Top 4 Reasons Why Your Nonprofit Needs Marketing Automation

Imagine this: it’s the end of the fiscal year, and your organization has a few unmet fundraising goals. You vowed to take a more strategic approach to this year’s fundraising appeals, but staffing changes and organization-wide shifts disrupted your plans. Now, you are once again sending last-minute email blasts to your entire database on the final day of your fundraising campaign.

Sound familiar?

Now more than ever, donors expect a seamless, thoughtful experience built on trust and perceived value from the nonprofits they support. This heightened expectation requires a long-term, personalized approach to constituent engagement rather than a short-term, transactional one.

While this type of strategy may sound daunting, marketing automation can help you tackle it using your existing time, resources, and expertise.

Marketing automation refers to the use of technology to automate marketing activities. This tool can be a game-changer for your organization, helping you to ultimately spread your mission to a wider audience.

Integrating marketing automation into your marketing plan is a no-brainer. However, just in case you need more convincing to adopt this tactic, we’ll delve into the top four reasons why your organization should utilize marketing automation. Let’s get started!

1. Increase constituent engagement with personalized messages.

It’s no secret that personalization is key to successful communications. However, meaningful personalization requires knowledge about who your constituents are, what they value, and what types of messages will compel them to act.

A marketing automation solution can help you gather this information and put it to use. 

By combining demographic information with data points such as the types of email content your audience reads most or which web pages they frequent, you can create content that speaks to why a recipient cares about your mission. Double the Donation’s guide to donor data recommends storing typical demographic data such as names and contact information, as well as behavior-oriented data like preferred communication channels and giving history.

For an example of how marketing automation can help, let’s examine the steps you would take to use marketing automation when you’re planning a fundraising event:

1. Set up your automation tool. Before you begin, you’ll need to set up your marketing automation tool and make sure it’s integrated with your CRM.
2. Identify past attendees. For your next event, you’ll want to reach out to past event attendees and encourage them to sign up. With marketing automation, you can easily identify which supporters have attended your events in the past.
3. Reach out to past attendees. Next, you can use marketing automation to schedule invitations and inform past attendees about your upcoming event. If you haven’t audited your CRM in a while, marketing automation can also help you clean up your data so you’re making decisions based on accurate information.

A marketing automation solution also allows you to track the effectiveness of your efforts. By using reporting and analytics features, you can easily share that information with your internal stakeholders, leading to an iterative approach to constituent communications.

2. Stay top of mind with donors, even when it’s not fundraising season.

How often are you sending non-solicitation communications? Despite your best intentions, it can be difficult to consistently prioritize customized thank-you messages, stewardship emails, donor recognition outreach, or other non-fundraising touchpoints.

However, it’s important to keep your donors engaged year-round. Getting Attention’s donor engagement guide explains that engaging your supporters can help prevent donor lapses, identify major gift opportunities, and segment your supporters into useful outreach groups.

With a marketing automation tool, you can automate:

• Stewardship drip campaigns. Keep your supporters engaged and informed year round with a stewardship drip campaign. That way, you can develop meaningful relationships with supporters.
• Thank-you messages. It’s important to thank donors immediately after donating so that they know you appreciate their contributions. Automation speeds up the donor recognition process.
• Acknowledgment campaigns. To drive further engagement, you may set up an automated acknowledgment campaign. This is similar to an automated thank-you message but includes regular follow-ups about what a donor or volunteer’s contribution has helped your organization accomplish.

Let’s walk through how this automation process works. For example, a donor contributes $50 to your organization. With the help of marketing automation, you can set up an automated workflow that notifies your team to thank the donor for their gift. That way, you can thank donors as quickly as possible without having to manually review new donations each day.

3. Encourage corporate giving.

If you’re not already taking advantage of corporate giving opportunities, you’re missing out. Volunteer grants and matching gifts can supply your nonprofit with tons of additional revenue each year. However, many people are not aware of these opportunities in the first place. Additionally, if you don’t actively encourage your supporters to fill out the necessary forms and send them to their employers, donations can slip through the cracks.

Using automation can ensure that you’re maximizing corporate gifts. Consider asking volunteers if their employers offer volunteer grants. If they do, ask them what the name of their company is and send an automated reminder to follow up with these select volunteers. In your follow-up, remind volunteers to submit a volunteer grant request to their employer so you can receive the resulting funds.

You can repeat the same process for donors and their matching gifts. By using automation to spread awareness of matching gift opportunities and remind eligible donors to submit matching gift requests, you can earn double or triple the amount of donation revenue.

4. Save staff time and internal resources with automated communication.

Marketing automation is not a silver bullet, set-it-and-forget-it solution. Implementing and maintaining marketing automation involves planning, content creation, and consistent data maintenance to truly provide value to your organization.

But if your communications team is already stretched thin (or nonexistent), a bit of concerted, strategic effort at the outset will be well worth the investment. After a sound implementation of your new system, you can easily get to a place where you’re sending your constituents a variety of content, learning more about them, and gathering data about which approaches are working—all in an automated manner.

This way, you can spend less time pulling lists and building last-minute emails, and more time strategizing and making an impact. By using technology like the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can create different automation workflows for new donors, donors who haven’t contributed in a while, or donors who just opened an email of yours. Once you set up these different donor journeys using branching logic, the system will automatically trigger the workflow for each future donor who falls into one of those categories.

More and more organizations are utilizing automation technology to transform their marketing and fundraising efforts. It’s important to keep up with peer organizations so your nonprofit can operate as efficiently as possible, retain donors, and show supporters why your cause is worthy of their support.

Marketing automation isn’t just another marketing trend for nonprofits. It’s the way of the future and will propel you to maximize your time spent on mission-critical initiatives. If you’re interested in learning more about how marketing automation can transform your nonprofit, connect with us to work with an experienced nonprofit Salesforce consultant.