Personalization at scale has been described as “the holy grail” of fundraising. 71% of donors report that personalized engagement makes them feel more engaged, while nearly half of nonprofit donors report dissatisfaction with the level of personalization they receive.

Many nonprofits have implemented manual solutions to increase the personalization of their communications, including the ever-popular donor surveys. Donor surveys can be a great way to get to know your donors better, but they also present several key challenges for fundraisers.

1. Good survey design takes significant time and effort
2. Most of your audience likely won't actually opt to participate
3. Once you've analyzed the survey results, implementing changes to your communications also requires manual effort
4. Surveys show a snapshot of a point in time, but don't reflect changing and evolving donor interests

When your donors consume media in their daily lives, they likely turn to apps and websites that serve them an endless supply of content automatically tailored directly to their interests, based on their previous behavior and interactions. Not only do those algorithms personalize the type of content delivered to each viewer, they evolve and adapt as people develop new interests.

Your organization likely collects similar content interaction data, like email opens and clicks. But for most organizations, rather than powering personalization, that information sits in a database unused, while donors continue to receive one-size-fits-many outreach. 

This problem affects nearly every single nonprofit, so Dataro is proud to announce our latest AI-powered donor propensity model: Interest Areas.

Our Interest Areas tool helps you easily determine the type of content that each of your donors finds most compelling, so that you can target segmented audiences with personalized updates and appeals.

How Interest Areas works

In order to use Interest Areas, Dataro will need to first access your email history, through an integration with Mailchimp or another email marketing platform. Then, fundraisers and marketers guide the AI by specifying the content themes they would like to analyze. These often include the main issues or topics of an organization’s work, regions you work in, identity or affinity groups you serve, or anything else that you have previously sent emails about. You can repeat this process and reanalyze your data with different interest area criteria as many times as you’d like, so the possibilities are endless. 

Once the topics for analysis have been identified, Dataro creates a list of the donors who are most engaged with each interest area. Additionally, Dataro provides a detailed analysis of each list, including donor demographics, giving patterns, and history with the organization. This analysis can help fundraising teams construct donor personas, identifying different cohorts of donors with similar interests within their databases. In addition to the donor lists generated by past email interaction behavior, Dataro also creates “Similar Donor” lists, identifying donors with similar demographic traits to the donors on your Interest Area list, who are likely to share similar interests.

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How to use Interest Areas in your marketing and fundraising campaigns

Once you've analyzed your donor interest areas, here are a few of the ways that you can activate it to drive more impact in your marketing and fundraising campaigns. 

1. Find where your mission resonates

With Dataro’s configurable Interest Areas, you can ask the model to analyze any number of topics that you’ve sent emails about to determine which are the most popular with your audience. 

2. Create donor personas

Dataro’s AI analysis can help you spot demographic trends and build donor personas around each common topic. Do younger donors and older donors have different preferences? What about donors who have been with the organization longer, or those who tend to give more? Understanding the way your current donors behave can help you nurture new donors in a more personalized way.

3. Build targeted audiences for each appeal

Fine tune your appeal audience by segmenting donors with different interest areas, in addition to choosing the donors most likely to respond, to ensure that you’re investing your time and resources in the most efficient and impactful way.

4. Personalize content for each donor

Segment your email list by interest area to send each donor the content most interesting to them, to keep them opening, reading, and clicking. Using Dataro's personalized content generation tools, you instantly draft email and appeal copy tailored toward the preferences of the donors on your list.

See how Interest Areas helps segment and personalized a real life email campaign in the video below:

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