WealthEngine, as the leader in wealth intelligence in the United States, specializes in helping you identify, understand, and connect with wealthy individuals. Our WealthEngine Research Lab has updated our now highly anticipated 2019 U.S. Millionaire Report to give you the most up-to-date insights on millionaires throughout the country.
Currently, 12.7% of the United States’ adult population is made up of millionaires. As wealth continues to grow and the number of millionaires climbs across generations worldwide, the population is being divided into segments of High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) and Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI). The rise of these subpopulations presents marketers and fundraisers with both an opportunity and a challenge to understand and engage with these promising prospects.
With the growth and diversification of the millionaire population, changes in the millionaires’ behavior mean that marketers & fundraisers must tailor their marketing, sales, and development efforts to the wants, needs, and values of their target audience. The personalization of communication and products allows marketers and fundraisers to connect and forge long-lasting relationships with their existing and prospective donors.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are also revolutionizing the way each industry appeals to their consumers, individually. AI can help you identify patterns and actionable insights among customers, donors, and prospects. These insights can be used to build predictive models that not only identify your next best prospect, but also predict or even influence behavior. With this evolving technology that is constantly being refined, you have the ability to reach consumers in a for more personalized, and focused way. You are able to understand their ways of being and provide them with what they need, exactly.
The data presented in the 2019 U.S. Millionaire Report highlights the tremendous value and opportunities that can be gained from uncovering the millionaires you are already engaged with and discovering the millionaires you want to be engaged with.
As a development professional in the arts and culture sector, you may be looking for prospect research best practices. Today, fundraising is both an art and a science. While data drives decision making, there is also a subtle art involved in framing and timing the ask. With this in mind, here are 3 top best practices in prospect research for arts & culture fundraisers.
Our prospect research best practice recommendations combined with tailored solutions will help you:
Increase prospect engagement through personalization
Convert more ticket buyers into donors or members
Let your best donors guide your prospect research
1. Increase Prospect Engagement Through Personalization
Personalization is a mantra that you will hear about often in the near future. This is a key prospect research best practice in the arts and culture sector. Most organizations generally have automated emails thanking someone for a low/mid-level gift. Even though this is common practice, it is not impactful.
Personalization is necessary to increase impact and engagement. Sustained engagement will encourage prospects to support your cause, thereby becoming donors. The messaging needs to be personalized regardless of the medium. For example, a handwritten letter or call from the Executive Director sent to high-level donors can ensure a deeper connection.
Prospect research can help you take this a step further. You can personalize communication not only based on giving history but also on giving capacity and other wealth factors.
WealthEngine can empower your prospect research to reach the right set of major gift donor prospects. We can help you decide if someone should be in an annual fund portfolio or major gift portfolio.
Our wealth intelligence goes beyond net worth to generate a holistic propensity score. Wealth screening can help you set your prospect research in motion and increase donation amounts across all giving brackets by optimizing your ask.
2. Convert Arts and Culture Ticket Buyers or Visitors into Donors
You may be familiar with the common struggle at arts and culture organizations – the difficulty of prioritizing between ticket sales and fundraising. Both are equally important to sustain the organization. However, with lean teams, one of these gets prioritized at the cost of the other. Most organizations that we speak with tend to do a great job filling the seats in a theater or getting a high volume of visitors. Ideally, all those ticket buyers/visitors would be donors or members. Although we recognize that this may not be the case right now.
It may seem like a monumental task to research every ticket buyer or visitor. But these visitors are your greatest prospects! Our next prospect research best practice recommendation can help convert visitors to life-long donors or members. WealthEngine has the capability to screen a ticket buyer at the point of sale and notify you so you can begin nurturing. Furthermore, our API will capture potential major donor prospects in real time.
For instance, if you have a new ticket buyer who conducts the transaction on your website. Our wealth screening solution combined with API can update you on their wealth, demographic and lifestyle information immediately. This allows your team to identify prospects who have not only the capacity to give but also the propensity and intent.
The broad nature of this type of prospect research will give your team the ability to roll out the red carpet. Top prospects can be given the platinum experience before and after any event. This level of personalization would enable the visitor to become better engaged with your organization, creating a strong case to become a donor.
