June 2019

June 24, 2019December 2, 2019

5 Summertime Tasks to Prepare for a Successful Fall Donation Drive

With the new school year just around the corner, it’s important to begin preparing for your fall donation drive. But, you may be wondering where to start. Let’s explore where you can look for donors in your database and how you can use wealth screenings to find your next best prospect.

5 Tasks to Prepare for a Fall Donation Drive

1. Screen Your Giving Day Donors

As designated Giving Days have risen in popularity, many universities have been able to raise millions of dollars. They’ve also seen their number of donors double. Giving Days have other benefits- alumni and other members of your institution’s community are able to lend support from anywhere. Furthermore, they’re also given recognition among their community of gift givers.

So, to gear up for your fall donation drive, it’s important to screen your Giving Day donors. By conducting a wealth screening, you can see which donors have the greatest propensity and capacity to give. Donors who give during events like Giving Days may donate sporadically to your institution over time. But, they are still inclined to give. By reaching out early, and implementing effective engagement techniques, they’ll be more likely to donate during your fall donation drive. This is an even greater opportunity for your institution to cultivate donors who give again and again.

2. Screen Your Alumni

Alumni who had positive experiences at their alma mater are keen on giving back. They want to see incoming and returning students have an experience that was just as positive as theirs was.

So, when reaching out to alumni for your fall donation drive, it’s important to understand more about them. By taking the time to familiarize yourself with their interests and giving history, you can engage them in relevant ways. It’s important to ask yourself: who’s an active member of our institution’s alumni association/ Which alumni have given in the past? What do they do now? And do they have the propensity and capacity to give more? By conducting a wealth screening, you can get those answers and more. You can learn more about the wealth, lifestyle, affinities, and interests of alumni and uncover donors, hidden in your database. This can also help you personalize your outreach, and communicate with alumni about fundraisers that they’ll feel individually connected to.

For example, in 2014, the University of Maryland received a historic gift of $31M from former Computer Science Major and Oculus CEO, Brendan Iribe. Brendan attributed his love of virtual reality to the University of Maryland’s computer science department, which is what inspired him to give back.

3. Screen the Parents of Your Incoming Students

With incoming students arriving in just a few months, it’s important to screen your new students’ parents. Which families, of your incoming class, may have the greatest ability and willingness to give during your fall donation drive?

For most parents, if they have the ability to give, they’ll contribute as much as they can. They want to ensure that their son or daughter has all the resources necessary to be successful. Especially if members of your university’s incoming class are legacy students, their parents may be even more keen to give. They’ll want their child to have the best experience at an institution they feel personally connected to and invested in.

By the time your fall donation drive comes around, you can hold an event for parents. This is an opportunity to walk them through the campaigns you have in progress, and how these will transform their child’s college experience.

4. Screen Your Gala Attendees

During galas for your institution, attendees are keen on seeing what their gifts are being put towards. They want to know how their commitment to your campaign(s) is being transformed into tangible accomplishments. It is important to know which gala attendees have contributed substantially in the past. However, it’s even more important to find former attendees who have the ability to give more.

So, it’s important to understand (through screenings) where their values lie, and which projects they’re likely to invest in further. Then, during your fall donation drive, you can tailor your outreach in ways that keep your attendees motivated to keep giving.

5. Model Your Screening Files to Find More Potential Donors

You’ve screened all the donors hidden in your database who have the greatest propensity and capacity to give. Now what? How do you find new donors to give during your fall donation drive?

Using WealthEngine’s modeling solution, you can create a core donor persona. From there, you can find overlaps in demographic data, preferences, and giving history among your existing donors. This will help you understand potential donors you should be reaching out to. Essentially, you’re creating an impression of your ideal donor and then using those traits to find more people like them.

For example, one of WealthEngine’s clients, a large, private, research university in the midwest had a plan in place for fundraising at all levels. However, their biggest challenge was securing Major Gifts. By using WealthEngine’s modeling solution, the team generated a model that automatically identified the top 10% of their donors. The gift capacities of these donors were in the $100,000 range, and over 200 members were identified as top prospects. This reduced their major gift donor lead time by 88%.

Learn How to Model and Screen Your Data to Secure Donations

Learn more about how modeling and screening could help you increase conversions.

