Online and Offline Data: Why Your Nonprofit Needs Both

Gabrielle Perham

In today’s digital world, your organization may be tempted to focus solely on its online presence and connecting with supporters virtually. Alternatively, you may go the traditional route and use outreach methods like direct mail and physical data collection sources like paper surveys.

The truth is that your nonprofit needs to leverage both online and offline strategies and implement data from both sources. In this guide, we’ll explain the benefits of using online and offline data and dive into some nonprofit use cases where leveraging both data types can take your strategy to the next level.

Benefits of Using Online and Offline Data

The more variety in your data sources, the better. When your nonprofit leverages a mix of online and offline data, you can unlock the following benefits:

Holistic understanding of your supporters. When you gather both online and offline supporter data, you gain a more comprehensive understanding of their behaviors, preferences, and previous interactions with your nonprofit. This information allows you to customize your engagement strategies to your supporter base.
More precise targeting and segmentation. As Deep Sync’s data-driven marketing guide explains, data marketing is based on quantifiable facts about your constituents. Instead of guessing what types of messages your target audience may respond to, data makes it possible to run a campaign based on what you know to be true about your supporter base.
Better supporter engagement. Better data leads to better personalization, giving your supporters a better experience with your nonprofit. This makes them more likely to engage with your content—whether that’s email newsletters, social media posts, direct mail campaigns, event invitations, or website announcements.
More effective fundraising campaigns. By collecting both online and offline fundraising data, you can better understand supporters’ giving preferences and cater to them accordingly. You can also better analyze your fundraising results and use the insights you gain to improve your approach.
Comprehensive reporting. Combine online and offline data to get a better sense of your nonprofit’s overall impact. When you analyze data from all aspects of your organization’s operations, you can identify trends and make data-driven decisions that drive even greater impact in the future.

Diversifying your data sources opens up opportunities to improve the supporter experience, raise more for your cause, and analyze your organization’s impact on a deeper level.

Use Cases for Online and Offline Data

Now that you understand why using online and offline data sources is so beneficial for nonprofits, check out these use cases for how you can leverage both data types.

1. Marketing

When you use offline data to power online marketing and vice versa, you can bring unique insights to your approach and better personalize your communications. Let’s say you’re looking to build a social media lookalike audience, based on your current mailing list, to broaden your reach online.

Lookalike audiences allow your nonprofit to identify a group of prospective supporters with similar demographics and interests to your current audience. Since lookalike audiences share traits with your supporters, they’re more likely to be interested in supporting your cause than the general population.

The best way to develop a lookalike audience is by partnering with a data provider. They’ll grant you access to data and modeling tools you need to unlock and target the same, exact lookalike audience across channels.

Just as you can use offline data for online marketing purposes, the reverse is true as well. For example, you may gather website analytics indicating which areas of your mission your supporters are most interested in and conduct a data append to get their physical addresses for a direct mail campaign.

2. Fundraising

Analyze data from both online and offline fundraising channels to identify the most effective strategies for different segments and tailor your appeals accordingly. For example, you may find that younger supporters prefer to donate via social media fundraising features and text-to-give whereas older donors like to mail checks to your organization. Note these preferences in your database, and be sure to reach out to each segment through the channels they prefer to maximize donation revenue.

If you don’t have the information you need to send donors fundraising appeals through their preferred channels, consider enriching your database. Data enrichment supplements your first-party constituent data with offline, third-party information so you can better reach your donors through both online and offline channels. In this case, you may enrich your database with contact information like:

Phone numbers
Mailing addresses
Email addresses

Additionally, you can use data enrichment to obtain donor demographic and lifestyle information that can help you further personalize your fundraising appeals.

3. Stewardship and Retention

Collecting data from both online and offline sources helps strengthen donor relationships. With this assortment of data, you can gain a complete understanding of donors’ engagement history across online and offline touchpoints.

For instance, a supporter may have started their donor journey by attending one of your events (an offline touchpoint), which inspired them to volunteer with your organization (another offline touchpoint). Then, they eventually followed your nonprofit on social media (an online touchpoint) and made their first contribution through your donation page (another online touchpoint).

With all of this context in mind, you can implement more targeted stewardship strategies that help you retain this donor’s support and build a long-lasting relationship with them. You may refer back to the first event they attended to show how far they’ve come as a member of your community, share volunteer opportunities with them, or inform them about recurring giving options since they’ve demonstrated continued support for your organization.

4. Event Management

Event management has a lot of moving parts. You need to collect a variety of data types to constantly improve your strategy and offer a satisfying attendee experience.

For example, a stellar way to use both online and offline data for event management purposes is to compare online registration and engagement metrics to actual attendance and participation outcomes.

If you judged your event’s success based on pre-event registration and engagement, you would only assess your ability to market your event effectively. Conversely, if you evaluated your event on attendance and participation alone, you would only measure your ability to engage attendees during the event. By cross-referencing these metrics, you can assess your event’s success in a more holistic way and pinpoint the gaps in your strategy.

Additionally, you may measure post-event engagement using online and offline data by analyzing social media engagement metrics, email open and engagement rates, and paper survey responses. Storing all of this data and the insights you gain from it in your event management platform will help you refine your event strategy and optimize the attendee experience.

5. Impact Reporting

All nonprofits claim they make a positive impact on society, but what exactly is your nonprofit doing, and how exactly does that work affect your community? You need to measure your social impact to substantiate your organization’s claims and effectively portray your work to stakeholders and potential donors.

As UpMetrics’ social impact measurement guide explains, “Impact measurement allows you to go beyond saying, ‘Our organization is making a true difference in society’ by helping you to back up this claim with data.”

While most of your impact measurement data will be tied to offline outcomes, such as program participation, volunteer satisfaction scores, and fundraising revenue, it’s also important to analyze your online reach through website analytics and social media metrics to get the whole picture of your impact.

Most nonprofits understand that they must use data to effectively refine their approaches to almost every area of their operations. Now, the emphasis should be on collecting a variety of data from online and offline sources. When you do so, your organization will get a fuller understanding of what you’re trying to measure and make well-informed decisions that push your strategy forward.