Seamless from the Start: Marketing Automation for Donor Stewardship

Suzanne Bellanger
Stewardship Marketing Manager
Brown University

Great stewardship must begin at the start of the donor relationship. The very first interaction a donor has with a nonprofit organization leaves a lasting impression. If a donor has a positive first experience, it goes without saying they’ll be more likely to give again. They’ll be more likely to get (and stay) involved. And they’ll be more likely to talk about their experience with others who might support your cause. 

Marketing automation can help ensure every donor interaction is seamless from day one. It can also help you track donor behavior so you can gain a better of understanding of where and when they interact with you. And marketing automation can help your team better manage workflow and projects. All of these add up to a positive donor experience by giving you the ability to provide your donors with best-in-class service and compelling content offered where they see it, when they see it. 

But what IS marketing automation? What does that mean? And how can you use it to help your organization, specifically? 

Salesforce defines marketing automation as “technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically.” At its most basic, marketing automation is a solution that helps you capture and store prospect and donor information so you can segment constituent populations into targeted groups in order to better communicate with them.   

Marketing automation begins with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, but it doesn’t end there. Your CRM is the heart of your automated process, but it should work in conjunction with plug-ins and add-ons that allow you to flow better information into your system and extract more information from your system. The goal from a stewardship perspective is to use this information to enhance the donor journey for every donor who supports you.

There are a lot of different options and a lot of different players in the market offering these solutions. In fact, there are so many competitors and so many products that it can feel overwhelming and intimidating when you’re considering adding enhancements to your system or replacing your system altogether. I suggest evaluating your critical needs and identifying a few key areas you wish to improve upon. Specifically, identify the pain point(s) you are trying to solve. How are you trying to improve the donor’s interaction with you? Once you identify the need, research the solution that will help you meet those needs. For most organizations that have not yet moved to a fully automated marketing system, these might include better information capture, enhanced reporting capabilities, and the ability to provide more targeted and timely communications. 

The automation tools that help you capture information can help you improve your calls to action (CTAs), donation forms, landing pages, and website visitor tracking. Tools that help you digest and manage data allow you to segment your donor base for deeper analysis and provide better reporting. Automated solutions that provide enhanced social media publishing options, SEO/keyword optimization, and drip campaign capabilities help you communicate with your donors in a more integrated and targeted way.

Why are all of these so important to your stewardship efforts? 

Better Information Capture

A Call to Action (CTA) is a text link, button, image, or web link that encourages a website visitor to become a lead. Some examples of CTAs could be “Give now,” “Join today,” or “Donate.” CTAs should be visually attractive, action oriented, and easy to locate on your pages and emails. 

Most CRM platforms have add-ons that allow you to customize your CTAs to ensure they’re compelling for YOUR donors. When paired with learnings from other marketing efforts, this tool helps you design CTAs that will draw your donors in and encourage them to click, leading them to your donation form or designated landing page. This is the first impression I was talking about earlier and it should leave a lasting one about YOUR organization.   

The donation form is as important as the CTA not only from an impression perspective, but also from an information gathering one. Nonprofit forms should at a minimum include first name, last name, email address, and state of residency, but you can use them to capture a lot more about the donor (and feed it into your CRM) by including a few targeted questions. 

A landing page is a web page that captures visitors’ attention and encourages support or participation. This page revolves around an offer, such as an event registration, e-book, contest, or webinar, and captures visitor information in exchange for the offer. This is also an excellent place to collect information and make a lasting impression. A good automation tool will allow you to add custom landing pages tied to unique campaign-specific URLs that help you track where the visitor came from.

Effective marketing automation also helps you keep tabs on how many (and which) people are visiting the different pages of your website. With some analysis, these numbers can tell you which types of communication are most successful and which constituents are most engaged with your website. This is important information when considering how and when to communicate with them. Knowing which pages a donor visits most often can help you gain valuable insight into the topics, initiatives, and programming that s/he is most interested in, which in turn can inform your individualized messaging and benefit offerings. 

More Sophisticated Reporting

Donors, volunteers, advocates, and staff all have different network sizes, skills, and motivating factors. Using automation tools that allow you to identify profiles in your CRM based on custom criteria will help you build targeted segments to which you can send different types of information. 

The ability to customize reporting is also a key element of marketing automation. The more ways you can visualize and analyze your data, the more insight you gain and the better prepared you are to provide compelling messaging and content. It also allows you to offer incentives and devise recognition milestones that resonate with your donor base at all levels of giving. Reporting should include gift date, type of gift, and amount tracking, as well as designation specifications, but should also be able to capture other types of interaction your donors have with your organization. Ideally, you should be able to pull reports from your CRM that detail the point of origin for all gifts, responses to invitations, and a history of all volunteer and engagement activities. It should also detail where your donors interact with you online, and if they have any documented preferences for types of communication they like to receive. All the better if you can also document and track donor interest level in key subject areas related to your mission or cause.  For example, you might include and track answers to donor survey questions. 

Enhanced Communication

If you invest in software that allows for centralized social media publishing across multiple platforms (most commonly Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram), you’ll save time and resources, and improve your ability to deliver timely, cohesive messaging. When you present similar content across social media platforms, you reinforce your message and strengthen its impact. None of this is news to you, I’m sure. Most likely, you’re already pushing content out across all your social platforms. But marketing automation can help you do what you’re already doing in a less manual way, freeing up time that can be spent on developing better content and fine tuning your strategy. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of using keywords and tags to enhance where a webpage appears in search results. Keywords are topics that search engines like Google use to index results. Nonprofits can use tools like Google Adwords, Keyword Eye, Wordstream, and SEMRush to help identify words that will drive the right audience to your website and landing pages. These tools help take the guesswork out of your SEO efforts and help ensure your messaging and marketing efforts are reaching your constituents. 

In today’s world, it doesn’t suffice to send generic emails; there’s just too much competition in inboxes. In order for your email to be read, it has to stand out in the crowd. If your CRM is limiting your capabilities to deeply segment your audience and/or use conditional/variable text in your subject lines and body, you should consider finding a compatible external solution. Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo, Hubspot, Campaign Monitor, and Emma are all options you can consider. Just be sure to pick the software that will work in conjunction with your CRM and will provide enhanced capabilities that allow you to be more strategic and targeted with your email communications. Segmentation, variable text, multiple templates, and the ability to execute drip campaigns with minimal manual input will likely vastly improve your open and click-through rates. 

Marketing Automation lets you do you, only better and more efficiently…

Chances are, you are already familiar with many of the strategies I’ve discussed here—from the initial lead generating marketing strategies to the website enhancements, social media campaigns, and email engagement efforts. Marketing automation tools simply help you elevate your efforts and bring your strategies to the next level. Think about how time-consuming it is to manually set up an email series. Or how frustrating it is when you have to rely on insufficient or incomplete data when trying to segment your constituent base. Or how discouraging it is when your clever email message is left unread by virtually everybody you sent it to. Even if you don’t have the financial resources, or you have other constraints that limit your ability to fully automate, consider focusing on one key area that you can improve by moving to an automated process. 

When you invest in technology, you’re investing in the future of your organization and providing your team the opportunity to successfully execute their brilliant ideas. But don’t just run after the shiniest, newest thing. Put some thought into which solution is right for you—choose the solution(s) that will help you keep your donors engaged, energized, and connected to your mission by addressing your unique challenges. Thoughtful investment in the right marketing automation tools will allow you to forge a deeper connection and more personal experience right from the first point of contact by eliminating barriers that prevent you from doing so in a more manually driven environment.