The 2024 holiday readiness guide for non-profits and education organizations

The holiday season is upon us, so it’s time to prepare for one of the most charitable times of the year - Giving Tuesday. In fact, Giving Tuesday lands on December 3rd this year. Occurring on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, Giving Tuesday is one of the key days during the holiday season when organizations receive generous donations from alumni and members. Now is more important than ever for non-profit and education organizations to do everything they can to prepare their businesses for the impending busy season. During this season of giving, organizations typically see surges in charitable donations, community engagement, and outreach efforts. Sending engaging communications to your member network is crucial during this time to get the most out of your campaigning efforts. As such, ensuring that the contact data for alumni and donors you have on hand is accurate becomes paramount to maximizing these opportunities.

No matter the industry, the cornerstone of all effective operations is data quality. This becomes even more important during the busy holiday season when people see influxes of festive messages in their inboxes and mailboxes. Accurate, clean data ensures you can reach out to donors, alumni, volunteers, and community members efficiently and effectively. On the other hand, poor data quality can result in missed opportunities, wasted resources, and a damaged reputation. Before the busy season catches up to you, it’s imperative to take the initiative to prepare your contact data to ensure effective operations, fundraising, and communication. In this blog, we will reveal our holiday readiness guide and outline our top tips that non-profits and education organizations should consider when evaluating their data quality and why integrating the right tools is crucial for success. 

How to prepare your data for the holidays

Audit and clean your data

Before the holiday rush begins, conduct a comprehensive audit and cleansing of your existing data. This will allow you to identify and correct errors in your email, address, and phone data, such as duplicate entries, outdated contact information, and incomplete records. Having up-to-date contact data that you can trust ahead of the holidays sets your business up for success in launching communication and marketing campaigns for your non-profit or education organization.

Consider integrating a data cleansing and enrichment tool that can also automate the bulk of this process to save time and reduce human error. A data cleansing and enrichment service removes incorrect, incomplete, duplicated, and improperly formatted data. Then, it incorporates new updates and information into an organization’s existing database to improve accuracy and add missing information. Manually fixing these errors is inefficient and costly, so integrating this tool into your tech stack will systematically examine, cleanse, and update your data in minutes. 

Segment your audience and tailor messaging

During the busiest time of the year, when people are likely flooded with emails and direct mail from various organizations, how do you stand out? The answer is targeted communications and segmentation. People are more likely to act when they feel connected to the messaging. By dividing your audience into intentional groups like past donors, prospective donors, alumni, or event attendees, you can make it easier to craft personalized messages that resonate with each group, increasing engagement and donations during the holidays. 

However, poor data quality can negatively impact segmentation. If your contact data is incomplete or outdated, you risk campaign effectiveness and brand reputation during outreach and follow-up. After all, your campaigns can only be successful if they reach the intended audience, and there’s nothing worse than seeing your name misspelled on a letter or email. That’s why having a data cleansing and enrichment tool in place can ensure you have your constituents' most current contact information. Having a clear and singular view of your member data enables you to better understand their donating behavior and interests. This information is crucial in perfecting your personalized messaging. 

Equip your team with data skills and tools

Data is at the heart of all decision-making, so it’s important to train your team and equip them with the right tools and skills to manage data successfully and encourage a culture of data accuracy. Applying data analytics is a powerful way to gain insights into donor and alumni behavior and preferences. By analyzing previous donation patterns, event attendance, and participation, your team can predict future trends and make strategic, data-backed adjustments to current programs.  

A data-literate team is crucial for maintaining data quality and leveraging analytics for successful holiday campaigns. The market is full of different data tools for your team to choose from. When researching and choosing a data quality tool, ensure it is user-friendly and has all the solutions your business requires. Consider tools with automation capabilities and enable data enrichment, profiling, standardization, cleansing, and monitoring to help you foster a clear and robust data management strategy for your organization. Additionally, many platforms offer free trials to give your team an idea of their platform features. 

Maximize donations this holiday season

Ensuring data quality within non-profit and education organizations before the holiday season is essential for maximizing campaign impact and donations. The best way to do this is by investing in a robust data quality tool that will allow continuous monitoring and performance of your campaigns. However, the end of the holiday season does not mean the end of your data quality efforts. It’s important to conduct a post-holiday campaign analysis to evaluate the success of your efforts and gain data-backed insights for improvement.

Experian can help your organization take control of your data and turn them into actionable insights. Experian’s Aperture Data Studio is a powerhouse data quality platform that can run full-volume analysis across data from disparate sources. It has data cleansing and workflow orchestration capabilities to help transform your data into a reliable source and automate data quality processes. Get in touch with a data expert to get started.