Press Release: 6/13/2025

Accelerating Donations Through Personalization and Marketing Automation

 

Marketing automation may not be the first priority you think about when considering how to allocate your limited resources, but you may be overlooking a highly effective growth opportunity to increase donor engagement.

One area where data investment helps drive growth relates to marketing automation and campaign management. Efficient data management can make a big difference in your communications approach (meaning higher personalization), frequency of communications, and overall reach, and therefore can have a direct impact on donations to your non-profit.

On the marketing and communications front, over the past 10 years, there has been an explosion in hyper-personalized communications. This benefits greatly from structuring your information in a useful and complete format and from gathering as much data as possible to inform your communications.

• Systems such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud (formerly Pardot) allow you to build customer/prospective donor journeys (rules-based/triggered custom communications). These systems also gather input from website traffic and email responses to better understand the contact’s individual preferences.


• The use of content to help drive awareness within your audience and create a sense of community around your cause is paramount. This content creation often involves blogs, webinars/video, podcasts, or other media types. These are often hosted on different systems with traffic data stored separately.


• Google analytics and traffic resources are often handled separately.

AI and search tools can be used to gather content for insertion in communications (e.g. testimonials, case examples, background data on the “need” in the community).

Data solutions can be implemented to bring this disparate data together and provide a feedback loop to drive the process of constructing and managing effective outreach campaigns. These can be optimized to get the best response rates managed at an individual relationship level, based on their preferences and behaviors driving increased contributions and donations.

In addition, the data can be augmented, analyzed, and streamlined using AI- based solutions. The result is that investment in marketing automations can have a high return on investment for even smaller nonprofits by turning brand engagement into converted donations.

Working with a Data Solutions technology partner can help your organization stay ahead in an increasingly data-intensive world. Whether you’re looking to improve efficiency, reduce costs, or make smarter decisions, working with external experts can unlock new opportunities for growth.

Ryan Knight is the Team Lead, Data Solutions at Insource Services, Inc.