Modern fundraising requires more from you. More channels. More creative. More data and analytics. More audience segmentation.
To keep up, you need an “easy button” solution.
Avid Pathways is the easy button you need to deploy better fundraising segmentation faster and automatically. See how it works in this interactive demo »
Modern Fundraising Demands More Time & Resources
The resources that modern fundraising requires are rapidly growing. This is because donors increasingly interact in a multi-channel fashion—both with our organizations as well as with consumer brands.
Fundraisers who embrace this multi-channel approach will see better results.
But you’ll leave critical revenue behind if you fail to keep up.
For example, Avid’s live fundraising benchmarks show that donors who give via the mail are more likely to give larger gifts and to retain longer if they’re cultivated using online channels—even if they never give online.
Donors who only ever give online give larger gifts and retain longer if they’re cultivated using offline channels like direct mail.
Beyond that, donors (and any consumer) in the modern era expects personalization at every level: from the ads they see on Instagram, to their TV show recommendations on Netflix, to their product suggestions on Amazon.
Donors expect the organizations they support to personalize their communication as well.
The challenge:
Expectations for personalization and segmentation have changed. Your budgets and resources have not.
In fact, if you’re like most nonprofits, your budget is likely tighter in 2025 than it was in 2020.
Over the past 5 years, revenue across the nonprofit sector has decreased by 12%. Meanwhile, inflation has made it more expensive to fund your programs.
Increasing costs and decreasing revenues means you have less to work with—even though donors are demanding more.
The Benefits of Increased Fundraising Segmentation & Personalization
Luther Seminary discovered some significant issues in their fundraising revenue. Using Avid, they identified that every major segment of their donors was trending down.
Avid served up these insights to Luther Seminary and their team automatically—ensuring they could get ahead of the problem before it got out of hand.
But they needed a plan.
Digging deeper into their data using Avid’s Insights, the Luther Seminary team discovered a large opportunity to reactivate lapsed donors.
Their hypothesis:
Re-engaging lapsed donors with offers delivered via Facebook / Meta advertising will lead to greater donor reactivation.
The biggest challenge to their plan:
Running a lapsed donor re-engagement campaign delivered via Facebook / Meta advertising requires powerful segmentation.
If they didn’t provide Facebook / Meta with the most up-to-date and enriched data available, their costs could skyrocket and their ROI may not be worth it.
Without Avid, this would have required a herculean effort:
- Pulling all their lapsed donor segments out of their CRM.
- Merging their lapsed donor segments with their email engagement data to determine who to re-engage.
- Cleaning and deduplicating their audience lists.
- Uploading to Facebook / Meta for ad targeting.
- Doing all of this over and over again to suppress donors who had already re-activated.
With Avid, all of this was accomplished in a matter of seconds with a few quick clicks—enabling high performance, low advertising costs, and a 308% increase in reactivated donors.
Fundraising Segmentation Is Done for You with Avid
Whether you’re running a year-end campaign, a reactivation campaign, or sending out your monthly appeal—segmentation is one of the most critical keys to hitting your revenue goals.
But segmentation is usually one of the most labor-intensive tasks and tedious aspects of getting a campaign off the ground.
Avid Pathways handles your segmentation for you.
Define your audience once, and Avid will keep it up to date forever—even deploying it to the channels of your choosing automatically.
Here are some common fundraising segmentation examples that Avid is simplifying for modern-day fundraisers:
Donor Suppression Lists
Imagine it’s the last week of the year. Most of your direct mail and email appeals for your year-end campaign have already gone out.
You’re getting ready for your final push to your goal.
Your emails are drafted.
Your ad creative is ready to deploy.
Your donation page is optimized for urgency.
But you’re stuck. The suppression lists aren’t ready yet.
Your database admin is waiting on a few more gifts to be processed. Then they’ll re-run their reports to get you that essential suppression list.
Without your suppression lists, you risk soliciting hundreds or even thousands of donors who have already given to the campaign. If that happens, you’ll come across as tone deaf and out of touch.
With Avid, you can setup your suppression lists before the campaign even gets started.
Avid will keep them up to date every single day—synchronizing your CRM data with your email platform, your advertising, and any other channels where you need your suppression lists.
No more late-night data pulls.
No more worrying if the lists are accurate.
No more stressing about getting the campaign out on time.
Avid takes care of it for you.
Reactivation Campaigns
We all know it costs less to keep an existing donor than to acquire a new one.
However, if we don’t stay on top of who we’ve already re-activated, our direct mail and our advertising budgets may be going to waste.
The success of any direct mail program relies on the quality and accuracy of the data used to power your mailing lists. But the data used for direct mail is often out of date by the time it gets to your print vendor.
The same is true in advertising.
Your ad campaign success is reliant upon the volume and accuracy of the data you provide your ad platform.
If you’re not constantly telling the platform who to target—and who to exclude—you risk wasting valuable advertising dollars on donors who have already reactivated.
Avid changes all of this.
Avid watches every day to see who has given, who has not, and which audience segments need to be updated.
It allows you to send the latest audience segments to your advertising channels in real-time.
It ensures that you can get the most accurate, de-duplicated direct mail lists pulled the moment you need to send them to the printer.
All of this reduces your costs and improves your performance—on top of saving you precious time.
See How Avid Pathways Simplifies Your Fundraising Segmentation
I could keep telling you how Avid Pathways simplifies your fundraising segmentation. But for some fundraisers, it sounds too good to believe.
So why don’t you take a look for yourself?
Below you’ll find an interactive demo showing you how Avid lets you create audience segmentation in seconds.
Not only is fundraising segmentation easier with Avid. Your segmentation is also better.
Avid stitches together data from every single one of your tools—allowing you to build richer, deeper, and more accurate audience segments.
Take a look for yourself in the interactive demo below:
Get a Personal Tour of Avid
Ready to See What’s Possible?
Whether you’re navigating a complex CRM migration, trying to re-engage lapsed donors, or just tired of feeling stuck in reactive mode, Avid gives you the clarity to act and the confidence to move.
Let’s stop patching tools together. Let’s start building momentum.
