Demographics: Actionable or Just Informational?
At DMI we’ve been spending some time talking about the best way to utilize demographic data and I wanted to share with you some of my thoughts.
The main question is whether a demographic overlay is actionable or does it just provide some interesting pie charts. A little of both I think.
House File Mailings
Trying to select donors for an appeal mailing using demographics is tricky. RFM still reigns supreme in that aspect. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t still use demographics to your advantage. What I’m referring to is messaging. For example, if your file is diverse in age ranges, you may want to test different communications to your 70+ donors. Or, you may want to do some premium testing basted on donors’ interest codes.
A word of caution. Try to keep any demographically based messaging as subtle as possible. Letters mentioning a donor’s age, income and the fact that they like cats will only serve to creep them out.
Acquisitions
Another way to apply demographics is to first break your active donors into quartiles or deciles based on a metric or your choosing such as lifetime donations or donations in the last 12 months. Once that’s done, compare the demographic breakouts of the top performing group to the other quartiles or deciles. If you discover any demographic values that are more present in that top group than the others, you can try to target the sources of those types of donors in your acquisition mailings.
This information is particularly useful for those marginal lists. If you knew one of those lists contained look-a-likes to your top donors, it might be worth the investment to include it in your mail plans.
If any of you have had luck using demographics in other ways, I’d love to hear from you.
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This entry was posted on January 30, 2011 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Data Overlay, Demographics. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
