3 Ways to Tailor Donor Communications With Predictive Artificial Intelligence
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Nonprofits are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance a wide range of tasks, from automating administrative activities to creating content. However, one of the most effective ways to leverage AI is as a predictive analytics tool. By using predictive analysis to tailor your donor communications, you can increase response rates and engagement, ultimately leading to greater support for your cause.
Let’s explore three specific predictive analysis strategies your nonprofit can use to refine its donor communications, along with use cases and examples for each approach.
1. Natural Language Processing for Metadata Management
Natural language processing for metadata management is a type of predictive analytics that leverages language processing technology to evaluate human-produced text. These solutions understand the deeper meaning of written language, improving their ability to assess and categorize donor communications.
Nonprofits can use it to evaluate text from donor communications, emails, social media posts and other unstructured data sources to identify relevant metadata, including donor preferences, feelings and engagement levels.
Related story: How Important Is Artificial Intelligence If You’re Not Even Doing the Basics?
Here are a few ways to use this strategy:
Automatically adapt the focus of donor communications, such as emails or letters, based on donors’ preferences. Let’s say a specific donor has expressed interest in your volunteer program by actively opening and responding to your volunteer-related emails. As a result, you’ll know to prioritize volunteer updates in your communications with this individual.
Adjust your tone based on donors’ preferences. For example, you may find that messages with a more upbeat tone receive greater engagement than somber communications. You can then use natural language processing to understand the phrases and keywords with which donors resonate and use the results to inform your messaging.
Analyze the sentiment of donors’ responses and feedback. AI solutions can evaluate communications from donors, such as survey responses or email messages they’ve sent to your organization. Use natural language processing tools to scan these inputs to understand their meaning and provide a cohesive summary of donors’ feelings on certain initiatives. For example, you can evaluate post-event feedback surveys to understand whether donors were satisfied with the experience and where there is room for improvement.
2. Donor Segmentation
Donor segmentation is the process of grouping supporters based on shared characteristics, preferences or interests. It’s a great way to assess your data from audience touchpoints and interactions, including donation history, event attendance, volunteer participation and communications, to pinpoint patterns and develop donor groupings.
Here are a few ways to use this strategy:
Create robust donor personas. Donor personas (or profiles) help your team understand critical audiences, such as major donors, mid-level donors and corporate sponsors. Use your AI solutions to build out each persona with specific information about that audience’s giving habits, communication preferences, and strategies your nonprofit can use to connect with individuals in that group.
Save time by creating tailored messages for specific donor groups. Rather than creating individualized messages for every person in your donor base, you can create tailored messages for overarching personas. For example, you might send a quarterly impact report specifically to donors in your monthly giving program.
Identify donor upgrade opportunities. Segmentation makes it easier to identify supporters who may be ready to expand their involvement. An example of this could be a segment of mid-level donors who have the potential to make a major gift. You can use prospect research and donor engagement data to identify mid-level supporters who are willing and able to expand their giving.
3. Campaign Management
AI tools can help you run more successful outreach campaigns by anticipating donors’ responses to different messages. Use it to predict which donors are most likely to respond to certain types of outreach by evaluating their past engagement and response rates.
Here are a few ways to use this strategy:
Send donors messages via their preferred communication platform to increase engagement and response rates. For example, don’t bother sending a donor mailed letters if they prefer email.
Identify the right time to send donation solicitations. AI might help you discover the best day of the week or month of the year when donors are most receptive to fundraising requests.
Understand to which campaign types your audience is most drawn. You might find that you see higher response rates with supporter-led grassroots campaigns on social media rather than higher-level email campaigns from your nonprofit. In that case, you can plan more supporter-led campaigns rather than top-down outreach initiatives.
If your organization is new to predictive analytics, a nonprofit fundraising consultant can help develop customized tools that allow you to access the insights you need to enhance your communications approach.
Either way, don’t let your nonprofit delay in taking full advantage of the benefits that predictive AI offers your donor communication strategy.
The preceding post was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.
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As associate managing vice president of annual giving and digital marketing, James Barnard is an integral part of the team at the global fundraising consultancy at BWF. James uses his 15-plus years of experience to help organizations build community and maximize their fundraising potential by optimizing their digital strategy and philanthropic marketing. He has been active with CASE for years, serving as a conference speaker and CASE District III board member.