Segmentation is Your Friend

TL;DR: Sophisticated audience segmentation can dramatically improve performance, but most nonprofits lack the tools to implement it continuously.

This is Week 5 of "The PushBlack Chronicles" – a 6-week journey through the marketing challenges that inspired us to create Chorus Marketing Studio. Each week, I'm sharing a real story from my time co-building PushBlack to the largest Black nonprofit media company, connecting it to the broader challenges facing nonprofit marketers, and showing how we've built Chorus to solve these exact problems. Missed previous installments? Catch up here.

At PushBlack, we undertook an ambitious project to model our audience and optimize our sending strategy. The results were remarkable – we discovered we could send to half the number of people while capturing 90% of donation value. This approach cut our list churn by 50% and allowed us to engage different segments with content they cared about most.

But this wasn't a sustainable process. The analysis required significant technical expertise and took months to complete. We couldn't run this type of segmentation regularly, so we did it once every couple of years at best. Meanwhile, our audience was constantly evolving, meaning our segments quickly became outdated.

We needed this level of sophisticated analysis happening continuously, not as a rare special project.

The Segmentation Gap

This challenge is universal across nonprofit marketing teams. Most organizations know they should be segmenting their audience more effectively, but they lack the tools and expertise to do so continuously.

The cost of this gap is enormous – organizations over-message some supporters while under-engaging others. They miss opportunities to match content to interests and fail to optimize frequency based on engagement patterns. All of this leads to unnecessary list churn, reduced lifetime value, and missed donation opportunities.

Precision Audience Engagement

Chorus Marketing Studio makes sophisticated audience segmentation accessible and continuous. Our platform automatically analyzes engagement patterns across channels to identify natural segments within your audience. It then recommends optimal content topics, messaging approaches, and sending frequencies for each segment.

Instead of running a major segmentation project every few years, you'll have constantly updated audience insights that evolve as your supporters do. The platform identifies which supporters are at risk of churning due to over-messaging and which have capacity for more engagement, allowing you to optimize your approach for each individual.

Have any questions or want to dig in with me one-on-one? Schedule some time here.

Best,

Tareq