Clear communications to the right audience improves the overall success of your campaigns and helps maintain the health of your list. Learn how our Geotargeting tool can help!
Clear communications to the right audience improves the overall success of your campaigns and helps maintain the health of your list. There are times when you have the right message but can’t hone in on the right audience, either because they’re very localized or in a specific geographic location.
We thought you might want a hand with that. Enter the Engaging Networks Geotargeting tool!
To find a specific geographic audience in Engaging Networks, you begin with a map in our query tool and select a starting point. From there, you can expand your radius around that starting point as far as you like. Engaging Networks will select supporters from your database* that fit that criteria and you can use that queried information to target them in email sends.
What does this mean for your cause? A new level of hyper targeted emails. Even if you’re already targeting supporters based on interests or behaviors, now you can find them locally.
Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around this so I’ve put a few thoughts together to give you some ideas from a fundraising and advocacy perspective.
Fundraising Example #1 – House Party in Washington, DC
One of your major donors is throwing a swanky house party but they want to focus on bringing in people local to the Washington, DC area to cultivate local support and build relationships. They’ve asked if you can send an email to supporters in walking or cab distance of their home in Dupont Circle. You figure that’s about a mile. You build your email and any variants. Then, it’s time for targeting. When selecting your send criteria, choose the ‘map’ icon, enter the location information and see below how to go from there.
Keep in mind, the success of something localized to a mile radius will be impacted by how much data you have about your supporters!
Fundraising Example #2 – Corporate Partnership Concert
You have a really cool corporate partner. They want to throw a benefit concert with all proceeds going to your charity. The band lineup looks good and they’ve decided to make it a beach party (I want to go!). They’re promoting and have asked you to do the same but don’t really care who you send it to. You promote on social but decide not to burn out your list that lives too far away and send the invitation locally. Maybe a 45 mile radius of Ventura, CA.
You’re getting the idea right? The same can be done to exclude or filter supporters. Maybe you want only donors in a specific location to be emailed (filter). Maybe you want to invite everyone in Canada EXCEPT those who live in Edmonton (exclude). You can also do this simultaneously. Maybe include everyone in a 45 mile radius of Ventura, CA but exclude those in a section of town who don’t care for the corporate sponsor (not sure how you’d know that but you get the idea).
Now a couple advocacy examples. I love the ideas for fundraising but advocacy is where I’ve used a tool like this myself and have been very effective.
Advocacy Example #1 – Town Hall Meeting
The political race is on and your organization’s choice candidate is coming to town. Your team feels strongly you should activate your supporter base to turn out and hear what they have to say. Use the Geotargeting tool to select supporters within a certain radius of the meeting and send them a special invitation.
Advocacy Example #2 – Local Hearings
I used a geotargeting tool to draw people out to attend hearings on specific conservation issues. The hearings were typically very local so we’d send within a 10 mile radius and ask people to attend. Then we’d follow up the next day with an email asking them to take action whether or not they attended the meeting. Those who did will feel empowered (you hope). Those who didn’t, will want to take action since they didn’t attend!
Volunteer Mobilization Example – Rallying Around Local Issues
Forgive my repetitive conservation examples but it’s what I did for a long time and something I love. There’s an oil spill. You’re most certainly mobilizing support across the nation but you need hands on the ground NOW. You need professionals for some tasks, volunteers for others, etc. Choose the spill location on the map, expand your radius to supporters within a few hours’ driving distance and send your priority appeal for volunteer assistance.
I sincerely hope you’re not mobilizing around a major oil spill anytime soon. However, I do hope this gives you some ideas for how to reach the right people with the right message. We’re always striving to deliver new and innovative tools to help you succeed and this is one of my favorites.
If you’re interested in hearing more about Engaging Networks or our Geotargeting tools, give us a shout at [email protected].
*Using Geotargeting means you need solid location data on your supporters such as Lat/Long – these fields are already in Engaging Networks and ready for your data. For more information on how to use this amazing tool reach out to our Account Services team.
