6 Easy and Low Cost Ways to Build Better Relationships with Your Donors using Technology

Donors deserve the “Disney Experience”. That means we should give them awesome service including:

• Making it easy for them to donate, volunteer or advocate for you
• Providing speedy acknowledgements (thank you’s and receipts)
• Delivering honest, clear and transparent impact reporting that help them understand how their money was spent
• Yielding access (in case they have questions, want to give feedback, or just want to talk)
• Engaging with them with highly-relevant, super-personalized messages sent at the right time

 
These days it’s easier than ever to give your supporters this kind of service through the use of low-cost, high-productivity technologies.  Here are 6 of the best:
1.  Use online e-listening tools to track and score donor online engagement.  Now you can track everyone that cares about your mission by monitoring how often they visit your website, where they click, how frequently they visit, and more.  Each click can be recorded in their individual donor profile.  The clicks can even be scored and ranked in order to determine who is most passionate and when. By monitoring their engagement you won’t need to interrupt disengaged prospects.  Rather, you’ll be able to communicate with the folks who are most engaged and ready to volunteer or make a gift.
2.  Use online surveys to gather intelligence that you can use later to deliver highly personalized, hyper-relevant communications to your supporters based on their preferences.  You can drive people to the surveys using email.  Or you can create pop-ups on your website.  And, finally, you can employ retargeting ads that will appear after your supporters visit your website.
3. Use “Chat Now” tools.  Private companies use them all the time and aren’t they terrific and convenient?  They are easy to deploy too!
4. Include “Contact Us” buttons on your web pages.  Make them prominent and easy to click on.  Don’t hide ’em.  And make sure they can email you with a simple click.
5.  Create a Virtual Advisory Board for major donors and legacy society members.  Why not give major and legacy donors “Bat-Phone” access so they get the V.I.P. treatment they deserve?  Mal Warwick recommended this in some of his books but I think it works better in a virtual environment.   The best ones should include Webinar and chat tools.
6. Use email marketing automation tools. Once you know your donors’ preferences you can easily segment your audiences to receive more relevant, personalized messages.  That’s easy.  But who will send all those personal emails?  Your computer!  Now you can program tons of pre-written email messages to be sent out based on lead score triggers or on predetermined dates and times.
 

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