2. The Power of Data-Driven Decision-Making
If there’s one thing nonprofits repeatedly excel at, it’s embracing the power of data to uncover key signals about their donors’ motivations for giving.
Some of these signals are fairly obvious. For example, a key takeaway of the pandemic era for nonprofits was that people who were most concerned about the impact of COVID-19 were most likely to donate. Other times, it might take a little sussing out to determine what, exactly, might lead people to strengthen their financial support of an organization.
Decision intelligence can help, and forward-thinking nonprofits would be wise to explore its benefits in 2023. As explained by CDW, decision intelligence is “an automated, engineered approach that gives organizations the ability to process large amounts of data to improve business decision-making.” It does this by applying “machine learning to your existing data to help business leaders make decisions.”
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Larger nonprofits with deep data sets and the budget to pursue more cutting-edge solutions are best positioned to take advantage of decision intelligence. Those that do may see clear benefits. For example, data from Giving Tuesday found that while 28 percent of people donate money, it’s more common for donations to come in other forms, such as goods or volunteering. However, 35 percent of donors do both.
Simply put, potential could be high to encourage people who donate nonmonetary support to eventually donate monetarily. Decision intelligence can empower nonprofits to parse these different kinds of givers, helping them to understand their unique motivations and limitations — and offering insights on how they might be moved up the giving ladder.
“There’s an opportunity to think more about how you could actually segment people in a more precise way to address this kind of fundamental need,” says John Costello, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Notre Dame who released a study last year on the impact of donor choice in defining how people support an organization.
At a time when small-donor numbers could be dipping downward, nonprofits need to think more strategically about how best to target their audiences.
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