See how to model your data →

See how to screen your data →

June 24, 2019December 7, 2020

Identify & Combat Donor Fatigue to Build Long-Term Donor Relationships

Ever wondered if Donor Fatigue is real? Spoiler alert: the answer is yes! In fact, it can majorly obstruct the development of long-term relationships. Every nonprofit advancement team aims to create long-term engagement among donors. Engagement that sets donors on the path to major gifts, recurring donations, or even planned giving. In any long-term strategy, nonprofits have to be able to identify this phenomenon.

To that end, let’s analyze what it is and how you can combat it.

What is Donor Fatigue?

Donor fatigue is a phenomenon where your donors may gradually stop giving to your organization. They may also stop giving altogether. This may be due to a feeling of indifference or desensitization caused by too many asks.

Although the loss of connection may be temporary, if you don’t take the right steps, you may end up losing a valued donor forever.

The first step is to identify the causes of this phenomenon.

Top 6 Causes of Donor Fatigue

Donor fatigue results in desensitization or a feeling of being tapped out among your donor base. One or more of the following 6 factors can cause this:

1. Too Many Requests

One of the primary causes of donor loss through fatigue is receiving too many fundraising requests. Nonprofits believe in donor retention. Past behavior is usually a great indicator, so the instinct is to ask again.

When donors have already donated to your cause, and they continue to receive requests, they may begin to feel tapped out.

2. Poor Understanding of Propensity and Interests

Understanding donor propensity and interests should be one of the primary steps in your prospect research plan. For instance, a donor may have contributed to a disaster relief fund. This is an indicator that they are interested in humanitarian aid. However, it is best to proceed while being better informed.

They may have been inclined to give to that disaster because of the affected area. If they have lived in the affected area before and still know people that live there, that may have served as a motivator.

3. Generic Asks

Like poor understanding, sending generic asks can cause irreparable damage to the donor relationship. Asks can be generic in many ways. The actual cause may not be the right fit. Further, the ask can be a mismatch with donor capacity.

Even your chosen medium or message appear generic when you do not personalize communications.

4. Ill-Timed Asks

Your request’s timing can be a mismatch just as the medium or nature of the ask can be.

Recency is an issue: when you send requests soon after a donor gives, fatigue can set in. Furthermore, life stages are constantly changing. If your donors are paying college tuition or medical bills for family members, they might be less inclined to make a contribution.

5. A False Sense of Urgency

When natural disasters occur, nonprofits send messages with a sense of urgency. This is expected. However, over time, receiving such messages dilute the impact of your ask on donors.

Donors will feel less inclined to give if the actions required by them seem cumbersome.

6. Lack of Transparency in Communication

Another cause of donor fatigue is ambiguity. Sometimes messages do not clearly communicate the purpose and the impact of donations. In these instances, the lack of transparency hinders long-term relationship building.

Solutions to Combat Donor Fatigue

Fortunately, there are ways to avoid this phenomenon. Understanding your donor base and personalizing your outreach is paramount.

1. Regular Screenings

To understand your donors well, you need a holistic view of them. This means you have to look beyond their wealth. Wealth screening can show you your donor demographics, lifestyle, interests, and affinities.

Further, when you screen regularly, you can ensure that you are keeping up with important changes in donor wealth and life stages. This means that your asks are based not only gift capacity but also interest and inclination.

Brian Bishop, Director of Development at TurningPoint Ministries has said,

“(Screening)… allowed us to shift from relying solely on capacity-driven prospecting to become much more inclination-driven. Unless you’re paying attention and using a tool like WealthEngine, you’re going to miss people”

Therefore, regular screenings mean that you don’t overlook donors who are ready to give. Moreover, you don’t induce disinterest through ill-timed or generic asks.

You can automate your screening process through API integration. This way, every time a donor comes into contact with a touchpoint, screening data on them can be refreshed.

2. Donor Segmentation

Segmentation can also help you combat donor fatigue. Use a wealth score such as the P2G Score. This score can help you measure not only propensity but also capacity.

An understanding of propensity and capacity can help you segment donors into lists for your annual fund, major gift program and other types of fundraising.