3. Let Your Best Donors Guide Your Prospect Research
In our experience, we have found that a lot of organizations have a solid set of low and mid-level donors. A lot of these donors have not only greater gift capacities, but also the interest and motivation to give. They can easily be leveled up to ensure that there is no money left at the table. As a prospect research best practice, it comes down to perfecting the ask.
There are two ways to increase the number of high-level donors:
Optimize your ask. Don’t forget that prospect research can still be applied to your current donor base! Prospect research allows you to determine the capacity, propensity, and intent of donors and prospects. Use the insight from prospecting to ensure that gifts from your current donors match their capacity and propensity.
Our demographic, lifestyle, interests, and affinity data can help gift officers with this best practice. Fundraisers can maintain a meaningful dialog with donors and prospects as part of the nurturing process.
Find new high-level donors. In-depth prospect research allows you to do a deep dive into your donor base and identify patterns of traits among your high-level donors in order to find more prospects like them. WealthEngine’s analytical and predictive modeling solution can build models based on your top donors.
Our prospecting solution uses insights from these models to find more high-level prospects. This way your best donors can help you find your next best prospects! In one such instance, our client went from raising $400k at their gala to $7.8M in 3 years. They were able to accomplish this by using WealthEngine to identify other prospects modeled after their top donors.
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Take your prospect research to the next level, contact us to learn more.
We hope these prospect research best practices set you up for year-round arts and culture fundraising success! Contact us to learn more about how our solutions can help you perfect your prospect research. Fill the form on the right and a WealthEngine rep will contact you very soon.
You may also like our other articles on prospecting:
Knowing donor lifetime value for each of your contacts can make your nonprofit fundraising efforts go much faster. You can use it to forecast the future giving of your constituents. Here’s how to calculate donor lifetime value, which can help you determine which donors to nurture more closely.
What is Donor Lifetime Value?
Donor Lifetime Value is an estimate of how much you can expect a particular donor to contribute to your organization over their lifetime.
There are many factors that go into calculating what this number should be. Not only should you take into account a donor’s wealth indicators but you should also look at their propensity to give to related causes.
One WealthEngine client found that by simply asking a specific 1% segment of their donors to contribute just $100 more in a year, they would generate over $200,000 in additional funds. In five years, this would generate more than $1 million in new funding from “underperforming” donors.
The beauty of creating such a model is that it can pinpoint exactly who to target and what your ask amount should be.
Want to learn more on how to nurture your donors for a lifetime? Download our Capital Campaign Thank You Letter templates to create that connection.
The donor lifetime value wealth model takes into account the giving history to your organization, donation frequency, contributions to similar organizations, and other factors.
WealthEngine’s deep insights into donation habits start with financial data about a donor to determine their giving capacity. The model then uses philanthropic, demographic and lifestyle data as part of the data set to predict how much a donor is likely to give.
Aside from these factors, our data science team uses our proprietary database, which has profiles on over 250 million Americans, to calculate the donor lifetime value.
These insights can help you estimate the churn risk and future giving behavior of your existing donor base. Armed with this information, you can maximize fundraising ROI across the donor’s lifetime instead of focusing only on your next campaign.
We start with randomized partitions of known giving history. Some segments of this data are used for calibrating the model and others are used to validate it. We also evaluate various types of predictors using the data sets our clients provide.
Then, we apply machine learning algorithms that iterate and learn from each round of data analysis.
Once the model is created, we cross-validate it to view the model performance. This gives an overall confidence level in the model.
Using a Model
Using these machine learning techniques, WealthEngine helps nonprofits determine very useful insights like:
Churn likelihood: probability that the customer will not donate anymore after their last donation
Next gift amount: expected amount of the donor’s next donation
Future gift count: expected number of donations within a 20-year period
Future gift total: expected dollar value of donations within a 20-year period
Total Donor Lifetime Value: Past plus expected future donation amounts
Equally important, the donor lifetime value model can help you identify the high-value donors atrisk, including those with:
Moderate-to-high churn likelihood
High expected next gift amount or future gift total
When you know these valuable insights, you can identify approaches to increase the number and amount of gifts from your donors. You will know the potential for donor fatigue that occurs due to frequent contribution requests. This can generate higher conversions while saving your marketing investments.
