We’re going to talk about something that no one likes to talk about.
And, if we’re being honest, no one likes to talk about it because no CRM vendor can offer it.
Except CharityEngine.
We’re talking about granular donor attribution, which means that you, as a nonprofit, know the very specific (and often unique) donor journey of every single donor.
If you’re not a CharityEngine client, should you read this article? Sure, because at the end of it, you’ll understand what donor attribution is, why it should matter to your nonprofit, and what you can do with it. You’ll be able to ask your vendor informed questions and maybe even get them to add these features to your system.
Donor attribution is a game-changer. Let’s see why.
It means that you assign credit to different channels a donor touches. Let’s say you’re running a year-end campaign. Your outreach includes social media, direct mail, and emails. All those channels drive donors to your website’s donation page. If you have a wildly successful campaign, you will want to pull a report that tells you which channel was the most effective at getting people to donate.
In analyzing that report, you learn that social media didn’t bring in any donations, email brought in some, but direct mail pieces got the highest and largest response. You’ve learned that direct mail has a significant impact on giving, and you now have the data to support a larger direct mail effort.
Without donor attribution, you’d be thrilled you ran a successful campaign, but you wouldn’t know why it was successful. You wouldn’t be able to zero in on exactly what was working, so you could do more of it and have an even more successful campaign.
When you can track the effectiveness of your channels, you can make strategic decisions about where to focus your fundraising efforts.
Making data-driven decisions is going to increase your fundraising. Full stop. When you can see which efforts are the most successful, that’s where you double down. And that’s where your numbers go up.
But there are other benefits to donor attribution:
We’ve been talking about digital marketing for nonprofits, and donor attribution fits in with this approach.
Savvy nonprofits are adopting these marketing strategies and applying them to fundraise successfully. But to leverage the powerful insights a marketing strategy can give a nonprofit, you must have the technology that can provide the data you need.
So let’s say you’re all in on the value of donor attribution. What’s next?
I’m not here to pitch one technology over another. I will say that your tech stack matters. And if you’re not tracking, scoring, attributing your donors using technology, your nonprofit isn’t as successful as it can be.
And then we can take it a step further and say that if you’re using many different channels to reach out to and engage donors and prospective donors, you’re halfway there. If you’re then crediting the right channels, you’re ahead of the fundraising game.
If you embrace these (more traditionally) marketing strategies, you need a tech stack that has a few features:
If you think about the donor journey, you have likely seen its stages.
In other words, if your CRM offers granular donor attribution data, you know exactly how to get prospects to become donors, donors to become sustainers, and sometimes sustainers to offer major gifts.
You will not waste time and resources on outreach that doesn’t work!
Now you know that a campaign planned without donor attribution data is little more than a guess. And of course you can have a great campaign with guesses, but any effort will be so much more successful with data-driven strategies.
So your next steps? Call your CRM vendor and ask about donor attribution. Ask how granular it is. Ask if there are plans to expand on this technology.
And, if you don’t like the answers, give us a call.