When you approach the right donors for the right programs, results can be vastly different. For instance, a WealthEngine client found that asking for an extra $50 to their top 1% would generate $200,000 more in a year. That’s $1M in 5 yrs!

3. Actionable Insights

Your screening data can provide valuable insights. Analyze this data to find macro patterns in your donor base. For example, you may find that all your major gift donors share 4 common traits. They all live within 50 miles of your organization, they are all over 50, they all own luxury cars, and are all interested in reading.

These patterns can help you in two ways. First, they can give you a deeper understanding of what makes your donors respond. When you communicate in a way that resonates, there is less room for donor fatigue to set in. Second, when you know what kind of donors are likely to give major gifts, you can find more like them and retain them in the long run.

4. Modeling

You can take your insights a step further through modeling. Modeling uses machine learning technology. You can create a custom model that answers a specific question at your nonprofit.

In this instance, you can create a model for early detection of donor fatigue signs. This can help you adjust your strategy with donors who are at risk. For example, your model can assign a high score to anyone who has recently donated to your cause.

This score will indicate that they should not receive any more requests in the near future. By doing this, you avoid frequency and recency issues that result in non-responsiveness.

4. Personalization

When you have segmented your donors and identified those at risk, your engagement strategy can become much more personalized. Personalization can extend to your message, the medium, and frequency.

Using results from your analysis and modeling, you can identify exactly what makes a donor respond. A response means they are interested and engaged. For instance, you can find that some donors don’t mind up to 3 emails a month, but they won’t open emails about organizational news.

These learnings help you tailor your outreach in a way that donors are not put at risk.

5. Authenticity

Personalization drives a connection with your donors. However, it goes beyond addressing them by name in emails. Authenticity is a major factor when it comes to communications. When donors understand where their dollars have made an impact and where they have made a genuine difference, engagement levels are much higher.

When personalizing communication, it is important that the tailoring goes beyond cosmetic aspects. This means using urgency only when appropriate. It also means using a tone of voice that is reflective of your organization’s culture.

6. Donor Involvement

Another key method to maintain interest is to actually involve donors in the activity at your organization. You can seek their advice on projects or fundraising programs.

Furthermore, you can also tap into their inner circle to find their close connections. Donors can help make introductions to their contacts. These contacts, in turn, could become board members or donors themselves. When donors are involved and their counsel is sought, they feel a deeper connection with your organization. This connection is strengthened so they maintain a long-term association with you.

How WealthEngine9 Supercharges Your Long-Term Strategy

WealthEngine9 or WE9, our newest release, is transforming the fundraising landscape. Explore how our Engagement Science™ speeds up the way you screen, analyze, find insights and predict outcomes through modeling.

Learn More

Recurring Donors: Why you need them and how to get them

Capital Campaigns: Fundraising Strategy for Nonprofits

June 17, 2019December 4, 2019

Engaging Alumni: 7 Steps to Convert New Graduates into Future Donors

Your students just graduated. What can you do to ensure long-term engagement among this group of graduates? If an alumnus doesn’t donate within 10 years of graduating, there’s a good chance you’ve lost them forever. Even though alumni fundraising is a long game, your advancement team should think about engaging alumni as soon as they graduate. Follow these 7 steps to build an alumni engagement strategy that results in a lifetime of giving.

Step 1: Don’t Lose Touch

When your current student body is graduating, make sure that they stay in touch with your institution. Have them join your Facebook or LinkedIn groups. Prompt them to follow you on Instagram or Snapchat. You may have an overall account for your institution and others for different departments. Encourage them to join both.

It is not enough for these alumni to simply follow you on social networks. You will also need to keep them engaged on these channels. This means you will also need to create engaging content on these channels constantly. Moreover, you will need to stay active on all platforms. For instance, you can post news about the achievements of other alumni and ask them to share what’s going on in their lives.

Similarly, sending an engaging alumni newsletter should be part of your strategy. Your newsletter is another good way to remain in touch. You can use it to highlight institutional achievements, news about your institution, and career opportunities within the network.

Step 2: Connect Alumni to The Next Batch of Students

When it comes to engaging alumni, it’s important to make them feel like they are still part of the community. Most higher education institutions hesitate to connect current students to alumni. This stems from a fear of tapping the alumni network out.