Calculating Donor Lifetime Value for Your Nonprofit
WealthEngine offers multiple donor lifetime value modeling options. In addition to custom models, our popular 4-pack of pre-built models can shine a light on specific major gifts, planned giving and other opportunities within your existing base of donors.
Learn more about how to calculate and apply donor lifetime value to accelerate fundraising for your nonprofit. Take a minute to fill the form on the right and a WealthEngine rep will contact you very soon.
Financial services trends have all veered towards digitization in recent years. While these trends are indicative of progress, they can also present certain issues for marketers. Marketers at financial firms need to leverage technology and data to make their offerings resonate. With this in mind, let’s review financial services marketingtechniques that will modernize your approach.
Omnichannel Marketing for Financial Services
One of the major issues in financial services stems from digitization. This means that more customers prefer to interact with FinServ professionals via digital channels. As a result, marketers are tasked with the ability to maintain a human touch in new ways.
The primary way to achieve this is by taking an omnichannel approach to your financial services marketing. This means that your customers must have a consistent experience no matter what channel they choose to interact with you through.
For instance, let’s consider the case of a retail bank. More customers bank online these days. Whether they use your website for a money transfer, your mobile app, or they come into a branch, they should have the same kind of experience. If your brand’s tone is more personable when local residents interact with their teller, the same warm interaction should come through, as if they were communicating with a chatbot.
Let’s consider different channels and how you can make marketing effective in each medium.
Digital Marketing for Financial Services
Financial Services Marketing is now more reliant on digital techniques. It is possible and necessary to take an omnichannel approach even in your digital strategy. Your email marketing, content, social media marketing, among other strategies, should all reflect your core brand.
For instance, a customer care query could come in through email or via Twitter. Your response time and tone must be consistent across channels.
When it comes to digital marketing for financial services, one thing is crucial: maintaining a personal touch with your customers. Financial services marketing needs to build a high degree of trust. This can be enhanced through the human touch.
As a marketer, you need to find the right balance between leveraging technology and making your customers feel like they are receiving personal attention. Artificial Intelligence is becoming more adept at this over time.
Personalization comes from refined segmentation. Begin with understanding what makes your customers unique. Then, segment them on the basis of preferred channels, life stages, wealth indicators, etc. When you understand what each segment values, you can communicate in a way that truly resonates and makes an impact.
Let’s review different digital media and how you can increase engagement across them.
Content Marketing for Financial Services
Thought Leadership is a dominant theme under content marketing for financial services. This stems from the fact that financial products not only require educating customers, but they also require building trust.
However, for your thought leadership strategy to be effective, you need to offer real value to your readers. Clickbait or misleading titles guiding readers to pieces that don’t offer any insight will have an adverse effect on your brand.
To differentiate your content strategy, don’t just discuss trending topics in your industry. You need to weigh in on these topics by contributing your own point of view. This offers your customers insight into where you stand, plus it helps you stand out with your unique perspective.
Furthermore, content marketing needs to help solve problems and provide pertinent information. Your customers search for certain keywords, read your blog posts, emails, or your how-to manuals in the interest of learning about something. When your content is written to help provide clarity or new information around a particular subject, it will automatically draw your customers in.
Email Marketing for Financial Services
Email marketing is all about personalization. This does not end by addressing your customers by name in your mass emails.
For email marketing to be effective in the financial sector, you need to understand customer preferences beyond the surface level. This means that you should know what product or service best fits their life stage. Further, it is important to know what kind of messaging would resonate with a specific customer. This extends to the tone of voice, images, and even the frequency of your email communication.
Automation tools for financial services marketing can help you understand what topics a customer is interested in. Knowing this means that you can tailor your communication to offer them the right solution at the right time. This, in turn, also helps build long-term relationships with customers.
Marketing Automation for Financial Services: Find Wealthy Clients
Many wealth managers and marketing teams fall into the trap of using the same old techniques for financial services marketing. Marketing automation for financial services is only possible when you know your customers well.
Personal networking, social media, sponsoring events, and other methods to meet wealthy prospects, are all useful techniques. However, you may end up spending your valuable time pursuing leads that are not qualified.
By using automated data analysis and prospect modeling, you can quickly screen and qualify prospects. Better yet, you can reduce sales cycle time and find new clients that are very much like your best ones.
