The Pros and Cons of Nonprofit Marketing Personalization
When it comes to digital marketing, competition for attention is fierce. One effective tool nonprofits can leverage to stand out and connect with supporters is personalization.
Increasingly, consumers expect the content they see online to be tailored to their interests, and strong personalization strategies ensure your nonprofit’s messages align with that expectation. However, while personalization has many pros, there are also several downsides nonprofits should be aware of.
To help your nonprofit understand the nuances of personalization and better market its content, this guide will review the top pros and cons of this popular outreach strategy.
Pro: Improved Donor Relationships and Lifetime Value
By tailoring content to an individual donor’s preferences, you demonstrate that your nonprofit cares about their specific support. As a result, the supporter is more likely to feel a connection with your nonprofit, increasing the chances of continued support.
Strong donor relationships lead to increased lifetime value, which is the amount a donor will give over the course of their engagement with your nonprofit. As the relationship with a donor deepens, their average giving amount increases. This means stable, long-term donor relationships are incredibly valuable, and you can lay the foundation for them with strategic personalization.
A few ways you can improve your donor relationships with personalized content include:
- Adhere to personal preferences. When donors share details about their preferences and interests, record them in your donor database. This allows you to reference them the next time you reach out to that donor. This might involve tailoring donation request amounts based on their past gifts, sharing campaign updates from projects they’ve supported, and contacting them via their preferred communication channels.
- Create an emotional connection. Donor relationships are often based on emotion. Storytelling is already an effective marketing engagement tool, and it can be even more effective when you share stories relevant to individual supporters. For example, if a donor gave to a specific campaign, you might share a story from an individual who directly benefited from that campaign to reinforce the impact the donor made.
- Maintain regular contact. Building relationships takes time. Steward your donors by staying in touch and consistently personalizing your messages. If you address a supporter by name in one email, then follow it up with “Dear donor” in the next one, they may question how your nonprofit views them.
By maintaining consistent, emotionally driven personalized communication with donors, you can secure them as long-term partners.
Con: Reduced Donor Privacy
To tailor each message to donor preferences, you will need to collect, manage, and store extensive data on your donors. As a result, some donors may have privacy concerns. This can lead to complications, including:
- Legal compliance. Be aware of and follow relevant data collection and privacy laws. For example, if you collect donor phone numbers via your donation form, you may want to start texting them to increase engagement. However, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act bans sending unsolicited text messages, requiring all organizations (including nonprofits) to attain explicit consent before doing so.
- Security issues. Data breaches are a common occurrence, with over 1.7 billion individuals having their data compromised in 2024. As your nonprofit stores identifying donor information, such as contact and financial details, you may put donors at risk if a data breach occurs. Prevent this scenario by implementing thorough technology protections, training your staff to spot fraud, and having a plan ready if there is a data breach.
- Individual donor preference. Privacy-conscious donors may choose not to engage with organizations they feel use excessive tracking. You can accommodate these supporters by making non-essential information fields on your donation, volunteer, and event forms optional and experimenting with a cookieless website.
To protect donor privacy and maintain consistent practices, create internal guidelines for collecting and using donor data. This might include guidelines such as vowing to never share donor information with other organizations or not storing data for donors who are minors.
Pro: Boosted Engagement and Marketing ROI
Supporters are more likely to engage with content that’s aligned with their interests. By personalizing your marketing outreach, you can increase open, clickthrough, and conversion rates.
Improve your fundraising strategy by tracking engagement data for both content and channel types:
- Content type. Use your CRM to record the types of content formats, topics, and messaging strategies supporters respond to. For example, you might notice a segment of donors often engages with content that includes videos but ignores primarily text-based messages. Or, you can note which of your nonprofit’s programs individual supporters engage with, and send them related content.
- Communication channel. Different supporters use different primary marketing channels. Maximize your return on investment by noting not just which platforms receive the highest engagement rates, but which individual supporters are engaging. For example, you might improve the ROI for your text marketing strategy by removing supporters who do not respond to your messages from your mailing list.
Additionally, track individual supporters’ past engagement with your nonprofit. For example, a supporter who previously volunteered with your nonprofit is likely to be interested in news about your volunteer program.
Con: Significant Technical Investment
Personalized marketing strategies can produce a significant ROI. However, they often require significant investments to get started.
Nonprofits operating at scale will primarily rely on technology to create personalized content. Robust CRMs like Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud can create an integrated technology ecosystem, where all data from supporter interactions is captured and stored in one comprehensive system.
Building out this system and customizing it to your needs will require investing both your nonprofit’s time and money. Researching and purchasing the software you need will likely be a long-term process, and you will also need to consider technical consultant fees and implementation timelines.
When launching your marketing strategy, consider the upfront costs and potential ROI to decide if intensive personalization is right for your nonprofit. Smaller and growing organizations may start with limited personalization efforts and slowly scale up. For example, these organizations may leverage an email platform with segmentation and personalization features but may not immediately invest in a custom, comprehensive database.
Ultimately, when approached deliberately and with the right tools, most nonprofits can navigate the drawbacks of a personalized marketing strategy and reap its benefits. Assess your nonprofit’s current resources and budget to determine if you’re ready to begin investing in the strategies and platforms you need to personalize your content.
