Using Data to Deepen Donor Relationships: A Quick Guide
Your nonprofit collects a lot of data on its supporters. Every time someone makes a donation, registers for an event, signs up to volunteer, purchases merchandise, participates in an advocacy campaign, or responds to a marketing message, new data is created. But are you using this information to its full potential?
While data can serve many purposes at your organization, relationship-building is among the best activities to leverage it for. Effective fundraising isn’t one size fits all, and data helps you tailor your strategies so you can create a connection with each individual donor that leads to long-term support.
In this guide, we’ll discuss a few practical ways your nonprofit can make the most of its data to develop stronger donor relationships. Let’s get started!
Segment Your Supporters
Analyzing donor data as a whole might tell you what your supporters do, but it doesn’t really tell you who they are. Segmentation—the process of grouping donors based on shared characteristics—helps you get a better understanding of the latter. And when you know who you’re trying to reach, you can develop tailored communications that resonate with your intended audience.
DonorSearch’s donor analytics guide outlines a few categories of supporter data that you can use for segmentation, including:
- Demographics: Age, gender, location, education, marital and family status, employment, wealth
- Psychographics: Hobbies, interests, values, lifestyles, opinions, pain points, motivations for supporting your mission
- Giving history: Average donation amount, giving frequency and recency, preferred contribution channel, lifetime value
- Non-donation engagement: Interactions with marketing materials, event attendance, volunteer hours, advocacy participation, in-kind contributions
From here, you can choose the right segments to target for each of your campaigns and create messages that elicit a positive response. For example, if you’re creating direct mail appeals for annual fund giving, you might prioritize sending them to older, wealthy donors who usually give via paper checks. However, if you’re testing out social direct messaging for the first time, you’ll probably be better off targeting younger supporters who are active on social media and sending information about activities they often participate in, such as volunteering or advocacy.
Conduct Prospect Research on Potential High-Impact Donors
While segmentation can tell you a lot about your donor base, relying on these groupings isn’t enough to cultivate the highly personalized relationships necessary for major and planned gift fundraising. Getting to know these high-impact supporters begins with conducting prospect research, a process where your team gathers both internal and external data to help you determine if an individual might make a large donation to your nonprofit.
It’s critical to assess both the ability and willingness of a prospect to determine whether they’re a viable candidate for major or planned giving. To find these potential donors, look for the following three types of data, also known as markers or indicators:
- Capacity indicators, which show a prospect’s financial giving potential, include real estate ownership, stock holdings, business affiliations, political contributions, and other wealth data.
- Philanthropic indicators—i.e., past donations to your organization or other similar nonprofits—reveal if a potential donor has charitable tendencies.
- Affinity indicators demonstrate whether a prospect would want to support your specific organization and include a connection to or passion for your mission, a history of non-donation nonprofit involvement, and other relevant personal information (e.g., interests, values, and family ties).
The most important indicators to identify will vary across different fundraising initiatives. For example, the team members in charge of your planned giving program should look for potential donors who have life insurance policies and wills in addition to the usual capacity indicators. Or, if you need major donors for a capital campaign, the best candidates will have interests and values that align with the campaign’s goal (e.g., university donors who enjoy sports would be the most likely to give to a capital campaign to build a new football stadium).
Incorporate AI Into Your Processes
You might have heard artificial intelligence (AI) called “the future of nonprofit fundraising.” However, research shows it’s quickly becoming the present—more than 85% of nonprofits are exploring AI as of 2025, and nearly half of organizational leaders in the sector believe AI has the potential to significantly boost efficiency and productivity in key areas of their nonprofit’s operations, including donor engagement.
There are two major types of AI tools your nonprofit can leverage: predictive and generative. Predictive AI tools analyze data, recognize patterns and trends, and project future scenarios based on these findings. Generative AI can also recognize patterns in data, but it uses this capability to create original content (text, images, videos, etc.) based on those trends and user prompting.
The best nonprofit AI strategies involve predictive and generative solutions working together. For example, you might use a predictive modeling tool to sift through prospect research data and identify the candidates who are most likely to give to a particular initiative. Then, you can enter the data into a generative AI solution to help you draft talking points for introductory meetings, follow-up emails, and donation requests that are tailored to each donor.
However, your goal in leveraging AI tools should be to enhance processes involving donor data, not give them over to technology completely. AI is still evolving, and relationship-building requires a human touch that these solutions can’t provide. Carefully review and revise all of your generative AI tools’ outputs to ensure your messages align with your nonprofit’s mission and brand, and use predictive analytics as one factor among several in your decision-making.
Track Key Relationship-Building Metrics
Although data on individual donors is generally most helpful for building relationships, holistic information is also important for refining your strategy and continuing to make the most of your nonprofit’s available resources as you cultivate donors. To put this into practice, consider tracking relational metrics like:
- Donor acquisition rate: How many new donors did your organization gain over the past year or during specific campaigns?
- Donor retention rate: How many of last year’s donors gave again this year?
- Average gift size: How much are donors generally giving?
- Major gift solicitation success rate: Of the major gift asks you’ve made, how many resulted in a large-dollar donation?
- Marketing analytics: Which communication channels get the most interactions and drive the most conversions?
- Supporter satisfaction: How do donors feel about their experiences with your nonprofit?
Store all of this information in your nonprofit’s donor database or constituent relationship management (CRM) system so it’s easy to access and analyze at any time. Additionally, 360MatchPro’s data management guide recommends integrating your CRM with other software (such as your marketing, accounting, and prospect research tools) to allow for automatic data transfer, which saves your team time and prevents mistakes.
The tips above should provide your nonprofit with a solid starting point for leveraging its data to build stronger donor relationships. Make sure to adapt these strategies to align with your organization’s goals and prioritize your supporters’ unique needs to cultivate real connections and community around your cause.