How do you begin?
The answer lies in big data. You may already have large volumes of data. But, do you have the right kind of data? Furthermore, are you leveraging this data in the right way?
In other words, you can find wealthy clients that most financial firms overlook. When you tap into these methods for marketing financial services, you can shorten your sales cycle dramatically. Here are 5 strategies that will help you understand if you are using the right kind of data, the right way:
1. On-the-Fly Wealth Screening from Your Phone
You meet people everywhere: professional events, networking breakfasts, the gym, maybe even at your daughter’s soccer tournament.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could enter your new-found acquaintance’s name into your phone and instantly learn whether they could be a good prospect for you?
You can.
WealthEngine’s instant wealth search feature lets you scan over 250 million U.S. contacts and see their wealth profiles. You will learn details on their interests, donation history, real estate, and other luxury property holdings and many other data points. The data is gathered from numerous publicly available databases and compiled into an easily accessible system. This information can completely change the game in your company’s financial services marketing efforts.
It also provides ratings and scores. These can indicate a person’s propensity to spend, to save, and to give (known as P2G). Propensity-to-Spend (known as P2S) can indicate a person’s likelihood of purchasing luxury goods. You can then use these personalized marketing insights to guide your dialog appropriately.
Example of what a propensity score would look like on your phone
2. Batch Prospect Research Before You Attend an Event
Let’s say your company sponsored an event, maybe a golf tournament, an art expo, or a dinner for charity. You’re going to attend these events to meet new people. You want to focus on the individuals who have the highest potential to do business with you.
Traditionally, you would mingle and look for introductions from those you know. You would spend time talking to many people to determine whether they are a qualified prospect.
There is a much better – and significantly more efficient – way to do prospect research. More importantly, this form of financial services marketing will help you find who you should talk to at these events.
Wealth screening can pinpoint exactly who you should look for so you spend your precious time effectively.
Prior to the event, ask the host for a list of people who have RSVP’d. Then, you can upload the list into WealthEngine as a batch to do a wealth screen on everyone before you attend.
Within minutes, you will get back a list of the most wealthy attendees who will be at the event.
These are the people you should spend the most time with.
This method of marketing financial services allows you to do prospect research quickly. It will save you hours of wasted time pursuing unqualified leads.
You can also connect WealthEngine’s data directly to your customer relationship management (CRM) tool, such as SalesForce. When you use APIs in the financial services marketing, you can discover wealth insights on everyone as you add them to your CRM. There’s no need to login to WealthEngine or change your workflow.
3. Create a Model of Your Best Wealth Management Clients
Your financial institution’s research department produces financial models all the time. You can use the same concept of modeling to create a detailed profile of your best wealth management clients.
To illustrate, these models identify the characteristics of your top clients. You will learn your prospects’ demographics, assets, real estate and luxury property ownership like boats and planes, luxury goods spending habits, favorite charities, and interests.
This level of detail in financial services marketing is significantly more useful than simply knowing someone’s name and address. In fact, the more data you provide, the more information our data scientists can model.
Many of our clients learn that they are spending their time pursuing prospects who have a very low likelihood of turning into wealth management clients. Financial services marketing becomes a lot easier when you use machine learning to get deeper clarity on who your best prospects really are.
4. Finding New Prospects Who Match Your Model
Once you have a well-defined model of your ideal client, you can use it to find others who have similar characteristics. There are several ways to do this efficiently.
API Connected to SalesForce
If your wealth management firm uses SalesForce, you can use WealthEngine’s SalesForce Connector to instantly get a score of every new prospect you add. This way, you don’t have to change anything in your workflow to accelerate the marketing of financial services.
Just add names to SalesForce and we’ll instantly send you a match rate based on the model of your best clients. You’ll know right away whether this prospect is someone you want to spend your valuable time on.
Match Your Model to 250 Million Records
WealthEngine can also run your model against our massive database to find people you don’t know but who match your ideal client profile. This is one of the fastest ways to leverage financial services marketing to find wealthy clients who could become some of your best clients.
You can then reach out, invite them to breakfast, or a round of golf, knowing that they fit the profile you want to pursue.
5. Identify Money In Motion
Creating a model and prospecting for clients based on that model will help you identify people to pursue. Next, you’ll want to monitor their money in motion.
