How to Conduct Data-Driven Donor Segmentation (10 Tips)

Donor segmentation strategies help nonprofit organizations target their fundraising efforts, share relevant content, and deepen relationships with the right audiences in the right ways at the right times. But figuring out which data to use to create tailored segments and which donor lists would be most effective isn’t always obvious.

Some donor segments focus on fundraising potential, while others may aim to grow loyal champions of your cause. How you shape these cohorts depends on donor preferences, behaviors, and demographics. When done with intention, donor segmentation can give the type of high-touch personalization expected for major donors to all supporters of your cause.

Below, we walk through the donor segmentation process, including key donor data categories to consider and best practices for putting your donor segmentation goals into action.

Why do nonprofits need donor segmentation?

Donor segmentation can enhance a nonprofit’s fundraising strategy in several ways:

• Greater personalization: Donors prefer personalization. So rather than send a generic message to your entire email list, customize communications to include the most relevant content for each donor group. When you connect with individual donors on a more personal level, your message stands out, and supporters grow a stronger connection with your cause.
• Higher donor retention rates: Donors are more likely to continue to engage with your nonprofit if you provide them with useful content and thoughtful connections. Use donor segmentation to steward donors across your programs, like encouraging them to join your recurring giving program or fundraise for your organization.
• Optimized resource allocation: Donor segmentation can help you use your time and budget more effectively. Personalizing messaging to groups of donors at once saves staff time, while targeted paid advertising increases the likelihood of your message finding the right audience without wasting resources.
• Higher ROI on communications: Donor segmentation can lead to a greater return on investment for nonprofits’ outreach and stewardship efforts. When the right messages meet the right people, this results in new or continued champions for your cause.

Donors seek an authentic, personal connection with your organization. While one-on-one outreach isn’t always scalable, using segmentation, customized templates, and automation software can help you send targeted communications at scale.

How can nonprofits leverage donor segmentation?

Nonprofits can track data to create donor profiles based on shared characteristics, such as past gift amounts, social media use, or program interests. They can then create customized donor engagement experiences for each cohort, such as:

• Targeted email marketing campaigns: Sending relevant emails to donors encourages greater open rates and engagement with your content. Use this opportunity to connect with donors based on their interests and communication preferences.
• Personalized ask amounts: Getting the right ask in front of the right person increases the likelihood of receiving a donation. Donor segmentation can help you deliver more targeted appeals based on supporters’ giving patterns. Classy’s new Intelligent Ask Amounts feature does this work for you. It uses machine learning to present every donor who lands on your donation form with an ask tailored to their unique giving characteristics and history, resulting in nonprofits raising 11% more on average in A/B testing.
• Social media content and ads: Knowing the demographics and interests of donors who are the most active on social media can help your team create and target content and ads that resonate with them on their preferred platforms.
• Curated VIP events: Understanding donors’ relationships with your nonprofit helps identify those ready to increase their support and become recurring, peer-to-peer, or major donors. Create special events to nurture these relationships to their next level of commitment.
• Effective donor stewardship: Retaining donors requires ongoing, personalized touchpoints. Automate this process through regular check-in emails, event invites, and other donor stewardship actions that resonate with specific cohorts.

To effectively conduct donor segmentation, ensure your donor database and fundraising software allow you to collect the necessary information and automate processes. Some key features to consider include:

• Built-in notes
• Appended wealth, location, and demographic data
• Integrated social scraping
• Tracking by donor interests, group affiliations, and communication preferences
• Easy sorting and segmenting based on chosen characteristics

7 donor data categories to analyze for thorough segmentation

There are many ways to segment donors, depending on specific goals and target audiences. For example, you can group donors by geographic location, employer, education, or hobbies. The seven data categories below are a great place to start.

1. Website behavior

Programs like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can help track user behavior on your donation website to see how people interact with and navigate through your content. For example, look for individuals who engage with five or more pages per visit to understand their user journey and replicate effective messaging. Or track which visitors convert quickly from your homepage to determine how they arrive there.

