Three Keys to Better Alumni and Donor Segmentation
Maybe this sounds familiar: The College of Business has an urgent need to send a fundraising appeal via email. If we're being honest, what default criteria will be used to create the mailing list? Some combination of business graduates and past donors to that college?
Our own experience tells us the net should be cast wider, right? After all, you may have engineering or law graduates who are passionate about supporting business education and vice versa. A better segmentation formula might include "areas of interest" in addition to which college their degree is from — broad areas like the visual arts, environment or fighting poverty.
We're hoping to serve as the sole provider of compelling information to our constituents. What is it that only we can provide?
The trick is to set up your team and workflow for success. It will take careful planning to capture (and capitalize on) what seem like a few easy data points, but we can boil the process down to a few important elements:
1) A content strategy your institution can deliver on.
Let's work backward from our end goal. We're hoping to serve as the sole provider of compelling information to our constituents. What is it that only we can provide? A likely answer would be student, alumni and donor success stories. Or perhaps we have a strong reputation in a specific area of research. The classic news hook of "first, best or only" is a great way to drill down on this question and find points of pride to highlight.
The answers here will help build our improved segmentation. If our college or university has historical expertise in cancer research, then chances are we'll have plenty of newsworthy content to share in the way of research grants, alumni accomplishments and unique academic programs. Is your college the first or only one in the nation with a certain major? Did the university climb in a recent ranking? All great indicators that content will be there for future mining.
2) A way for alumni and donors to provide communication preferences.
No matter how your institution manages data, some tool is needed to collect and execute on feedback about how our audiences value and consume information.
This may be a web page, a form in a user portal hosted by your CRM, an online survey question, a raffle card collected during an event — or all of the above! Whatever the methods or resources at your disposal, it's important to pursue alumni and donors where they are.
For example, an online survey promoted via social media or email may be a cost-effective first step. Over time, it may be worth investing in a basic response mailer in an alumni magazine or other ways to capture data from loyal supporters who aren't regular website visitors or email readers.
3) A system for applying those preferences to list creation.
With any luck, at this point we're sitting on mountains of rich, actionable, awesome new data. How can we ensure it's used effectively and consistently?
Depending on your system and resources, the basic principle here is to feature some way, during list creation, to incorporate the user preferences you collected. So, back to our original example, you might segment the email to include:
Degree holders from the College of Business
Past donors to the College of Business
All constituents that have indicated an interest in "Business education" in their communication preferences
In terms of consistency, imagine you provide email preferences to your alma mater or favorite retailer online today. Then, every few months, you're asked to do so elsewhere and the list of choices keeps changing. This is frustrating for you as the user, and shows the underlying system likely causes staff headaches too. The list of smart new preferences you developed should appear identically across multiple formats, media and for years to come.
Of course, gaining early consensus and buy-in from colleagues also goes a long way toward ensuring the survival of your hard work. In turn, you'll be creating a better experience for alumni and donors, as well as lifting up the powerful stories of students, educators and researchers.
And what's better than that?
About Me
I’m a freelance partner for small business, higher education and nonprofits with more than 20 years of award-winning experience in marketing, writing, design and strategy. Proud graduate of The University of Toledo and Michigan State University.