Segmentation

When it comes to fundraising, having the right information about your donors is critical. How much time do you spend prospecting for donors? Do you know how many of those you reach out to have the potential to make a large gift? Sending the wrong type of donor the wrong message at the wrong time is bad for your whole list. Enter smart segmentation, and enter Weinstein Hospice in Atlanta.

Neglecting your mid-range donors can have quick and devastating effects across all areas of your fundraising.

Too often, fundraising focuses on money. Fundraisers and their organizations search (too often desperately) for money … and the bigger the bucks, the better. “Fundraisers and their organizations keep searching for the top of the pyramid,” Tom said. “They don’t spend enough time moving the base up.”

Ah, yes, the pyramid and its top: the pinnacle of the pyramid, where so few donors reside. And fundraisers focus on the top. They and their organizations keep looking up. Too few fundraisers pay too little attention to too few people.

In the May 2010 issue, I wrote this column, "Listen and Learn," asking readers to really consider the language and focal points of their communications with different groups of donors.

What are you doing to message to different donor groups (perhaps we should first ask what you are doing to identify different donor groups!) in a more donor-centric way?

In June 2011, a handful of writers took on the task of breaking down traits and tendencies associated with a variety of donor segments — mature, African-American and faith-based — in our story, "Segment Snapshots."

If your organization’s retention efforts aren’t fine-tuned, this is the perfect webinar to help you focus.

Dane Grams spends a minute with Cristi Hegranes, founder and executive director, The Global Press Institute, to discuss her organization and its fundraising.

Women of the baby boomer and older generations give more to charity than their male counterparts and are more likely to give, when education, income and other factors affecting giving are equal, a new study from the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University finds.

At all income levels, and regardless of the share of their permanent income that they give, boomer and older women give 89 percent more to charity than their male counterparts.

The Walmart Foundation alongside six women’s foundations — The Washington Area Women’s Foundation, The New York Women’s Foundation, Women’s Fund of Mississippi, Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis and Women’s Funding Network — announces the launch of the Partnership for Women’s Prosperity. The new national partnership intends to help economically vulnerable women gain financial and economic security through education, job training and employment opportunities.