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Standardizing your nonprofit’s approach to donor identification, acquisition, and stewardship is crucial for maintaining an efficient and effective fundraising process. That said, a donor list can help you centralize your efforts.

 

A donor list is a collection of information about existing and potential donors to your nonprofit. It usually includes details such as contact information, donation history, engagement activities, interests, preferences, and wealth indicators. Your nonprofit can use your donor list to identify, qualify, and start communicating with supporters quickly.

 

In this guide, we’ll review these tips for crafting a donor list that aligns with your nonprofit’s needs:

 

1. Use a CRM with Robust Features
2. Implement a Dynamic Scoring System
3. Try Social Listening
4. Collect Insights from Marketing Efforts

 

As we explore these best practices, consider how your nonprofit currently approaches donor acquisition and engagement and which tips would fit best into your fundraising planning process. 

Use a CRM with Robust Features

As the home for your donor data, the most important tool to help you build donor lists is your CRM. However, your CRM needs to be configured correctly and have the right features to be useful for your nonprofit. Ensure your CRM has the following features:

 

• Configurable donor profiles. Choose a software with adaptable fields so you can collect the information most pertinent to your donor community.

• Donation processing. Automated funds syncing removes menial tasks from your team’s plate and reduces human errors.

• Customizable reporting and analytics. Use these tools to determine the effectiveness of your donor lists and highlight areas of improvement. 

• Automated workflows. AI and other automation features can provide suggestions for optimizing your donor list and taking effective next actions.

 

Also, remember that your nonprofit’s data hygiene practices can impact your database’s effectiveness. NPOInfo’s guide to nonprofit data hygiene suggests standardizing your data formatting, scheduling regular data backups, and auditing your database to remove any incorrect or duplicate records.

Implement a Dynamic Scoring System

Standardizing donor qualification is important for accurately prioritizing outreach and stewardship efforts, especially if there are multiple people on your team. Adopting a dynamic scoring system helps you pinpoint high-value donors while taking your organization’s changing needs into account. For example, let’s say that you’re running a sorority or fraternity capital campaign. Your scoring system might include criteria like:

 

• Average donation amounts
• Graduation class
• Donation frequency
• Engagement history
• Matching gift/corporate giving eligibility
• Interest in supporting your chapter
• Networking connections
• Engagement with the chapter before and since graduation

 

Once you’ve determined your scoring system’s categories, assign a point value for each one. Then, work with your team to reorder your donor list based on how many points each person gets. 

 

Throughout the scoring process, don’t forget to correct for circumstances unique to your nonprofit. For instance, if you’re scoring donors for your capital campaign who have already pledged support for a different campaign, take their other engagement into account so you can tailor your asks appropriately.

Try Social Listening

While you should reach out to your donors for feedback directly, you should also pay attention to the buzz about your nonprofit on other channels. Social listening, a technique that involves monitoring digital mentions of your nonprofit (usually on social media), can enhance your understanding of your donor population and make your donor lists more specific. Follow these steps to get started with social listening:

 

• Choose the right tools. Some digital marketing and social media management tools feature social listening tools that track keywords and phrases for your nonprofit and send alerts when relevant digital conversations start, stop, or change. 

• Monitor how external factors impact your nonprofit. It’s important to note that, while keyword-tracking accounts for the volume of digital mentions, it doesn’t necessarily include context about why these conversations start. For instance, a donor could tag your nonprofit online mentioning that they can’t attend your charity auction this year, but it might be because they’re being impacted by economic challenges instead of feeling discontented with your nonprofit.

• Regularly analyze data. Once you have a robust dataset, look for patterns in sentiment and how they align with external trends. Note any common criticisms or compliments that can help you improve your donor lists.  

 

Remember that social listening for donor list development works best if you have a strong online community that regularly talks about your nonprofit. Before deciding to adopt this technique, gauge approximately how many users discuss your nonprofit online and how often they post. If you have a donor community that leans older or doesn’t use social media, you might want to consider a different approach to expand your donor list.

Collect Insights from Marketing Efforts

Your marketing efforts are built to align with your donors’ motivations, preferences, and pain points, all of which are useful insights for donor lists. If your nonprofit has already developed successful and data-driven marketing efforts, you can leverage this information to better categorize and understand donors on your list. Some key marketing tools that can yield useful data include:

 

• A/B test results. If your nonprofit has tested different types of messaging to see which resonated most with donors, you have an understanding of certain donor segments’ motivations and interests.

• Donor personas. Personas are a useful tool for nonprofit marketers to step into their donors’ shoes and better understand their psychology. Detailed personas include their demographic information and hypothetical life situations or motivations. 

 

To picture these insights in action, let’s return to the example of a sorority or fraternity running a capital campaign. Marketing insights from these tools might look like this:

 

• A/B test results show that alumni/ae donors respond best to appeals that focus on cementing their legacy on the chapter, moving them higher on your capital campaign’s donor list.
• Donor personas reveal that alumni/ae who have graduated in the past decade show interest in large-scale eco-friendly building updates, placing them higher on a donor list for a capital campaign in this area.

Whether you’re working to retain first-time donors or searching for major campaign contributors, donor lists can streamline and optimize your outreach efforts. If you follow these tips and have the right tools and expertise about your donor community, you’ll be optimizing your lists in no time.