Here are the Best Data Segmentation Tools for Your Nonprofit

Data segmentation is a useful way for nonprofits to deliver tailored communication to targeted audiences. (If you aren’t familiar with the concept of data segmentation yet, read our article all about data segmentation for nonprofits here.)

Your stakeholders can be segmented in many ways – by age, location, frequency of donation, donation amount,  and more. Data segmentation tools help you take off the burden of doing this manually and also help with keeping your segmentation real-time, which would require a lot of effort when done manually.

While there are many sophisticated tools to help you achieve this, selecting the right customer segmentation tools requires the careful consideration of a few factors, which include:

• Customizability –  Opt for tools that will let you customize the way you can segment your data so that it best serves your unique nonprofit. Look for a tool that is intuitive and lets you explore your data in ways that are most meaningful to your nonprofit
• Scalability – Your nonprofit is expected to grow like any other organization, which also means your database size is bound to grow. Be sure to choose a tool that works for you at scale. Consider the capabilities of the tool for larger audience size and the associated costs before making a decision. 
• Visual representations – Visual representation helps you to a great extent when it comes to understanding and analyzing your data. Having a tool with comprehensive visual representation will be a huge factor in making your data segmentation journey effortless and smooth. When looking for tools, look for something that allows you to build dynamic charts and one that updates in real-time. 

With this established, let’s look at the best data segmentation tools that your nonprofit can use. 

Google Analytics – A very sophisticated tool that is free!

Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics tool in the world. Google Analytics has the ability to track and store quite a bit of information about the people who land on your website. It’s a robust tool that’s customizable, scalable, and visually powerful. You can use Google Analytics to segment your online audience on dimensions such as location, new user versus returning user, donors, session lengths, pages viewed, etc. While Google Analytics doesn’t allow you to capture the contact information of these segments, it does give your organization a clear understanding of the audiences that are visiting your website, helping you to tailor your content to those users. 

Kindful – A CRM tool built for nonprofits.

Kindful facilitates fundraising, donor tracking, analyzing interactions, and more. Nonprofits can track the donation history of donors, event participation, past acknowledgments, pledges, etc. This is a holistic CRM tool that can help your nonprofit with not just tracking, but also fundraising and scheduling relevant communication to your audience segments. 

Bloomerang – Bloomerang is a cloud-based solution that’s particularly good for small and growing nonprofits. It enables users to view an organization’s donor records, track the best time to contact each donor, and measure a donors’ engagement levels to make it easier for users to know when someone should be contacted. The tool also allows you to access donor retention rates from the Donor Retention Cockpit, where each donor has a profile of their giving summary. You can rank your donors’ engagement levels as “cold,” “cool,” “warm,” and “hot” depending on their behavior. 

Donor Perfect – This is an easy-to-use holistic tool that helps your organization manage donations, contacts, receipting, reporting, email, events, and all of your fundraising initiatives. The tool also offers donor data tools that allow you to track campaign engagement, donation history, donor retention rate, conversion rates for specific emails, donor targeting, and filtering among other features.

Aside from Google Analytics, which is free but doesn’t work for segmenting communications, the other tools in this list offer a freemium model or paid subscriptions depending on your database size. Nevertheless, investing in these tools can help you increase your nonprofit’s efficiency and effectiveness, therefore allowing you to generate more funds. When you experiment with segmentation ideas and analyze your results over time, you’ll see how data segmentation helps in adding a layer of personalization to develop long-lasting relationships with your donors.