Using vega attributes to optimise your data

Vega Attributes are “metadata” about your contacts. They combine the functions of Segment Codes, User-defined Fields and Rules-based Data to give you a powerful tool to manage your contacts.

You can segment your contacts by where they live [geography]; their age, gender, or income [demographics]; or their interest, values, attitudes, opinion, and lifestyle [psychographics].

After you've figured out what your main segments are, think about how each group's needs differ. It helps to look at the questions you asked yourself during your prep work.

Segment your supporters to reach the right ones with the right information

• Why should I group my contacts into segments?
• How do I do donors segmentation?
• How does this help my communication be more targeted and focused on my organisation goals?

Donor segmentation is when you group current and potential supporters based on their behaviours and who they are. It helps you engage with them better so you don't promote your cause to the wrong people. This target marketing can get you closer to your organisation goal.

Of course, for donor segmentation to work, you should figure out what your goals are ahead of time. Do you want to significantly boost your response, conversation rate, get more interaction, increase your newsletters signups?

Start thinking like your supporters.

Ask yourself: Why do your donors support your organisation or cause? What does your organisation fulfil for them? Do all of your supporters have the same needs? Do certain campaign appeal to a specific type of donors?

Now you can start grouping your contacts into segments, using data and analytics to help. 

Vega makes it easy

Attributes in vega help you offer relevant information to your contacts. It is simple: you divide them into groups by their interests and needs and arrange your content based on that combination. 

You can use Vega Attributes to

• Record Contact Preferences or Activities
• Volunteer or Contact Skills, Interests, Availability, Health and Safety and much more
• Record Journeys and Opportunity Pipelines
• Record Memberships
• Record Survey Responses
• Record Campaign Type or Event Preferences

Think of anything you want to count; target or group and you probably have an attribute. Obviously target groups like “Current Donors” can be discovered from financial data. Respondents to campaigns can be discovered through the engage module. So, you have lots of places to discover data and target contacts. However, attributes can be flexible and easy ways to group or manage your contacts. Attributes also can trigger workflows. (More on this later)

All attributes can have a START DATE, END DATE, VALUE, STATUS (Open or Closed) and an Auto-Renew Flag. These will be explained later.

If you want to be able to find a group of contacts easily then, do you have an Attribute that defines that group? For instance, I want to find all my Volunteers. If all contacts who are volunteers have that attribute, then I find them reliably by a one-click query.

If I want to find all Volunteers with skill and available on Wednesdays, the likelihood is I will use two attributes in a simple query to get a reliable answer. I will search for the skill and I will filter that by an availability attribute for Wednesday. If any of these attributes are missing, my query becomes harder or I must search through a bigger list to find the right people.

I want to find all contacts who are interested in an issue. Do I have that issue coded as an Attribute and have I either added that attribute to the Contact or had Vega add that attribute for me as a result of campaign activity? If so, my query again is simple. (the alternative is to query everyone who responded to any campaign that featured the issue.)

Again, what is it I want to count in my database, target in communication from my database or create communications based on some trigger such as a new registration through the website.

If you know the answer to those simple questions you have the basis for an attribute structure.

Next: ATTRIBUTES VEGA CAN CREATE FOR YOU