Donor Signals

Understand your donors with wealth and engagement insights.

Discover each donor’s wealth and demographic profile. Follow their digital engagement. Suggest the best next step to increase giving.

Benefits of Donor Signals

Drive next steps with each donor with 3rd party data and behavior.

See intelligent suggestions for the next best action based on each donor’s gift history, social media profiles, wealth data, web visits, email engagement, demographic data, volunteerism, and morethen automate outreach based on key signals.

Popular Features

See clearly through the clutter.

Leverage the demographic, wealth data,  social insights, and more to drive stronger donor connections and increase giving. This data can be used for major gift teams, as well as direct response fundraising so you have the insights to treat every donor like a major donor.

Popular Features

Take the guesswork out of gift asks.

Easily identify your best prospects and likely giving behavior using predictive analytics and scoring. Leverage giving patterns or donor interests to segment donors for personalized campaigns.

Popular Features

Real Results

The recognized leader in
nonprofit fundraising software

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G2 Summer 2024 Award
G2 Award for Virtuous

Resources

Expect more

Virtuous gives you the nonprofit CRM, fundraising, volunteer, and marketing tools you need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact.

Nonprofit CRM

Everything you need to build better relationships and increase impact with confidence.

Marketing & Email

Send comprehensive, omni-channel campaigns to activate donors and increase engagement.

Events

Produce virtual, hybrid, or in-person events that are personalized and raise more.

Volunteer Mobilization

Recruit and mobilize volunteers to fill mission-critical needs without the back-office headache.

Automation

Design personalized donor journeys, plus automate back-office processes and task management.

Signals

Actionable insights to help retain donors and extend engagement.

Online Giving

Design effective online giving experiences that celebrate the impact of each donation.

Business Intelligence

Enterprise-grade business intelligence and analytics to improve decision-making.

Grow generosity with Virtuous

Virtuous is the responsive fundraising software platform proven to help nonprofit organizations increase generosity by serving all donors personally, no matter their gift size.

“Virtuous truly understands nonprofits and the importance of our mission. And their open access to data and built-in custom reports gave us access to the data we need.”
Todd Shinabarger
Chief Information Officer

Do you feel like your donors are a mystery? Are you unsure about what motivates them and unclear on how to inspire them? Do you find yourself guessing about what signals they are giving you and throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks?

There’s good news!

Through donor signals, your donors are already telling you what they care about, how they want to engage with you, and what inspires them most. You just have to listen to the signals your donors are already giving you. 

Bryan Funk and Megan Donahue dug into the idea of donor signals on this episode of The Responsive Weekly. Watch the full recording of their conversation or read on to learn more!  

The Power of Listening to Donor Signals

When you think about what is important to your donors, are you making an educated case or is your answer based on data? With so many competing priorities, it’s hard to find time to dig into any data, but the problem is that ultimately you are still guessing.

Listening to the signals your donors are giving you is key to effective communication. Your donors are giving you signals all the time about what interests them, how they want to engage with your organization, and more. Inspiring generosity in your donors doesn’t require re-inventing the wheel. You just need to listen to what your donors are already saying to you. 

What are Donor Signals?

At a high level, donor signals are any piece of information your donors give you either intentionally or unintentionally about what they care about. In fact, donor signals can tell you how to communicate with your donors in a way that is contextual and relevant to their passion points with your organization. 

Most organizations understand how to listen to donor signals when it comes to major gift donors. It’s common to engage with those donors in a personal manner, such as going out for coffee or a meal. You learn about their personal lives and that then informs how you engage with that donor in the future. 

While this major donor process works well, the challenge comes in when you need to scale it. All of your donors are giving you signals, and you want to listen to all of them. In order to do this, you should first understand the three kinds of signals your donors may give you. 

3 Kinds Of Donor Signals

Each signal type is a way you can listen to your donors at scale. 

Donor Signal #1: Behavior You Observe

Image showing different donor signals in Virtuous including email tracking and website visits.

How are your supporters interacting with you online? The web pages they visit, the emails they click on, and whether or not they complete an online donation are all signals about what they care most about, and how they want to engage with you. 

In order to listen to these digital signals, you need software that can help track and record them. Most fundraising software has some version of the tools that you need, but at the very least you need a way to track donor behavior on your website, email tracking data, and a responsive nonprofit CRM. With the right tools you can transform the signals from your donor’s digital behavior into actionable information. 

Not only do these tools help you listen to the donor signals, they should also provide you with a way to implement the insights you get from those signals. 

Some action items to consider are :

Observing your donors’ digital behavior turns your digital platforms into a vehicle to learn more about your supporters. 

Donor Signal #2: Feedback

Image showing the different communication options in Virtuous including email and letters

Communication is a two-way street. Asking your supporters for feedback is a great way to get more information about what matters to them. While you can’t have coffee one-on-one with every donor, you can still directly solicit feedback from your donors in more scalable ways. Regularly inviting your supporters to talk to you gives you more opportunities to be responsive.

Some ways to ask for feedback from donors are: 

Once you’ve collected this data, you can start to look for patterns to inform your strategy. Segment your donors based on some of the feedback they provide you. For example, you can send out a survey asking people if they prefer phone calls, texts, or email. Segment your next campaign based on communication type and show your donors that you are listening to them. 

Whether it is requesting feedback about a specific communication or simply listening to the words your donors use in surveys or conversations, the way your supporters talk about your nonprofit’s mission should be the way you talk to them when you are making an ask. These feedback signals can transform the way you communicate with your donors. 

Donor Signal #3: Data Append

image showing some of the donor signals a nonprofit could get from a data append such as ideal ask amounts based on wealth data

There is a lot of information out there. Social media profiles, real estate data, corporate filings, public giving data, and other online data sources can all combine to give you rich signals about each person in your database. 

The information that you observe directly from donors, and the things they tell you, should always be trusted over third-party sources. That said, the signals from data appends to your CRM can help create a fuller picture. 

Wealth data helps you understand the financial capacity of your donors. Integrating your CRM with a vendor like DonorSearch can give you signals about a donor’s capacity to give based on the donor’s charitable giving activity, real estate holdings, political giving, business affiliations, stock ownership, and more. Social media scraping pulls public data from social media platforms into your CRM. This social data can be used to fill out donor profiles, identify influencers in your database, and learn more about your supporters’ interests and preferences. 

Stop Guessing, Start Listening

Collecting all these signals creates a more comprehensive picture of your donors, and gives you more data to work with. With more information, you have more opportunities to personalize engagement, making your fundraising more and more relevant and effective.

Does your nonprofit technology give you the visibility into donor signals that you need? Virtuous is designed to help nonprofits respond to their supporters’ signals and leverage their data to drive donor connections and grow mission-critical funding.