How to Use AI to Create and Interact with Donor Personas

Digital FundraisingGenerative AITech + Tools

Creating a draft persona for your nonprofit can be quite the adventure, especially if you can’t splurge on a high-end branding agency right off the bat. But don’t worry—this nifty tool can help you get started!

We know you’re eager to dive in, so let’s get to the fun part. Simply enter your nonprofit’s name, its general mission, and the audience profile you’d like to create. With the CauseWriter.ai donor persona tool, you’ll be well on your way to crafting a detailed persona in no time.

What goes into a Donor Persona? The 5 Parts of a Donor Persona

Think of donor personas as your nonprofit’s imaginary donor friends. These fictional, generalized profiles represent your ideal donors, helping you understand your audience and create effective fundraising campaigns.
Here are the 5 key parts of a donor persona:

1. Demographic Information: Age, gender, location, education, income, occupation, and other relevant details.
2. Psychographic Information: Personality traits, values, interests, beliefs, motivations, and behaviors.
3. Communication Preferences: Preferred communication channels, like email, social media, phone, or direct mail.
4. Giving History: Past donation behavior to tailor future appeals.
5. Channels for Engagement: How they interact with your nonprofit (events, volunteering, social media).

How do I use donor personas? 

Donor personas are used in a variety of ways to help increase the creativity of communications and push fundraising teams to segment donor outreach. Here are some ways donor personas can be used:

1. Tailoring messaging and fundraising appeals: By understanding their donors’ values, interests, and motivations, non-profit organizations can create messaging and fundraising appeals that resonate with their donors’ needs and desires.
2. Segmentation: By segmenting their donor database based on their donor personas, non-profit organizations can create more targeted and personalized fundraising campaigns. For example, donors who have given multiple times may be more likely to respond to a recurring donation campaign.
3. Channel selection: By knowing how their donors prefer to communicate, non-profit organizations can select the right channels to reach their donors. For example, if their donors prefer to communicate through email, the organization can create an email campaign to reach their donors.
4. Developing engagement strategies: By understanding their donors’ interests and behaviors, non-profit organizations can develop engagement strategies that resonate with their donors. For example, if their donors are interested in volunteering, the organization can create volunteer opportunities that appeal to their donors.
5. Measuring success: By using donor personas to segment their donor database and track their engagement and giving history, non-profit organizations can measure the success of their fundraising campaigns and make data-driven decisions.

Creating donor personas involves research, data analysis, and collaboration. Here’s how to do it:

1. Gather Data: Collect as much information as possible about your donors—demographics, giving history, communication preferences—from your donor database, surveys, and other sources.
2. Analyze the Data: Look for patterns and trends to segment your donors and identify common characteristics.
3. Create Profiles: Develop profiles that represent your ideal donors, including demographic and psychographic information, communication preferences, and giving history.
4. Validate the Personas: Test these personas with your donor database to ensure they accurately represent your donors and are useful for targeted fundraising.
5. Refine the Personas: Adjust the personas based on feedback to improve accuracy and effectiveness.
6. Use the Personas: Implement these personas to tailor messaging, segment your database, choose the right communication channels, and develop engagement strategies.

Example of a Nonprofit Persona

The following is an example of donor persona for Power Poetry created with the AI Persona Tool:

Name: Sarah

Age: 35

Gender: Female

Location: New York City (urban)

Occupation: Marketing Manager

Income: $85,000 per year

Psychographic Information:

• Personal values: Sarah values creativity, self-expression, and empowerment of young people.
• Interests: Sarah enjoys creative writing, attending poetry readings, and supporting causes that align with her values.
• Behaviors: Sarah is an active social media user and frequently shares content related to causes she supports.

Communication Preferences:

• Email: Sarah prefers to receive communication from Power Poetry via email.
• Social media: Sarah follows Power Poetry on social media platforms and is active in sharing content.

Giving History:

• Sarah has made several donations to Power Poetry over the past few years, including monthly recurring donations.
• She typically donates around $50-$100 per donation.

Engagement:

• Sarah has attended several Power Poetry events and has expressed interest in volunteering for the organization.
• She frequently shares Power Poetry content on social media and encourages her network to support the organization.

Using AI to role-play your persona

Now for some real fun, take your persona description and go to Chat.Openai.com and instruct the bot that it is in a role-playing game and should respond to all the questions asked as that character. 

“This is a donor persona role-playing AI chatbot that will play the character described below. This bot should stay in character and answer questions about what they may like or dislike about types of communication messages. Here are the details about the character: {insert persona}“

Here is a live chat with the trained persona of Sarah:

Now you can ask away, but remember that the threaded conversation may diverge after a certain number of chats as GPT models have a short memory. Whole Whale can build tools that solve this issue and are purpose-built for your nonprofit.