It’s no secret, say Jay Love and Steven Shattuck from technology entreprenuers Bloomerang, that effective donor communications are the route to higher donor retention rates – but what makes for effective donor communications?

Segmenting your emails, newsletters and acknowledgement letters is a great way to customise and individualise your messaging to donors. But, they wondered, are most nonprofits doing this?

So Bloomerang recently conducted a survey with the Nonprofit Marketing Guide to see how (if at all) nonprofits are segmenting their online and offline communications. You can view the results in their infographic on the right.

Survey findings at a glance

• Most nonprofits either have robust segmenting practices or none at all.
• Donation amount and action history are the most common segmenting methods.
• A lack of knowledge, data and technological ability most commonly prevent segmenting.

Survey methodology

Six multiple choice questions delivered via email to SurveyMonkey.
Data collected between 19 March, 2014 and 9 April, 2014.
425 respondents, most with budgets less than $5 million.

You can download a full pdf version of the infographic here.