Generally, an organization should engage its constituents where they hang out online, especially because potential donors should be hanging right in the same places.If you don’t already have donor profiles, which demographically explain who gives the most money, who gives money most frequently, and who donates only once, start gathering this information! This data will help to identify strengths and weaknesses in your fundraising. A good analytical mind and some spreadsheet prowess can take the raw numbers and produce attractive graphs which boil things down to their basics.

With demographic data, a social media expert can begin to determine where that general demography spends their time online. However, public data may be lacking on whether a specific news site or social networking site skews younger or older, male or female, or more or less affluent. By integrating your email marketing and analytics analyses, your organization and your social media expert can yield further data to determine targets of social media.

In #5 of 5 easy social media wins, I suggested “Ask Your Membership.” A donor who is interested in engaging with your organization may share with you what sites they visit on a daily basis, where they spend their time online and offline, how many children they have, what their income level is, and a slew of personal information. Anonymous surveying can yield tremendous results if you just take the time to ask. Where surveying seems intrusive based on previous email appeals, or the email response rates seem unlikely to produce a representative sample, you can test multiple email appeals to have your email members engage in a linking campaign, or “embrace social media…wherever they choose to engage: in their social networks, at a Wiki, on their blogs, in their book clubs, and in their email signatures.”

Your analytics can also yield great results to help with your social media plan. The sites that refer the most traffic to your site speaks volumes, as does determining which sites that send the visitors who spend the most time moving around your site, and which pages are your most popular exit pages. As your analytics data pool expands, the ability to understand your visitors without explicitly asking them becomes clearer.

For more information on email marketing as it relates to data, I recommend Steps to Create a Successful Email Appeal Series, and THINK. A multi-part Email Strategy Series. And for more on how to analyze entry and exit pages and visitors in your analytics, I recommend Tracking Success on Content Sites and Analyzing Your Exit Pages. My post on Social Media Marketing Campaign Process may assist you in a less analytical approach to your social media marketing plans.