How to Segment Nonprofit Donors: Identity vs. Identification
There are lots of aspects to a donor’s identity; not all are equally important to them.
Well, duh, you may say.
But this matters more than you may know. Because if you don’t really understand the difference between identity and identification you may be wasting a lot of time heading in the wrong directions.
Let me explain further.
If you loosely segment donors by aspects of their identity that are relatively meaningless as far as they’re concerned, you won’t improve your fundraising results. You’ll certainly be busy doing all this segmentation – and you’ll be able to report back to your boss on all the great, ‘scientific’ work you did – but it will end up being a lot of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.
Perhaps you’re an organization that develops personas or avatars for your constituents. This is something marketers do to know who they’re selling to, and what that person may value. Sell sweaters? It helps to know if you’re creating messaging for “Chilly Charlie” (who wants warm sweaters), “Stylin’ Stella” (who wants fashionable, trency sweaters), or “Frugal Freda” (who wants discount priced sweaters).
So too it helps when you write to ‘Suzy Soccer Mom’ vs. ‘Funky Grandpa.’ You assume they’re interested in different things, and they generally are. So you tailor your appeal differently to different target market segments.
But wait…
Get even smarter about donor identity.
Ask yourself if the way you’re segmenting your donors is too generic. As helpful as it is to group prospective supporters by persona, it’s important not to go overboard with this strategy.
Why? Because it’s non-specific and based on the most obvious common denominator. If you don’t drill down a bit, you may miss the forest for the trees.
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