Managing Your Donor Funnel with bLoyal
The architecture for most loyalty programs involves an exchange of value. Now that we’ve identified what we have to offer, it’s time to decide what actions we want our members to take. And while cash donations always help, you likely have a broader set of common needs, all of which you can leverage a loyalty program to help meet:
For example, start by offering rewards for donating to your cause. Broaden your objectives by offering rewards for volunteering at your events or spreading the word about your charity’s needs on social media.
The capabilities around accomplishing these added functions may vary between platforms and networks, but don’t be afraid to push the boundaries of your loyalty investment. Creating goals such as sharing of your donor loyalty program can have a dramatic impact on awareness and boost the collateral value of your program.
Donor CRM
As donors contribute to your nonprofit, they are automatically added to your donor loyalty program. They can log in and out of their account across platforms. Individual donations are automatically added to their donor record. These individual records become the base of your program and can be managed, either individually, or as part of a larger program from within your loyalty CRM.
Offers & Promotions
Offers can be launched from directly within your donor loyalty program through a back-end dashboard. You set the rules. When donors meet all the qualifications of any given rule, they are automatically awarded.
Segmentation
With your donor program list in place, segmentation enables you to plan and execute marketing strategy, and content, to understand how donors engage with your program. Where we would usually add products, nonprofits can add a donation amount. This amount serves to combine with static-level segmentation to help you better understand who your most valuable donors are, which campaigns are driving the highest returns, and what you can do to take your program to the next level.
Marketing
For so many non-profits, marketing boils down to an ever-increasing number of generalized email fundraising requests, that at best, tend to produce tepid results. Fortunately, for nonprofits who require this donor loyalty to thrive, there’s a better way.
Creating goals such as sharing of your donor loyalty program can have a dramatic impact on awareness and boost the collateral value of your program.
Marketing your non-profit with bLoyal starts with understanding the value that loyalty programs provide to your overall strategy. In the retail system, customers who were engaged with targeted marketing were up to 6x more likely to respond to your requests if they were targeted with relevant content, based on their history with your brand. In not-for-profits, this could be construed with donation levels. Build and launch highly targeted campaigns based on each donor’s history and push targeted messaging with:
- Bulk Email Campaigns
- Social Media Remarketing
- Landing Page Donation Portals
Analytics
To solve this problem, not-for-profits are beginning to take a page from the B2C playbook – where two key performance indicators known as “average order” and “customer lifetime value” – are the gold standard in measuring a business’ ability to attract and retain customer spend. These same metrics can be applied to your donor program and used to help understand the relative value that each donor brings to the table over time.
Telling a story about who your donors are and what each one means, starts with an understanding of how your marketing efforts are driving donations. Which channels are the most effective? Which campaigns yielded the best results? What did your most frequent donors have in common, and how can we grow this segment?
Loyalty programs like bLoyal help you do this with out-of-the-box reporting that measures which donors are more likely to donate in the future and at what amounts. This starts with integrated reporting and dashboards, but software like Microsoft’s Power BI can be used to combine your loyalty program data with overall marketing expenditures and see which.
IMPLEMENTING YOUR DONOR LOYALTY PROGRAM
The most common implementation of a donor loyalty program starts with an integration to your website and its payment processor or eCommerce functionality. In place of products, you can add various donation amounts. This allows potential donors to contribute directly to your program through an integrated web cart module. As donors contribute, they are onboarded to your loyalty program in real-time.
No donation is required to add a member to your loyalty program. At events where potential donors may not be ready to give, but would like to be contacted with more information, leverage text to join functionality in order to ensure that you’re able to retain and contact that potential member at a later time about their donation.
We don’t just want to drive donations based on rewards. We want to leverage our loyalty program to drive a sense of belonging and the common good
While an integrated loyalty program won’t stop you from taking payments as a direct donation, there are a number of direct benefits to managing this process through a website or other digital application. Namely having to do with automated data collection, segmentation, and marketing.
Web carts also offer an easy way to help you solicit donations at events and other offsite events, where a tablet can be used to sign new donors up. In a worst-case scenario, donors can be manually signed up for your program.
Modern loyalty programs can be integrated directly into your Word Press, Magento, or Shopify CMS and easily surfaced in your application through a loyalty SDK.
Loyalty programs are, by and large, known as a tool for retailers, restaurants, and other commercially-oriented businesses to build customer lifetime value through various awards programs. Nonprofits can take a lot of lessons and
apply these same strategies to their own donor funnel, however. Automate this process with loyalty and rewards platforms like bLoyal and these programs can become a central tenant of driving donations to your cause.
For more information on how bLoyal helps drive customer lifetime value, please visit us at www. bloyal.com or talk directly with our team at sales@bloyal.com
