This is a guest blog by Lauren Taylor with Windfall.
Let’s set a scene: You’re a plus-one at a wedding, and your partner is in the bridal party. You’re at a table with nine other people you’ve never met. What are some of the first questions you ask to get to know them better? What’s their name, connection to the couple, and very likely, “What do you do for work?” Learning about someone’s career is a great way to assess someone’s interests, passions, and what you might have in common.
Now, imagine you have this information at scale for your nonprofit’s constituents. Employment attributes such as job title, current company, and recent career changes can help your team prioritize outreach, find a perfect fit for your board, assess someone’s giving potential, and more.
Windfall is a people intelligence and AI company that gives nonprofit organizations actionable insights on donors and prospects, such as acquiring new donors, increasing gift size and frequency, and driving more impactful constituent engagement at the right time. Powered by best-in-class AI and propensity modeling, Windfall activates insights into workflows that engage the right people for each respective organization.
Windfall works with hundreds of organizations, and we’ve identified five ways to use accurate and dependable career intelligence data to accelerate your fundraising efforts:
Identify Major and Principal Donors
Discover Mid-Level Donors
Select Candidates for Board and Volunteer Positions
Uncover Matching Gift Opportunities
Personalize Outreach
1. Identify Major and Principal Donors
Utilizing career insights as a predictor of an individual’s financial ability to make a major or principal gift is a great way to enhance your outreach and relationship with a prospective or existing donor - especially when combined with wealth insights.
In the example above, a prospect may have a complex financial situation that could inhibit an accurate representation of net worth (affluent people can be very skilled at hiding their wealth!), but, career data shows that they are an executive at a large private equity firm. Bonus: They have a history of donating to your organization. This could be a promising candidate for your major gifts team to engage with.
2. Discover Mid-Level Donors
Beyond the C-Suite, looking for prospects with Vice President and Director-level titles is a great way to identify constituents early in their careers. These prospects may not have the current wealth to either make a major gift or be moved into a major gift portfolio yet, but they may be a “rising star” working their way up the corporate ladder.
By engaging constituents earlier in their careers, you can secure your next generation of loyal donors. This approach will help with your long-term forecasting and secure a strong foundation of future giving. So don’t wait for these donors to become executives to contact them! Instead, reach out now, and their giving potential will grow along with their relationship to your organization.
3. Select Candidates for Board or Volunteer Positions
Nonprofit boards are an influential part of idea generation, cultivating philanthropic commitments, and growing your pool of champions who spread the mission and impact of your organization. Career data can guide your efforts to fill board and committee positions and help build your
volunteer program. By using company and industry insights, you can ensure you have a diversified set of talents and expertise. Here are a few examples:
MARKETING: Having a marketing professional on your board can help you optimize marketing within your budget and ensure you’re working with a trusted marketing agency or consulting firm.
FINANCIAL PLANNERS OR ESTATE ATTORNEYS: Planned or in-kind giving are great ways for your constituents to build a legacy through your organization. Estate planning professionals can help you address your donors’ financial needs, and help your organization build a program to receive complex gifts.
VOLUNTEERS: According to the 2023 Bank of America Study of Philanthropy, affluent volunteers spent an average of 135 hours volunteering in 2022, and 62% said doing so was very or completely fulfilling. Retired individuals may be looking for opportunities to spend time on their passion projects and support a mission-driven cause.
4. Uncover Matching Gift Opportunities
Not only can career data help with your individual donor and board prospecting, it can also enhance your broader outreach efforts. As you build reports for an upcoming annual appeal or stewardship event, consider adding career insights like job title and employer to further segment and customize your messaging.
One example is employer matching gift targeting. With the start of a new year, many development teams are measuring the success of their end of year campaigns. But, they might be missing out on a huge opportunity if they are not adding their donors’ employers to these lists. By adding employers to donor lists, you have the opportunity to identify donors employed by a matching gift company. From here, you can customize your stewardship messaging to include instructions for your donors to request a matching gift from their employer.
5. Personalize Outreach
Career data, especially when updated frequently, can be essential to personalizing individual outreach efforts to your constituents. Windfall’s data can help identify individuals who have retired within the past six months, as well as individuals who were recently promoted or changed companies! Any of these career events are perfect moments for development teams to engage their constituents. For example:
A LAPSED DONOR WHO HASN’T GIVEN IN 5 YEARS GETS A NEW JOB AS A VP: Consider sending a handwritten congratulatory note, following up with an ask a few weeks later.
A LOYAL DONOR RETIRES: Give them a call congratulating them on their retirement, and let them know about planned giving and volunteering opportunities.
A CEO’S COMPANY GOES PUBLIC: Celebrate this huge success by sending them a swag bag, and add them to a major gift portfolio if they are not already.
Conclusion
Career data is a powerful tool to help identify qualified donors and refine how to engage with your constituents at scale. Leveraging career data to personalize messaging and to send timely outreach can help your organization develop deeper relationships and stand out from the rest.
Download Windfall’s eBook today to learn more about how your organization can get more value out of employment data, as well as ways to apply career intelligence to boost fundraising results.