1. Choosing a name & description
The first step is to choose a name and description for your strategy.
It's important to establish a good naming convention in order to facilitate cohesion and understanding within your team.
The description should provide more insight for team members about the purpose of the segmentation strategy.
2. Configuring your global segment
In this section, you will configure your global population. Ask yourself, who must I include or exclude at the global level? This is the population that you will be segmenting in the next section.
Changing the label
You can alter the label of any segment by clicking on the segment label and renaming it to whatever you want. Changing the label has no effect on the segment's configuration.
Add Inclusions & Exclusions
Define the rules of your segment.
Click the Add Inclusion button, to include a list of constituents from Raiser's Edge.
Click the Add Exclusion button to exclude a list of constituents. You can add as many lists as you want in both cases.
You can delete lists by clicking the trash icon.
3. Configuring your subsegments
Now you can divide your population into subsegments. Following the same methodology, use inclusions and exclusions to configure each individual subsegment. Subsegments will only calculate their constituent amounts based on the parent's configuration.
Order is important
The order in which you structure your segmentation strategy is important. If a constituent falls within segment A, they will be removed from segment B in order to prevent them from falling into multiple segments. For example, someone who donates on a monthly basis, will likely be considered an annual donor as well. If you order the monthly segment before the annual segment, you will be prioritizing contact with that constituent as a monthly donor.
Start with larger groups
One of our recommended best practices is to start by grouping donors into larger groups such as annual or monthly, and splitting them into smaller segments.
The endlings are key
The endling, is the lowest level segment of the segmentation structure. These are the segments that you will use when executing your campaigns.
In the image above, we have the following segmentation structure. The endling segments in this case are Large Donor, and Regular Donor, both nested within Monthly ➝ Active. Only the endlings will be accessible within campaigns.
Monthly ➡️ Active ➡️ Large Donor
Monthly ➡️ Active ➡️ Regular Donor
Once you're done structuring and configuring your segmentation strategy, you can move onto the campaign page.