Your alumni engagement strategy should give your alumni control over communication between themselves and current students. Invite them to become mentors. This gives them the power to say yes or no. Further, it allows them to feel connected to your university and feel like they are giving back.

In fact, your current students will have a lot to gain from connecting with relevant alumni. By doing this, you are already grooming current students for long-term engagement with your institution.

Step 3: Connect Alumni to Each Other

You’ve found ways to keep in touch with your alumni base. Now it’s time to create connections among them. For example, you can encourage former students to join alumni network chapters in their cities.

So, how will these steps lead to enhanced fundraising?

The fact is that you have to establish a strong connection with recent graduates. Engaging alumni is the foundation of fundraising. They have to feel a sense of community within your institution. When recent graduates are dealing with student loans and the beginnings of their careers, it can be the wrong time to ask for gifts. At this stage, it’s important to establish a connection more than anything else.

By doing this, you are setting the stage for your long-term alumni engagement strategy.

Step 4: Engage Alumni by Appealing to their Interests

Your alumni engagement strategy has to have a long-term view. The next step is to understand alumni interests. Doing this provides you two benefits:

First, it tells you more about your alumni body in general. Second, it makes alumni engagement more effective. For instance, when you know that a subgroup of alumni is interested in the arts, you can create events that appeal to their interests. When events are catered to alumni interests, they are more likely to attend them and thereby stay connected to your institution.

Moreover, you can strengthen alumni-student relationships by connecting the right people with each other. When these relationships prove effective, it increases your credibility in the long-term.

Step 5: Screen Your Network Regularly

You may already have an understanding of an alumnus’ background and interests from the time of admission to graduation. Wealth screening can enhance your view of them. Screening can help you understand how they live, give, and save.

Alumni status and life stages are constantly changing. As a matter of fact, recent graduates tend to move often until they establish themselves. This move may be geographical or professional.

Northwestern University is a prime example. Their Development Research and Prospect Management team found it challenging to match addresses in their alumni base. Using WE Screen allowed them to match 31,000 alumni with new addresses.

Regular screenings help you ensure that you are always working with updated information. Additionally, screening can add valuable information on alumni wealth, lifestyle, interests, and affinities. Engaging alumni becomes easier when you are working with a fuller picture.

Moreover, if you have API integration enabled, you can automatically receive updated data in your DMS.

Step 6: Personalize your ask

Understanding prospects beyond their wealth is the first step towards personalized alumni engagement. When you understand what makes an alumnus tick, you can speak their language.

You should personalize not only your message but also the medium of communication. For instance, some alumni may be interested in attending a wine-tasting event in their city. Similarly, some may be more likely to respond to an invite sent via direct mail. Others may be more responsive to a phone call. Personalization boosts your alumni engagement strategy by making your message resonate.

When it comes to asking for a donation, personalization plays a major role. Using screening data and insights gives you an idea of a person’s gift capacity, propensity, and intent. You can rank prospects based on propensity and intent. This way you’re only appealing to those alumni who are most likely to donate. Your ask can also be customized to each donor based on their capacity.

Step 7: Show the impact of their donations

Once you have converted prospects into donors, it’s important to keep them engaged. Engaging alumni in the long-term results in recurring donations, a path to major gifts or even planned giving.

The most effective way to keep them engaged is to show them what their dollars have helped you achieve. For instance, you can show a microbiology alumnus that their donation helped you restore a lab. This helps them understand the direct impact of their gift. Further, it resonates with their interest in the subject. They have helped you provide top-notch facilities for future students of microbiology. When they understand how they are helping uplift future contributors to their field, it makes them more interested in giving again.

Transform Alumni Engagement Strategy with WealthEngine 9

These steps should help you have a long-term view on engaging alumni. Learn more about how WealthEngine9 (WE9) is changing the fundraising landscape.

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3 Steps to Implement a Direct to Consumer Strategy

Direct to Consumer (DTC) is transforming the way brands interact with consumers. Retailers are beginning to gain more traction by marketing over social media. By doing this, they’re breaking into channels where they can speak to their customers directly. But, for legacy retailers, it can be a challenge if they haven’t leveraged technology to optimize their outreach. Which begs the question: what are the best ways to remain relevant? And what are the best ways to engage potential and existing customers? Let’s understand the retail landscape and the steps you can take to successfully engage in direct to consumer marketing.

