How To Use Data Analysis To Create A Good Faith-Based Marketing Strategy

Using data analysis to create your faith-based marketing strategy reveals important insights about your donor base. When you understand exactly who your donors are and what drives them, you can be more proactive in your marketing approach, improve donor engagement and increase returns on fundraising efforts.

Data analysis and predictive analytics conserve time and resources by improving supporter engagement and overall returns on your fundraising efforts by connecting with donors that are more likely to have an interest upfront.It also gives you insights that help you craft messaging that will tap into their current emotional connections as well as their past actions.

Predictive analytics is the branch of advanced analytics used to make predictions about future events. It analyzes data with techniques such as data mining, statistics, modeling, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Data analysis is the process of systematically applying statistical and/or logical techniques to describe, condense, recap and evaluate data.

Data analysis can unlock hidden insights by:

• Predicting which donors are most likely to donate, how much they will give and when they will be most likely to donate.
• Identifying prospective donors.
• Optimizing the frequency of donor contact to maximize contributions.
• Understanding and anticipating donor needs, behaviors and preferences.
• Determining where to deploy donor resources for the biggest returns.
• Identifying the most effective messaging and channels for solicitation.
• Anticipating when staff should provide additional attention to a specific donor.

There is a wealth of resources for gathering data to input into your data tools. These tools can reveal correlations and insights that will help you find out who your best donors are and how to talk to them with a faith-based marketing message that resonates.

Data analysis helps you find the best predictors and test the variables so you can start anticipating what donors want. That way you can personalize donor interactions and bring them more of the content that they love. When you combine several data sets, the results can be even more powerful. At Yaffe, as a third party, we’ve been able to take data from several inter-related faith-based organizations, score the donors based on this bigger combined data set and then return each data set to the individual organizations with richer insights without sharing proprietary information outside of the individual organizations. This allows even further personalization through deeper insights.

Data can re-enforce your faith-based marketing strategy and provide valuable insights about opportunities and unmet needs. This works especially well online where it’s easier to gather data. Audience profiling tools can help you gain a greater understanding of what kinds of content your potential donors are engaging with by tracking site visits, post engagement, interactions, authorship, publishing times and dates. The insights pulled from this kind of data can help you create content with a higher rate of potential interest with:

• Customized outreach.
• More personalized direct marketing offers.
• Relevant email campaigns and social media engagement.
• Organized events that people want to attend.

Using data behind your relationship-driven communications plan will help turn bystanders into advocates. There are always new insights to be gained. Integrating these insights back into your data analysis on a regular basis:

• Strengthens your faith-based marketing strategy.
• Enhances donor engagement.
• Improves fundraising.
• Advances your organization’s cause.

Data and analytics gives traditionally old world thinking faith-based organizations the tools they need to compete with all the new places and ways donors have to spend their time and money. It lets you have insights to create strategies that will compete with the latest gadgets everyone wants. You can tap into the deeper emotional connections with the right messaging at the right time to create the actions that help your organization – whether it’s volunteering their time, giving more now or setting up an endowment program.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can make your data work harder for you, just let me know. I’d be happy to share what I know. You might also like our previous post, Why You Should Use Video In Faith-Based Marketing To Inspire, Motivate & Unite.

Michael Morin, with a deep faith in data