Fundraising on Wavelength

This guide helps admins incorporate Wavelength into their fundraising efforts. If you are new to fundraising, check out the Fundraising 101 article.

Wavelength helps in many stages of a fundraising campaign including:

• Prospect Identification
• Fundraising Communication
• Receiving Donations

Prospect Identification

The better that you know your constituents, the better that you can engage them. The goal of prospect identification is to segment your donors and connect them with appropriate aspects of your fundraising campaign.

Wavelength has a lot of publicly available data. With its data, you can keep up to date on career changes, location changes, social profile updates, and wealth estimates. This data gives you a holistic understanding of your constituents. Has someone recently been promoted? Have they recently sold their company? Have they moved closer to a hub of organization members? These are great data points to know when soliciting constituents.

Prospect identification on Wavelength can be segmented into the following categories:

• Location (where do alumni live?)
• Event (which alumni will attend an event?)
• Interest (which alumni have interests that overlap with fundraising goals?)

With premium wealth data, you can also filter prospects based on wealth data.

Location Identification

Where do people live? As an admin, you may want set up regional get-togethers. Even though your alumni might not live in proximity to your organization, they may still be invested in it.

Knowing where people live is key to setting up regional events. The first thing you should identify is where your alumni are congregated. For instance, are they living on the coasts or do they move to the closest cities?

You probably have a good sense of where your alumni live, but if you don't, search for a couple cities. Use the "near" operator if you want to exclude all non-geographic search results. When you have identified places with an appropriate density for a get-together, start organizing one. Regional get-togethers are a great way to keep people engaged with your community. People like finding people in their area with shared past experiences.

Event Identification

Wavelength makes it easy to segment your alumni to create invite lists. You can search for the people in a specific class or groups of classes that are about to attend reunions or homecoming. You can then group email them, identify potential giving leaders, or find volunteers to help facilitate events.

If your organization hosts events with specific topics (speakers, philanthropy drives etc), you can search for keywords to augment your invite list. For instance, if you have a prominent doctor speaker, you may want to invite people in the medical field. It is as simple as searching for "medicine" and group emailing the results.

Interest Identification

Some Wavelength networks have additional properties such as affinity groups. These properties are a great way to identify people with interests in certain fundraising goals. So if your goal is to build a field house, alumni that played in soccer or another sport may be a good group to target.

Even if your network does not have additional data fields, many people have careers that align with their interests, so it is still worthwhile to do a quick search.

Beyond using interests to connect alumni with fundraising goals, you can also use them to establish career groups to enhance networking. Industry-specific groups are better for larger organizations. 

Wealth Identification

With Wavelength's premium data, admins can further filter their results. Premium wealth data includes information like net worth, income, propensity to give, capacity to give, and number of real estate holdings. After a search, use the filters to see a graphical breakdown of wealth data.

It's easy to segment communications based on wealth tiers. If you only want to email people with a net worth of $10 million or more, search for everyone, click net worth, and then click the relevant buckets. You can then research each of these potential donors or group message them. You can also further refine the population with a second wealth filter. So if you are only interested in reaching people with more than $10 million and have a high propensity to give, you can do that.

These wealth filters work for any search that you perform. When you first log onto Wavelength, you should check out wealth filters for your entire population. In future searches, you may want to to segment the population and then apply the wealth filters. 

Wealth data filters can help:

• get an understanding of the donation capacity and energy of your entire population.
• create targeted lists of regional large-donors (search for the area, then filter)
• identify giving leaders per class (search for a class, then filter)
• identify giving leaders by interest (search for interest, then filter)

Fundraising Communication

Once you have identified and researched individual prospects or identified groups of people on Wavelength, you can email them. You can analyze your email open rates, bounce rates, click-thru-rates, and other stats to understand whether your communication resonates. To learn more about emailing on Wavelength, check out Email on Wavelength. 

Receiving Donations

You can receive donations directly on Wavelength. Send a link to your donation page in your emails so that people can give back. The link is "https://[subdomain].searchwavelength.com/donate" so if "phs" is your subdomain, use: "https://phs.searchwavelength.com/donate". With Wavelength's emails, you will be able to see how many people clicked on the link.

Your Wavelength network has the look and feel of your organization. Your alumni can donate on any device one time, monthly, or yearly. They will have all the information about why they should give and other ways to give. In addition, they can indicate why they are giving and provide a note.

As an admin you have a full suite of backend tools to export and analyze data via Stripe. Log into Stripe to better understand your alumni's giving behavior.

If a user logs in to update their contact info or search for someone on the platform, it is easy for them to donate! Logged in users can also track their donations over time.

Even though a donation link is ever-present on the Wavelength network, don't expect many unsolicited donations. People often need an email and a reason to give. 

Why Use Wavelength for Fundraising

On Wavelength, you have everything you need to create a successful campaign. You can identify, research, communicate, and receive donations. It's simple, yet gives even sophisticated development officers the tools they need to raise money.

For alumni, it's easy to engage. They have one experience across their core needs of networking, keeping their organization up to date, and donating.