Money in motion refers to knowing when an individual you are tracking has a financial event. Real estate purchases and public company stock sales are examples of publicly available data, all of which WealthEngine tracks.
When you know that a prospect has a liquidity event, you know they are likely going to do something with that money. WealthEngine’s tools can email you a report as soon as someone on your watch list sells public company stock.
Strategic campaign fundraising is typically dependent on the structure of your capital campaign gift pyramid and your understanding of your donors. Once you’ve structured your gift pyramid, and you begin approaching existing and potential donors, it’s important to balance your need to procure gifts with your ability to connect with your donors. But, how do you effectively communicate with existing or potential donors? Here are three fundraising strategies for your nonprofit to use during the campaign fundraising process.
Sequential Solicitation
The primary fundraising strategy for all nonprofits when carrying out a capital campaign is sequential solicitation. Sequential solicitation is a guide, outlining the order in which you should receive gifts from lead donors to meet your campaign fundraising goal.
It’s important to secure your largest gifts first, and then work your way down the gift table, receiving smaller gifts towards the end of your capital campaign. Once you’ve achieved 50 to 70% of your goal (which you should complete during the Silent Phase), you can then make your capital campaign public and receive gifts from the community you’re serving.
Although campaign stalls can stem from internal campaign issues, such as an overworked staff, the most common reason is the failure to follow sequential solicitation. This is based on the four axioms of campaign fundraising:
The ten largest gifts set the standard for the entire campaign
Not following the top-down structure lowers giving sights across the board
Extended solicitation at lower levels will not offset major gaps in upper ranges
Once the first big gift sequence has been seriously violated, the entire program is in jeopardy
Approaching Potential Donors
Although the sequential solicitation model is in place, you may be wondering: how does it look in practice? Where do I start? That leads to our next fundraising strategy for nonprofits, which is an extension of sequential solicitation. Typically, there are 5 steps to sequential solicitation to help you approach potential donors:
Inquire. First, you want to build a prospect list, or leverage Wealth data, to identify the right people who can provide funding to your campaign. Once you’ve identified potential donors, it’s important to conduct external and internal research to assess each group or individuals capacity and propensity to give.
Plan. Once you’ve identified and researched potential donors, it’s time to figure out how you’ll engage with your donors. Besides outlining your intentions and goal, ask yourself: what aspect of the campaign would appeal to them? Is this appealing enough to gain their commitment?
Cultivate.Now that you’ve considered the ways in which your donor might contribute to your goal, it’s time to probe. By bringing your potential donor closer to your cause, you’re able to show them what you’re doing and what you’re intending to do. In doing so, they may end up committed to your work and want to help.
Procure and Secure.The time has come to explicitly request support and secure the contribution from your donor. If your donor has decided contributed, it’s your responsibility to follow up on the details in receiving the contribution. How much is the proposed donation? When the donation will be mad?; How will it be made?
Express Gratitude.You’ve planned, engaged your donor, and have received your gift. Now what? It’s imperative to acknowledge the importance of your donor’s contribution, and their influence on your work at large. By creating a connection with them, and expressing your appreciation not only for their contribution but of them as an individual or organization, your donor may feel inclined to give later on.
Appealing to the Motivations of Donors
Our final fundraising strategy for nonprofits is identifying, understanding, and acting upon the motivations of donors. Now that you’ve structured a way to collect gifts, and how you can successfully approach potential donors, it’s important to understand the motivations of your donors. Generally, there are four types of motivations:
Philanthropy. Donors with philanthropic motivations want to help change the world.
Connection. Donors motivated by affinity are those who wish to be connected to a cause that has similar values to their own.
Reciprocity. Donors motivated by mutual benefit seek to help organizations that will, in return, provide them with some advantage.
Social Consciousness. Donors with social motivations don’t simply want to contribute to a cause. They want to be part of a community.
By identifying their values, you’re able to create targeted messaging or find other ways to effectively communicate with donors. Not only will this help you with your existing or inherited campaign, but depending on the connection you forge with other groups or individuals, they may feel inclined to support and contribute to future projects of yours.
Get your campaign started today. Fill the form on the right to speak with a WealthEngine expert.
