’s tech stack—its donor database—can boost its relationship-building efforts.

Centralizing Donor Analytics

Although your nonprofit likely already collects copious amounts of data on its supporters, that information is only useful if you interpret and apply it to your fundraising activities via the process of donor analytics. DonorSearch’s donor analytics guide recommends digging into the following types of data to get to know your supporters better:

• Demographics: Age, gender, location, education, marital and family status, employment, wealth

• Psychographics: Hobbies, interests, values, lifestyles, opinions, pain points, motivations for supporting your mission

• Giving history: Average gift amount, donation frequency and recency, preferred contribution method, lifetime value

• Non-donation engagement: Interactions with marketing materials, event attendance, volunteering, advocacy, in-kind contributions

Within your donor database, you can use this information to segment supporters based on shared characteristics and tailor your outreach to each group accordingly. 

Personalizing Supporter Communications

Segmentation is a stepping stone to personalization, since supporters will respond best to communications that are geared specifically to them. This is true of all types of messages, from donation appeals to event invitations to thank-you notes.

To personalize a message to a specific supporter: look for the following information in your donor database:

• Their preferred name, including its correct spelling

• Their most used communication method (email, phone calls, text messages, etc.)

• Recent gifts and other involvement

Let’s say you work for an animal shelter, and you’re trying to invite a donor named Julia, who prefers to communicate via text, to join your monthly giving program. If you sent her an email that read something like, “Dear Julie, we appreciate your support of our shelter! Would you like to join our recurring giving program at the $20/month level?” you probably wouldn’t get a response due to misspelling her name, writing a generic ask, and using a channel that isn’t her favorite.

However, suppose you send the same donor a text that reads, “Hi, Julia! Thank you for donating $200 last GivingTuesday—the shelter pets appreciate it! If you give $20/month this year, you can make a difference all year long. Are you interested?” She’d be more likely to say yes to this request that aligns with all of her personal information, history, and preferences.

Identifying Major Giving Candidates

The more a donor could potentially give to your nonprofit, the more important it is to cultivate a relationship with them before you solicit a donation. And it’s very possible that there are strong major giving candidates within your organization’s existing donor pool! You just need to find them by integrating your donor database with a prospect research platform that can supplement your existing donor data with insights into supporters’:

• Capacity to make a large gift, which comes from wealth data like real estate ownership, stock holdings, and political giving history.

• Philanthropic tendencies by combining your giving history details with similar data points from other nonprofits.

• Affinity for your organization and willingness to support your greatest areas of need via additional information on interests, values, mission connections, and non-donation engagement at other organizations.

By starting with your current supporters when looking for potential major donors, you can save time and resources on cultivation since you’ve already established relationships with those individuals.

The ideas in this guide are just a few of the many ways your nonprofit’s donor database can support its relationship-building efforts. If you’re in the market for a new CRM system, make sure it includes robust analytics tools and integrates with other essential platforms in your tech stack so your team can spend less time managing data and focus on securing loyal support for your mission.