Gain insight through questions like:

• Which website pages are critical to donors?
• Which content has high engagement, and which gets ignored?
• What pages do supporters visit before and after making a donation?
• In what order do visitors view content?
• Have any recent website updates changed donor behavior?

Based on what you learn, develop relevant donor segments, such as:

• Regular site visitors
• Regular blog readers
• Referral vs. organic site traffic
• New email subscribers
• New volunteer sign-ups
• Specific program interests

These segments can allow you to keep regular visitors engaged with new content, invest in the most effective referral traffic to your website, or reduce friction in accessing your donation form.

2. Social media engagement

Tracking donors’ social media behavior helps your nonprofit learn what platforms and types of content donors prefer. Social scraping is a tool that allows you to catalog donors’ public social media behavior and observe their interactions with your content. This shows what resonates most with them, allowing you to increase their engagement level with your cause.

Gain insight through questions like:

• Which platforms are donors most active on?
• Are donor demographics different based on the platform?
• Do any donors have a large following or audience?
• Who else are donors following?
• Which posts are most liked, shared, or commented on?

Based on what you learn, develop relevant donor segments, such as:

• Donors by platform
• Influencers
• Regular sharers of your posts

These segments can help you increase user-generated content, launch effective, targeted social ads, or create more meaningful content for your audience.

3. Content downloads

If you offer supporters downloadable content like white papers, guides, or digital copies of your annual report, it’s critical to track who downloads them. These engaged users are great candidates for further involvement.

Gain insight through questions like:

• Which piece of content gets downloaded the most?
• How can we follow up with each user that downloads a resource?
• Who downloaded which pieces of content?

Based on what you learn, develop relevant donor segments, such as:

• Regular downloaders
• Content-type-specific downloaders
• Topic-specific downloaders

These segments can help you identify highly engaged supporters and initiate more detailed conversations about how they can support your cause.

4. Age group

Nonprofits can leverage generational trends in fundraising to best connect with donors across age groups. This is crucial as different age cohorts may prefer different communication modes, content types, or program areas.

Gain insight through questions like:

• Which age groups do donors fall in?
• What are the timely giving trends for these groups?
• How do different age groups interact with our content types?
• How can we tell the same story to different age groups in a way that resonates?

Based on what you learn, develop relevant donor segments, such as:

• Silent Generation
• Baby Boomers
• Gen X
• Millennials
• Gen Z
• Students
• Retired people
• Employed people

These segments can help you better understand the age ranges in your donor base to create more relevant content, prioritize the right channels, or determine appropriate ask amounts.

5. Communication preferences

Donors differ in their preferred means of communication. For example, someone trying to reduce waste may not appreciate a monthly mailer, whereas a retired donor who doesn’t check their email often may prefer a quarterly print newsletter. Note which communication channels supporters prefer and how frequently they want you to contact them.

Gain insight through questions like:

• What communication options do we currently offer donors?
• How can we tell the same story across different channels in a unique way?
• Which communication channels do donors prefer?
• Are there any current channels we don’t use?

Based on what you learn, develop relevant donor segments, such as:

• Email
• Phone calls
• Direct mail
• Social media
• Text messages

These segments can help you develop personalized communications and ensure donors hear from you as often as they’d like in the forms that matter most to them.

6. Relationship to nonprofit

A nurture path for a first-time donor will look different from a recurring supporter. By segmenting donors, you can provide personalized stewardship that encourages their next step with your organization based on their current relationship. Look at factors like the recency of their last gift, average gift size, or giving patterns to identify the types of donors to engage.

Gain insight through questions like:

• What are the most common donation amounts from supporters?
• How many donors gave last year but haven’t given this year?
• Which donors are most likely to evolve into major donors?
• How can we tell our story to new donors who discover us through peer-to-peer fundraising?

Based on what you learn, develop relevant donor segments, such as:

• New donors
• Long-time donors
• Mid-level donors
• Major donors
• Recurring donors
• Lapsed donors
• Volunteers
• Peer-to-peer givers
• Peer-to-peer fundraisers
• Event attendees

These segments can help you encourage increased giving amounts from past donors, re-engage lapsed donors, or steward volunteers into becoming first-time donors.

