Annual Fund Segmentation

Samantha Picazo

Hello there! I have been having a rough go of segmenting my organization's donor base for our annual fund. We have decided on a few different groups we'd like to hit, but we haven't been able to group them properly in query.


We are a children's museum so part of donor base are museum members, donors, or both. The problem is that we'd like to group together donors who are not members and members who are not donors. Our database isn't completely healthy, so we are having trouble pulling the right criteria. Does anyone have experience with this? I would so appreciate your help!

Elizabeth Johnson

Hi Samantha,


I used to do all of this in RE directly. So many changes were made and then both RE and then the spreadsheet also needed to be managed. This has worked well for us for about the last 3 years/9 appeals.

 

We segment our appeals on average 26 different ways of which a portion from each segment/package is returned to us for hand personalization. I find the easiest way to handle this (and not have to make changes to multiple places) is to export all the fields that I need for the mail house along with the fields that would allow me to make my decisions as to which package they should receive to excel. I then set up the appeals and packages in the spreadsheet using filters. Then our solicitors can tweak our managed prospects as they see fit. The spreadsheet is then shared with our mail house, removing columns of sensitve information first after one final backup that also contains our paperless groupings. Packages can be updated as new gifts come in right up until the mailing has been printed - we make one call into our mail house with the final changes. Then I import the appeal and package into RE making sure I have duplicated the same information on any spouses records as my original export is for the HOH to ensure no couple gets two different appeals unless they have specifically requested to be solicited separately.


It is way more efficient to set the packages in the spreadsheet. The export can take awhile to run. I have rebuilt it recently and it has improved and I still plan on it taking between 1 and 2 hours. I simply do something else while it runs so it isn't like it is taking my time.


Hope this helps.


Best Elizabeth

Christine Cooke 2

Samantha Picazo:

Hello there! I have been having a rough go of segmenting my organization's donor base for our annual fund. We have decided on a few different groups we'd like to hit, but we haven't been able to group them properly in query.


We are a children's museum so part of donor base are museum members, donors, or both. The problem is that we'd like to group together donors who are not members and members who are not donors. Our database isn't completely healthy, so we are having trouble pulling the right criteria. Does anyone have experience with this? I would so appreciate your help!

That should be two queries, and possibly one or two more if you have some folks you want to exclude (so that you can merge queries to subtract those you do not want to include).  It is best to decide which of those two groups is the priority and load them into Quick Letters to generate queries that you can then merge or export into a list or letters etc.

 I have had to do a lot of segmenting for annual fund -- up to 15 or 18 segments.  The best lesson I learned was mapping out a hierarchy and running them through the segmentation area of Quick Letters for the final queries.


I do not know what exactly you mean by data not healthy.  But if you have housekeeping to do overall -- then you are not going to get clean lists until that is done, so you will have to comb through and do clean up manually on your lists.

roger berg

Samantha Picazo:

Hello there! I have been having a rough go of segmenting my organization's donor base for our annual fund. We have decided on a few different groups we'd like to hit, but we haven't been able to group them properly in query.


We are a children's museum so part of donor base are museum members, donors, or both. The problem is that we'd like to group together donors who are not members and members who are not donors. Our database isn't completely healthy, so we are having trouble pulling the right criteria. Does anyone have experience with this? I would so appreciate your help!

Hi Samantha-


How do you indicate whether a constituent is a member? Do you use separate appeals, funds, and/or campaigns to differentiate money given for membership vs. money given as a donation? Do you use attributes to tag those who are members? If so, it should be a fairly simple query if I'm understanding you correctly. You could query on whether they have the member attribute and a gift to anything besides the membership fund/appeal/campaign - assuming these are paid memberships.

Or - if your members make a single payment in a calendar year to pay for their membership, look at members with a number of gifts greater than 1 for that time period (under Summary Info - Total Number of Gifts and filter by the time period), or non members with a number of gifts greater than or equal to one during that time period.


Good luck!