Listen to the full podcast.

How Is Direct to Consumer Changing the Retail Landscape?

More brands are beginning to flock to social platforms to market their products. This is presenting itself as a direct form of competition for legacy retailers. Diffusion’s 2018 Direct-to-Consumer Purchase Intent Index stated that a third of American consumers plan to make 40% of their purchases from direct to consumer businesses. Furthermore, 27% of Americans who will purchase direct to consumer products in the next five years will do so due to greater convenience.

Since the internet has democratized retail, everyone has the chance to start a business. Brands can put together an online presence and immediately begin branding and marketing. For example, before creating the cosmetics company Glossier, founder Emily Weiss created “Into the Gloss”. This beauty blog served as the springboard for the brand. This channel, along with Instagram, was soon leveraged as an online focus group for the company. They could spark conversations with potential and existing customers, asking them what they’d like to see. They’d get instant feedback and would create products accordingly. Since the launch in 2014, Glossier is now valued at $1.2 billion with only two physical stores.

Even now, big retailers are still reliant on brick and mortar stores (or wholesale environments). This means that they don’t have nearly as much visibility as they used to. So, retailers who are slow to embrace direct to consumer strategies are likely to lose more of their market share and profits over time.

Benefits of Implementing a Direct to Consumer Strategy

Leveraging a direct to consumer strategy gives retailers more control. Not only can they manage communication with customers, but they can also adapt their products accordingly.

Since customers are mercurial, they change their preferences often according to trends. As a result, they aren’t typically loyal to a single brand. But, when retailers receive comments from customers, they have the tools to make necessary changes. They can use the feedback they get to alter their messaging, products, and pricing constantly and consistently. They can identify the customer’s need directly and personalize their outreach and offerings. When they’re empowered with such data, they can deliver products and services almost immediately. Moreover, they can also increase their chances of cultivating a loyal consumer base. For example, in a 2017 study, Forbes reported that if a millennial received relevant messages based on their own interests from an institution, their loyalty increased 7% on average.

In that sense, direct to consumer gives retailers significantly more control over their revenue, what consumers are buying, and what they’re likely to buy later on. Direct to consumer marketing also enables retailers to expand their ability to sell. Businesses can increase the volume of items sold by having both online stores and physical stores. Further more, they can ensure that consumers get what they want seamlessly from multiple sources.

3 Steps to Adopting a Direct to Consumer Strategy

Here are other steps you should set in place to create a successful direct to consumer strategy:

1. Create 360 views of your customers.

Once you know your customer’s preferences, based on their feedback, it’s important to compile this information. By using WE Insights, you can view your consumers’ interests, along with pre-compiled demographic information. This will help you understand what products consumers are drawn to now, and will be interested in later on.

2. Personalize your Outreach.

Once you’ve gained a deeper understanding of your consumers’ interests, you can tailor your messaging to meet their needs. This is one aspect of the virtuous cycle of creating personalized outreach. This approach provides you with more feedback that you can then use to tailor more products. Personalization is at the core of direct to consumer.

3. Model to Understand and Appeal to Consumers.

Once you’ve identified who your loyal customers are, you can begin determining who your nest best customers will be. Start by finding the overlaps in preferences and demographic data among your consumers. This will help you determine what groups of people you should appeal to. In other words, it creates an ideal model for your business.

For example, a luxury tour operator wanted to build target prospect lists and run micro-campaigns via direct mail and email. Their customers were mostly retirees, and they wanted to expand their services to younger people who wanted to travel. After using WealthEngine’s modeling solution, the group was able to identify a core customer persona of a younger age. From then on, they were able to iteratively update their model.

Modeling helps you predict what products your customers may like in the future. It also helps you determine who, among them, has the greatest propensity and capacity to spend.

Learn How to Model Your Data to Personalize Outreach

Learn more about how modeling your data could help you personalize your outreach and increase conversions.

