Cultivating Giving Part 2: Determining your audience

Welcome back to Cultivating Giving! As a result of our last topic on storytelling, we received lots of questions on how do you tell a story when everyone is looking in a different place? The answer is far more complex than “share it everywhere.” You must get to know your audience in a deeper way to be able to connect with them.

Exploring the concept of “audience”

No organization has just one audience, and navigating your various audiences can be difficult. As a nonprofit, you likely have very diverse audiences that you are appealing to including those you are looking to support, volunteers, individual donors, or large donors like foundations.

Because your audience is varied, they behave in their own unique ways. They want to interact with you in different ways and on different platforms and devices.

Today, we will explore some data pertaining to audiences, how to assess your own audience, and how to develop your own personas.

Overall data and demographics

I want to briefly explore data and demographics for some of the most common platforms for Giving Tuesday — social media, email campaigns, and direct mail.

There is a never-ending amount of information on which social media platforms are most used by what age ranges, genders, regions of the country, etc. However, across the board (with the exception of teenagers), Facebook is still the most used platform by everyone from your niece to your grandma. Instagram has a strong, growing presence and is very popular in the 18–29 age range. Of course Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube are not to be ignored. Consider where your organization might thrive the most and focus on a couple of social media networks instead of them all.

Read more social media stats. Need help developing a social media strategy? Send us an email at hello@sarahobenauer.com

With nearly 4 billion email users, email marketing done well has a lot of potential. We’ll address some of the key features of email marketing later in this lesson. 73% of millennials want their communication with a business or organization to come via email. Read more email marketing stats.

Email is cheap. Direct mail campaigns are more expensive and more complex to coordinate. However, they can be striking. Whether it is a handwritten note or an elaborate, functioning record player. Direct mail is most popular amongst the 65+ demographic, as well as those in the (hold tight for this) 18–34 age range. Because millennials have been inundated with digital communication, physical mail holds a certain novelty that catches attention and feels more intimate. Read more here.

When it comes to email or direct email, segmenting is key. You’ll want to divide up your audience based on key demographics (like age, behavior, engagement level, etc.) so you can tailor your message. The direct mailer or email you send to someone in the 65+ demographic, will be very different than what you send to your millennial audience.

Now we’ve discussed a few basic stats and demographics, but what matters most is your organization’s analytics, which may be similar to or dramatically different from the industry standard.

Understanding your analytics

All of your social media platforms have their own analytics tools with an excessive amount of information. Social Media Examiner does a great job of breaking this out, but ultimately what you are trying to determine when looking at the data is the following:

• Who (age, location, gender) is engaging with your organization on social media (likes, shares, comments, clicks)?
• Which posts (video, photo, links, etc.) are most often engaged with?
• What is the written content of those posts?
• When does my audience most often engage with my posts?

If you can answer those questions, then you have a guiding light on who is seeing your posts and connecting with your organization, when the best day and time is to post, and what your messaging should look and sound like to increase engagement.

The same principles can be applied to email. In your tool of choice, you can access reports that show your open rate for each email, who opened your email, and who clicked on which links. From this information, you can make better decisions for emails in the future, like when to send and what kind of subject line to use. You can also use the “click” data to determine what is most interesting and to who, so you can connect with them and resource them in the future. Some features to consider:

• Segmenting your audience
• A/B testing with various subject lines
• Optimizing when you send based on your audience member’s time zone
• Resending emails to those who did not open it

Millennial giving

There is a lot of conversation around millennial giving. In fact, we could dedicate an entire week to it, but I would encourage you to check out Classy’s Guide to Millennial Giving for the full scoop. However, I do want to highlight a few key pieces of information.

• According to Nonprofits Source, 84% of millennials give to charity.
• They want to trust and understand what they are giving to, so be open and honest
• Storytelling matters, they want to connect to a cause and telling a story is the best way
• Millennials are accustomed to seeing high-quality design, so design does matter
• Monthly giving is more appealing because you don’t have to pay up one lump sum, but can commit to a smaller, ongoing amount
• Millennials are more comfortable in a digital space and are willing to give on their phones or through texts
• Millennials want to contribute their time and skills for good, like through Make a Mark

Developing personas

Audience personas often sound like a term used in marketing to make money off of a specific group of people, however, by identifying your organization’s personas, you are able to determine better ways to solve their problems and continue to do work that matters.

Personas come in different shapes and sizes because what you’re looking to understand may vary, but the following examples and exercises will help you get to what we view as the most critical pieces of information when building a persona for your organization or business.

Download our Audience Personas Workshop.

In action

Take some time to complete the Audience Personas Workshop over the next week and reach out if you have any questions!

Next, we will cover a bit of planning ahead for your campaigns. Let me know if you have any particular questions or prompts for this topic.

Need some extra help preparing your campaign? Give our Cultivating Giving Package a look. We’ll walk you through some of the exercises in the course, provide our guidance and strategy, and even create some deliverables like social media templates.

Cultivating Giving was prepared by Purpose Craft, an empathetic approach to design, marketing, and event planning. We believe in leveraging the power of creativity and technology to make something impactful for your organization.