21 Mar How Artificial Intelligence Is Being Used to Boost Donor Relations

From virtual chat systems and targeted ads to the recommendations streaming platforms make on what you should watch next, artificial intelligence (AI) has already surrounded our everyday lives. Now, nonprofits are embracing technology to transform their fundraising strategies, allowing them to increase operational efficiency and improve relationships with donors. Here’s how AI is being used to boost donor relations:

Personalizing emails to enhance the donor experience

You’re more likely to get engagement from your email campaigns when you deliver content that recipients care about. But you’ll get even more attention when each email is personalized to meet the needs of an individual donor or potential donor. Unfortunately, individually tailoring each email is a massive task, especially if your donor list involves hundreds or thousands of recipients.

AI can help, allowing you to improve open email rates through email content that is personalized to provide a better donor experience. AI can accomplish this by analyzing the recipient’s previous interactions with your campaigns to determine what content the donor may find most relevant. Through an analysis of your collected data, the AI tool extracts the donor’s actions, such as what they’re viewing, reading, and clicking on.

Finding the optimal time to appeal for donations

Communicate too little and you lose out on opportunities. But if you reach out too frequently, you run the risk of driving away people with what they may perceive as “spammy” behavior. But how do you find the right number of touchpoints when people’s preferences vary? Leverage your nonprofit’s historical fundraising data and power it with AI tools to analyze when individual donors are the most receptive.

AI can also help you automate recurring giving options, saving you the time and resources of creating a full-blown recurring giving campaign. Technology can help you convert one-time donors by streamlining the check-out process and automatically calculating the most appealing donation amount. Using your valuable data, AI can also measure whether a donor is likely to give major or mid-level gifts or likely to join a recurring program – allowing you to reach donors at the right time and with the right message.

Optimizing email campaigns to be more effective

You put donor relations at risk when you email them irrelevant emails or fail to email them a confirmation that they’re expecting, such as an email acknowledging their registration or upgrade. This can happen when you’re taking a manual approach to your email marketing.

AI gives nonprofits a powerful method to analyze data at scale, allowing them to identify patterns and make better decisions. AI can take the valuable insight that you’ve collected to provide you with ways to optimize your email campaigns and build better donor relationships. Rather than going through your email lists manually, AI can be programmed to segment donors into dynamic lists – ensuring that you’re not delaying communications or sending emails that are not relevant to them. Through AI’s ability to generate predictions, you can ensure you’re not missing any opportunities that put your donor stewardship strategies at risk.

About Jennifer Vickery: Jennifer is the President and CEO of National Strategies Public Relations, a PR firm that focuses on nonprofits and organizations with corporate social responsibility initiatives. Her background is in national public relations campaigns, where she oversees every aspect of PR strategy utilizing her 16+ years of senior-level experience. She’s worked for hundreds of national clientele through every facet of PR. Jennifer has extensive experience, including writing a regular column for a newspaper, producing a health television segment, serving as a radio personality for advocacy issues, producing a weekly radio show, to owning and running a successful public relations firm. Jennifer states media relations, community outreach and goodwill, in addition to strategic planning, as her favorite aspects of PR.

Jennifer is truly inspired and lives every day knowing she is making an impact on the lives of people in the community by providing expert information and the best-of-the-best in businesses, community involvement and goodwill.