Using social media to achieve new levels of donor engagement
Feb 18th, 2009 by Amy Southerland
Social networking tools allow people who believe in your mission to raise their hands and come into the fold voluntarily. Once they do so, the same tools allow you to start conversations, seed new ideas, and deepen people’s understanding of what you do.
There is inherent value in simply having the conversations social media enables, but if you don’t capture and capitalize on what people tell you, you’re missing out on a big part of what social media can do for you. If you want to continue to engage self-identified supporters over time, you need to listen, ask questions, listen some more - and then use what you learn to keep the conversations going.
There are lots of tools available that will allow you to capture what your supporters tell you - along with equally important information about behaviors - into a database. What you learn will allow you to respond to your constituents in a meaningful, relevant way. With the right data - and proper analysis of that data - you can take your relationships with donors (and potential donors) to new levels. Here are three things effective data collection will allow you to do:
- Customize messages to speak to individual needs and interests. Social media allows you to have authentic, personalized conversations with far more people than was ever possible with traditional marketing. For a good overview of how this works, check out Mike Trap’s presentation on scalable intimacy.
- Lead every donor through complete giving cycles. What you learn through social media should inform a broader 1:1 communications strategy, where every interaction with donors, online and off, is shaped by what you learn. Customization of the giving cycle should extend to marketing materials, events, and one-to-one real-world conversations - all the components that shape when and how you ask people (and thank people) for their support.
- Establish an “engagement index” that is unique to your organization. By tracking patterns over time and identifying a range of donor types, you can determine who is in the fold and who needs further cultivation. This should include predictive modeling based on frequency of giving, amounts given, and the behaviors (yours and theirs) that precede and follow the decision to give.
Nonprofits have always employed personalized interactions as part of the fundraising process, but because of the limitations of time and resources, personalization has necessarily been reserved for “high dollar” donors (e.g., lead donors for a capital campaign).
Social media is changing all that. Now, the information you can collect and aggregate through social media interactions can be used to create personalized pathways to engagement for donors at every level.
