How Nonprofits can Create (Useful) Donor Personas
Most nonprofits know that donor personas are important, but many find difficulty crafting ones that are useful and not overbroad (male: 16-60, between 5’2” - 6’5”, with interests). There is an art to creating personas that are specific enough to be useful, but broad enough that you’re not having to create a hundred of them.
In this post, we’ll discuss what donor personas are, how to create effective ones, and how you can leverage them to serve your nonprofit’s goals and mission.
Why Do I Need Donor Personas?
In addition to providing you with a clearer picture of the people who support your mission, donor personas allow you to craft messages that resonate with the right people at the right times.
Without personas, it can be easy for nonprofit communications to become myopic. Everything becomes about them: their work, the communities/people they serve, their mission ...
This is all important information that you can leverage in a variety of ways. But when you're asking audiences to give you something—whether it’s donations or just their attention—it pays to use messaging that speaks specifically to the things they care about.
How Many Donor Personas Should My Organization Have?
It depends. Begin by compiling basic demographic information about your supporters, such as:
Education
Occupation
Family
Income
Age
Gender Identity
Cultural Background
Location
Tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Insights, and any CRM tool your organization uses can be a good place to start. You’ll also want to gather information about their donation history: amount, frequency, and recency.
Once you’ve compiled this information, examine it for patterns and segment accordingly. For example, one segment might include individuals aged 35-45, married with children, who have donated only once. The way you choose to segment your list will depend on the information you have, as well as your organization’s goals and target audience.
Don’t Ignore The Competition
Once you’ve segmented your donors, take a look at some of your competitors. Are your competitors going after the same target market segments? Are they reaching segments you haven’t thought to consider? If necessary, you can create additional personas for donors you have not engaged with, but whom you would like to.
Analyze Your Audience’s Psychographics
For each of your segments, try to compile as much psychographic information as possible:
Attitudes
Interests
Goals
Challenges
Values
Opinions
Lifestyle
You can fill in some of this information from social media. You’ll also want to reach out to whomever is responsible for donor engagement for anecdotal information about each segment. Depending on what information is available, you may also want to interview some of your donors, or provide them with relevant questionnaires to fill out and return.
Creating your Donor Persona
Once you have a sense of what motivates each group of donors—their circumstances, goals, and challenges—you can finally begin crafting your personas.
The goal is to take all of the information you’ve compiled and distill it into a persona that embodies that segment’s most relevant characteristics. Good donor personas feel specific and tell a story, but are still general enough to be representative of the group.
It can be helpful to imagine you are creating a social media profile for this person. What sorts of information might that person choose to include? Assign them a name—Gen X Ginny, for example—and fill in specific details from the above categories.
Donor Persona Example:
Gen X Ginny is not a real person, but she feels like she could be, right? Your donor personas ought to give you a strong mental image of the person you are speaking to while, in a broader way, also appealing to the rest of the segment.
Name: Gen X Ginny
Age: 47
Occupation: Marketing Director
Income: $150,000
Education: Bachelor's Degree
Family: Married with two children (20 and 17)
Location: Suburb
Interests: Yoga, cooking, and cycling
Values: Community involvement, health and wellness, and family
Communication preferences: Email newsletters and personal phone calls
Challenges: Concerned about the impact social media is having on her children and the culture. She values close connections, but struggles to devote adequate time to them given her busy schedule.
Charitable giving: Regularly donates to local food banks and homeless shelters. She also recently made a donation to the children's hospital.
Motivations: Making sure her children understand the importance of philanthropy and helping those less fortunate.
Note: Ginny is busy, but she values the personal touch of a phone call. She appreciates being informed about her donations’ impact.
Purpose-Built Messaging
Donor personas can appear deceptively simple. In reality, effective ones require a great deal of analysis and some creativity. Having them, however, gives you the ability to craft custom messages that appeal to specific audiences for specific reasons at specific times. For example, a call for volunteers might utilize a different persona than, say, a fundraising campaign.
You’re Not In It Alone
Use the process above to craft compelling personas that take your organization’s messaging to the next level. And if you run into any trouble, remember: we are always happy to assist with this or other marketing-related tasks.
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