5 Ways Data Append Can Enhance Your Contact List for Better Engagement

One of our core values here at Rally is relationships. You need to connect with people. Especially in the nonprofit world, it’s about relationships more than transactions.

That includes your contact list. More than customer data, those are people.

So we’re rolling out data append services to flesh out your contact information and help you better connect.

What Is Data Append?

Data append is a digital marketing strategy to boost the data quality of your existing data. We take your current customer records and use trusted third-party data sources to fill in the gaps with all types of data, from phone numbers to postal addresses.

This kind of data validation will boost your marketing efforts.

Why Should You Use Data Append?

It’s a way to know your donors and volunteers better. When you enhance your understanding of your customers, you can boost engagement.

• Personal: Marketing campaigns are more effective when they’re personalized, so data append can add names to your outreach.
• Targeted: Better data means better segmentation. You can craft better appeals for your target audience.
• Multi-channel: With this kind of data enrichment you can create a powerful, multi-channel marketing campaign. Pair text messages with email marketing, social media, and even direct mail to get more touchpoints for better results.
• Make the most of your data: Lead generation is an expensive process so a little data hygiene can protect that investment.

How Does Data Append Work?

You provide some basic details about your donors, and the data append process fills in the gaps. We take the mobile phone numbers in your list and add marketing data such as first and last names, home phone numbers, direct mail addresses, email addresses, and more.

That’s called mobile phone append, where it starts with a dataset of mobile numbers and adds more data. We can also use other approaches—email append, address append, phone append—that can start with that data and add other info.

We work with third-party data append service providers using an API system to get the best data possible.

5 Ways to Make Data Append Work for Your Nonprofit

1. Personalize your texts: People like to be known. So add first names to your text messages for a more personal feel. It creates a better connection and that can lead to better results. As a bonus, when someone receives a personalized text they’re less likely to flag it as spam.
2. Keep your contacts: A big win for data enrichment is not losing contacts to changing or outdated info. People move and phone numbers change. Data append services can keep your contact data fresh and current, minimizing how much your contact list shrinks over the years.
3. Target your outreach: Just by adding postal addresses and that valuable ZIP code data you can target your text messages by location. Now you can reach out to volunteers you know are in the area, highlight local events, and send location-specific messages—all of which will boost your response rates.
4. Multiply your channels: Instead of relying on just text messaging you can follow up with an email or even direct mail pitch. Increase the number of channels and boost the potential success of your nonprofit’s fundraising campaign. Every marketer knows it takes at least seven touchpoints to get a response, and diversifying channels is an effective way to increase touchpoints without burning out one channel.
5. Improve your outreach: By matching data points in your customer relationship management (CRM) system, you can build better relationships. You might find connections between data elements that change your marketing strategy or validate your marketing efforts. Maybe email data shows someone already responded and if you hadn’t connected their email and phone number data, you’d still be harassing them to donate via text message. That’s smarter outreach.

Join the Beta

Here at Rally, we're excited to roll out mobile data append services. We want to get it right and make sure it’s as valuable as possible for your nonprofit organization. So it’s currently in beta and available to just 15 customers on the Growth Plan.

Plus we’re offering:

• 2,000 free record lookups to get you started.
• Personalized marketing consultation to help you understand and make the most of the new data.

This is a unique opportunity to enhance your donor engagement and boost fundraising with help from our team as we perfect this new feature. So book a demo to get started today!

Rally: Here to Help

Rally is here to help you get results with nonprofit text messaging:

• Tools: We offer integrations with your preferred fundraising platform, CRM, donation page, and more. We also offer Rally Insights to enhance your contact list with demographic data. Our functionality and workflows can boost donor engagement, encourage peer fundraising, increase text-to-give income, and in general make your mobile fundraising more effective. We also offer two-way texting in addition to bulk texts, so you can have personal conversations and build relationships—a case where that enriched data will come in handy.
• Support: We care about customer experience. We’ve got multiple options for help including FAQs, webinars, office hours, and more. Plus, we’re happy to get on a real-time phone call and talk through any issues, from onboarding to more effective texting campaigns. Read our case studies to see how nonprofits rave about our support and user-friendly system.
• Not sure: If your nonprofit organization is still not sure, we’re happy to show you a demo, walk through strategy, and talk pricing options. We can even help you get your nonprofit leadership on board. We can help you figure out what to say with your text outreach and how to make text and email marketing work together.

Learn More: Book a demo to learn more about Rally and start texting now.