Adding a personal touch to your communications helps you to build and strengthen your relationships with volunteers as well as donors and other supporters of your NFP. The following tips can help you to fortify your connections with others and increase their engagement and the assistance that they offer to your cause and its mission.

Name Drop

There are few things as powerful as either reading or hearing one’s name. Since our earliest beginning, our parents, and others later on, have used our name to grab our attention, pull us towards them, and include us within the group.

Calling someone by their name, establishes a connection with them of inclusion and belonging. Make certain that you are using the appropriate tools to personalise your email to include the name of the specific person that you are addressing and greeting so that you start out on the right foot in your correspondence.

Hubspot is just one of many online tools that makes it easy to personalise your emails and other content.

Hold Their Interest with Customised Content and Personalised Outreach

Make certain that the emails and other information that you are sending is something that actually interests the specific person. Use marketing automation tools to learn more about the interests of your supporters.

Next, use intelligent segmentation tools to group and target segments of your supporters based on interests, demographics, location and so forth. As you learn more about your nonprofit’s supporters, their background and what interests them, you can then use this information to create customised content that is more meaningful, helpful and appealing to them.

Curate the images, links, emails and articles that you send out. The content of the messages that you send should be something that is both interesting and relevant to each specific person and targeted to them based on their personal interests and preferences.

Don’t Forget to Be Human, Real, and Let Your Supporters Know How Engagement Helps

Whether you’re sharing the results of your latest fundraising drive, or using an image to show the impact that donations make on your service community, don’t forget to be very human and real. Even though an email is an online communication, it is still a conversation.

Pay attention to the words that you choose, as well as your tone, and subject matter and make choices that emphasise your shared humanity with your supporters, and service community.

Whenever possible in your communications, make certain that the call to action is clear, and that it builds upon the shared humanity and benefits that all stakeholders receive from their combined efforts: from service recipients, to supporters and the community as a whole, be certain to state how everyone benefits from your supporters engagement in the cause.