Audience Segmentation: how personalised can your fundraising get?
Howard Lake | 1 November 2012 | Blogs
Are you segmenting your audience types thoroughly in order to communicate with them in a truly personalised way?
In a seminar produced by Chameleon last week, a straw poll showed that most fundraisers in the room believed they had between one and 10 separate audience groups. We reviewed the audience research we’d done for 10 charities last year and the average number of audience segments was 39.4.
Why the huge discrepancy? We were given an example to show how far it’s possible to drill down to create multiple segments, starting with the catch-all title, ‘fundraiser’:
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By segmenting your audience to this level you can now start to personalise the communication to them. For example, the ‘first time challenge event fundraiser’ has two categories:
• ‘Successful’ – so this person or group has hit their fundraising target three months before their trek in Peru. To this person you want to say thank you and congratulations on hitting your target already, but how about stretching yourself and hitting 125%?
• ‘Unsuccessful’ – this person is new to this, and is struggling to hit his or her fundraising target, so you want to send a different message, of encouragement to continue, with fundraising tips and links.
Similarly, the ‘regular challenge event fundraiser’ who signs up every year without fail needs different communication, to acknowledge her regular support and to help her fundraise when it may be more of a challenge to repeatedly ask for money from friends each year.
What this example shows us is that it’s important to break down audience groups in order to communicate with them in a personalised way and to maximise income generation. Sound daunting? The great thing is, the technology is available to manage and optimise this level of personalised communication. And that should probably be the subject for my next blog – how to get all your systems to talk to each other and provide an integrated, personal supporter journey. Off I go to start writing! And if you want to see the context for my musings today, the slides from the event I mentioned are available to view on Slideshare, take a look – Fund Raisin Digital Pops:
Vicky Reeves, Founder & MD – Chameleon – The Digital Experts for the Charity Sector
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.