How to generate an optimised campaign list in Raiser's Edge NXT
Tim Paris, Dataro CEO, steps you through generating an optimised list of donors for your next fundraising campaign.
While this example is specific to appeals, it's easy to do the same thing with our other propensities. Simply use the relevant field to filter for what you are looking for using the search term "Dataro".
Creating your donor list
- In RE NXT, go to the Lists → Constituents → Build a New List.
- Select ‘Show all of them’. This creates a list of all your donors.
- Use the ‘Filter’ function to narrow down your list. Dataro’s propensities are stored using “Custom Fields”.
Select the relevant field you are looking for. In this example, we are looking at ‘Dataro DM Appeal Rank’ and ‘Dataro DM >$500 Appeal Rank’
Click 'Apply Changes'
- In this example, we’re running an appeal for 5,000 donors. Using Dataro DM Appeal Rank, select everyone whose rank is less than or equal to 5,000.
Sometimes a donor may be unlikely to give, but, if they do give, may give a larger gift. To try to capture these edge cases, we supplement our query with Dataro DM Appeal >$500 Rank. This should be 10% of the list size. So in this case we will also select everyone whose Dataro DM Appeal >$500 Rank is less than or equal to 500
- From here you can save your list and apply your normal exclusions, like removing donors with invalid addresses or who have opted out of DM communications.
- Applying exclusions will likely reduce your list size below your target of 5,000. So we ‘top up’ the list by selecting the next highest-ranked donors. In this case, if the number of donors after exclusions is less than our target list size, we can increase the list size by adjusting our query to include the best 7,000 Dataro DM Appeal Rank and best 700 to Dataro DM Appal >$500 Rank donors. Now the list is the correct size.
- Follow all your normal steps, like adding additional columns and exporting to Excel.
- Save this list, so you can use it as a template whenever you run a DM appeal.
Expert tip: Also add in the score field as part of your query and remove donors who are less than 0.01 to ensure you haven't added too many exclusions!