See how to model your data →

June 4, 2019June 4, 2019

Analytics Company, WealthEngine, Launches First Predictive Prospecting Platform

Entirely new, cloud-native architecture fueled by Engagement Science™ will change how organizations personalize campaigns and nurture prospects.

BETHESDA, MD – June 4, 2019 – Today WealthEngine announced the launch of the industry’s first predictive prospecting platform, WealthEngine 9 (WE9). With this launch, the company leaps beyond the business of providing wealth data to its more than 3,500 customers and becomes the only analytics company to provide wealth affinity scoring based on propensity, capacity, and intent.

“Segmenting who you precisely want to go after is a difficult problem today,” says WealthEngine CEO, PV Boccasam. “You can’t personalize or prioritize your message if you don’t intimately know your audience. Everyone else is focusing on what a person has while we have created a platform based on signals that reveal the why which we call Engagement ScienceTM.”

Coming to market with an entirely new cloud-native architecture, the WE9 platform consumes trillions of points of data to create more than 250 million pre-scored profiles giving you the ability to model, analyze, engage and take action with your next best prospect. Easily accessible through an API, WE9 enables real-time, compliant wealth screening within any customer relationship or donor management systems of record.

“I switched our business to WealthEngine because I realized they were ahead of the game in knowing how to make the data meaningful to their customers,” says Greg Workman, Director of Finance and Operations at Spectrum Health Foundation & Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital Foundation. “WE9 is going to make us even more efficient and effective while helping us connect with the right people at the right time.”

With this release, the company is also revising pricing to a flexible, credit-based model to optimize clients’ ability to use any of the available WE9 applications and services needed to drive their business objectives. Annual subscription clients will have access to the entire platform, with continuously refreshed data sets, and all the applications that were previously sold separately such as Analyze, Modeling, Prospect, APIs, and Connectors.

“Our models now enable us to identify a person’s propensity to donate or spend,” says Boccasam. “Interlinked with our customers’ data, WE9 has richer knowledge about their target audiences, so we can reveal their motivations. As a result of personalized engagement, our customers have seen increased lifetime value, improved campaign effectiveness and lowered
cost of acquisition.”

WealthEngine Engagement ScienceTM

As a predictive prospecting platform, WE9 enables its customers to do four critical things:

Discover insights faster than ever: Search, tag, filter, and favorite people as a way of keeping track of and prioritizing ideal donors and buyers. Through seamless access to more than 180 million US-based households and 250 million adults each with thousands of enriched attributes, discover the potential of ideal donors and buyers.

Segment with precision: Get granular with target audiences by digging deep into relevant wealth, and crucial lifestyle signals that provide insight into what motivates prospects to engage. By proactively nurturing prospects and existing donors and customers, insights are activated through personalized campaigns.

Prioritize top targets: Once ideal targets are identified, WE9 can uncover the next best donors and buyers, with automated models to find new prospects who share similar wealth and lifestyle signals. Take control of multi-channel campaigns, predict who is most likely to engage next and prioritize resources accordingly.

Activate your audience: WE9 insights go beyond wealth with more than 1800 wealth and lifestyle signals to reveal what motivates ideal prospects to take action, or existing donors to give more. By knowing what moves them, campaigns can be personalized in order to drive lasting, measurable engagement.

About WealthEngine

WealthEngine has been supporting more than 3500 industry-leading financial services, higher education, healthcare systems, advocacy, and high-end retail and hospitality organizations in capturing hundreds of millions of dollars for more than 20 years. Fueled by our wealth and lifestyle signals, our customers measurably improve their personalization and effectiveness across fundraising, capital campaigns, marketing, and overall engagement with their audience.

Rooted in machine learning, with a cloud-native architecture, WealthEngine 9 platform boasts an entirely new user experience to provide wealth, demographic and lifestyle signals that come together to formulate powerful scores, available in real-time. Underpinned by the company’s Engagement ScienceTM, WE9 targets, segments, and models prospects continually so customers will know what motivates their audience to save, buy or donate.

WealthEngine is hosting it’s second annual WE Prosper Summit, October 1, 2019, at the famed interactive Newseum in Washington, DC. The company is an active participant in Pledge 1%, regularly giving back to the community it serves through time, product and donations. Based in Bethesda, the company has offices throughout the US. Learn more at wealthengine.com.

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