7. Program interests

Nonprofits typically support several types of programs. For example, an arts nonprofit might have distinct programs that support working artists, community classes, and local galleries. If nonprofits send the same fundraising appeal to everyone, they have to choose between being less specific and thus less personal or leaving out the major interests of one group. Donor segmentation lets you send customized appeals that speak directly to the causes donors care about most.

Gain insight through questions like:

• How can we highlight the unique programs or initiatives we work on?
• What opportunities are available for donors to get more involved?
• What specific aspects of our work first brought donors to our cause?
• Do we have recent survey data on program areas of interest to donors?

Based on what you learn, develop relevant donor segments, such as:

• Program areas
• New initiatives
• General giving programs
• Volunteer opportunities
• Webinar and learning events
• In-person experiences

These segments can help you give donors a choice of where their funding goes, send invitations to events of interest, or send program updates of interest.

3 best practice segmentation strategies

Once you define your donor segments, take steps to optimize their potential for engagement and fundraising success.

1. Define nurture paths for donor segments

Nurture paths provide a framework for how to move each donor segment toward a specific goal. For example, you may want to convert first-time donors to recurring donors, upgrade recurring plans, re-engage lapsed donors, or encourage volunteers to make their first donation.

First, identify the key stages of the donor journey, from initial contact to loyal supporter:

• Awareness-building
• Initial donation
• Continued engagement
• Increased involvement
• Long-term commitment

Develop tailored content for each stage based on what you learn about their donor preferences. Next, determine which stage each donor segment is in and build a multichannel communication strategy to engage them with your materials in ways that will best resonate.

For example, first-time donors move from the initial donation stage to the continued engagement stage. Before you propose your monthly giving program, they may need a welcome series that connects them more deeply to your cause.

2. Personalize donor touchpoints

When conducting outreach to different segments, use the information available to you to customize your message.

For example, highlight programs you know donor segments are interested in based on their past giving, event attendance, survey results, or other behaviors. Share impact stories relevant to their past contributions or expressed interests to show how they’ve made a difference and can continue to do so.

You can also personalize content with tokens like the donor’s name, prior donations, or volunteer experience.

3. Conduct A/B test donor segmentation initiatives

Donor segments alone won’t guarantee success. Nonprofits should test specific segments and communication strategies to see which works best and where to adjust. A/B testing lets you compare the performance of two different approaches.

To optimize your donor segmentation initiatives:

• Set specific goals and identify key metrics, such as conversions or click-through rates, to measure the success of each segmented communication.
• Hypothesize how your new approach will impact donor behavior, such as increased gifts.
• Develop two variations of the element to test, ensuring that each differs in only one specific variable to isolate its impact.
• Test both versions within the same donor segment for accurate comparison.
• Use tracking tools to collect key metrics and ensure data collection is consistent across both versions.
• Determine which version performed better and why, assessing whether the results support or refute your hypothesis.
• Roll out the winning version to a broader audience or implement it as a new best practice.

Nonprofits can use A/B testing for various marketing campaign elements targeted to specific donor segments, such as email subject lines, paid advertisements, storylines in appeals, thank-you messages, or types of visual content.

Build donor relationships that last through effective donor segmentation

Donor segmentation puts your messages in front of people who are more likely to act on them, saves time and effort, and helps busy nonprofits work smarter. It’s also good for donors, giving them a direct line to what they care about most, respecting their time, and helping them connect more deeply with your organization.

Classy’s integrations make segmentation even easier with seamless donor data collection and activation. With GA4, Classy customers can see how donors move through their donation forms and registration pages. Plus, integrations with Mailchimp and Constant Contact make creating email segments and conducting A/B testing a breeze, while our Zapier connection makes it easy to define nurture paths for each donor segment.

Request a demo today to see our comprehensive suite in action.

Copy Editor: Ayanna Julien