In today’s world, we need nonprofits more than ever. 

Over the past six months the Dataro team and I have gone on “listening tour,” having in-depth conversations with many of our clients about how they are navigating increasingly complex landscapes while continuing to push forward in their work. 

There is one thing that we’ve heard constantly: right now nonprofits also need us - their donors, volunteers, and supporters, more than ever. 

Downward trends in donor retention mean that global nonprofits, especially North American nonprofits, continue to face the daunting challenge of replacing approximately half of their donor base yearly in order to maintain their annual revenue. 

Attracting and retaining donors is the most important, and most challenging task for many organizations working to fund critical programs across the globe, and right now many organizations are on the edge of a crisis. Here is what the data tells us:
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• In 2023, the typical global nonprofit retained 57.1% of donors (that is, only 57% of donors who gave in 2022 donated again in 2023). For North American nonprofits, overall donor retention rates are even lower, ranging from 40-45%.
  
  
• In 2023, only 28% of new donors gave a second gift, and projections for 2024 indicated a drop to just 26.9%. That means 72% of first-time donors in 2022 stopped giving in 2023. Over the longer term, approximately 69% of first-time donors never gave again.
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Fundraisers today certainly don’t have it easy. These conversations are what led to our most significant update to the Dataro platform to-date. 

Our team of expert data scientists, engineers, and designers have worked to bring the content of countless hours of research and conversations to life in the new and improved Dataro. This next evolution of the Dataro platform is built to help fundraisers attract and keep the attention of today’s donors, with targeted, personalized, omnichannel campaigns that meet each individual with the right message, at the right time.

Here are some of the most exciting changes we’ve made:

1. We've deepened our focus on personalized, audience-first fundraising

We heard a common theme from almost all of the fundraisers that we spoke with: they want to put the donor experience at the heart of their campaigns, targeting donors with messaging that inspires them, and asks that connect with them. Dataro now puts your donor audiences front and center, with AI-segmented Smart Audiences that identify fundraising opportunities for your organization based on your donor data. Are you keeping up with your Pen Pals (donors who always respond to a mailing) or your Clicktivists (those subscribers who LOVE taking action online)? We built Smart Audiences to make it easy to track and engage all of them.

Our improved Audience Builder tool gives you the full power to customize and create targeted audiences directly in the Dataro platform, with the ability to further filter your lists based on standard CRM fields as well as predictive modeling ranks and scores. Once you've built your target audience, you can instantly push it back to your CRM to start your campaign.

Additionally, our updated AI content assistant now not only drafts fundraising copy based on your chosen topic and tone of voice, but personalizes it based on the audience that you’ve selected - can Chat GPT do that? (spoiler: nope!)

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2. We’ve added a suite of tools to support digital marketing & omnichannel fundraising

Many Dataro users know and love our predictive AI models primarily for their use in high-cost direct marketing channels, where enormous costs can be saved by predicting the donors who are likely to respond (and those who aren’t) and targeting mail and telemarketing campaigns accordingly. 

Now, we’ve added multiple new tools to support email and online advertising campaigns as well, enabling organizations to coordinate layered, multichannel fundraising campaigns, and analyze a complete, 360° view of donor interactions.

One of the most exciting new features in this category is Interest Areas, a tool that analyzes the content of your organization’s email marketing communications and examines donor interactions like email clicks and opens to identify which topics resonate most with each of your donors, and segment lists of each identified donor persona.

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3. We’ve added additional models to help you engage and convert new donors

While we want to help you engage and retain your current donors, some lapse will always be inevitable, and you’ll need to find new donors to make up the difference (maybe even grow your program). Donor acquisition can be extremely expensive, so converting existing supporters and subscribers to donors is a big priority for many of the organizations that we’ve spoken with. Dataro’s new First Gift model identifies email subscribers that are ready to take the next step with your organization, to help you understand which prospects to target with an ask and which still need additional nurture.

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4. We’ve created a more integrated experience, for a seamless transition from insights to action

Donors today often interact with an organization in multiple channels, visiting your website after receiving a mail piece, or clicking on a digital ad a few days after reading your email newsletter. We’ve added integrations with Mailchimp, Hubspot, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud to enable you to analyze donor data that reflects all of the ways that your donors are communicating with you, and run coordinated multi-channel fundraising campaigns with ease. New integrations with Google Ads and Facebook Ads make it simple to create an audience and instantly launch an online advertising campaign in coordination with your latest mail appeal, or to segment high propensity or high value donors to create lookalike donor acquisition audiences.

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5. We’ve given the platform a glow-up

We know that fundraisers don’t have the extra time in their days to deal with learning how to use unintuitive tools. Dataro’s fully redesigned user interface is built to make the more tedious fundraising processes, from segmenting lists to drafting appeal content, simple, fast, and even enjoyable. While previously data modeling, predictive analytics, and machine learning have been terms and tools reserved primarily for data and technology teams, Dataro makes it easy for fundraisers and marketers of all levels of tech savvy-ness to activate their data for smarter, more targeted and personalized fundraising. 

Want to see just how easy it can be? Take a guided tour of the platform here: 

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Donor engagement and retention is often an uphill battle, but there is hope. When an organization is able to secure a second gift from a new donor, 59% of those donors will continue donating. Engaging donors in a targeted and personalized fashion pays off time after time, as we’ve seen through countless experiments and case studies. 

If you’re wondering how AI audience targeting and personalization could change the trajectory of your organization’s donor retention, we’d love to talk with you. You can schedule a personalized demo with our teams in the US, UK, and Australia here. As always, happy fundraising!