7 Helpful Marketing Capabilities for Nonprofits from Microsoft 2024 Product Release Wave 2
If your nonprofit is looking for software that supports more complex marketing capabilities, consider adding Microsoft to your list.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights combines modern content development and marketing automation with a powerful segmentation engine that can leverage unified constituent profile data from multiple sources. It’s a good option for nonprofits that want to take their marketing to a more sophisticated level by creating multi-channel constituent journeys versus simply managing email marketing.
Here at Heller Consulting, we stay in-the-know as Microsoft continues to roll out new product features and functionality so that we can share what we learn with our nonprofit clients and readers. In this article, we’re sharing seven new and planned capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights from the Microsoft 2024 product release wave two that we’re particularly excited about for nonprofits.
Seven Helpful Marketing Capabilities for Nonprofits from Microsoft 2024 Product Release Wave 2
While the following features are not specifically built for nonprofits, nor are they the only new capabilities from Microsoft, we see them as particularly helpful for nonprofits that want to take their marketing to the next level:
1. Take campaigns from concept to launch using Copilot.
This feature, slated for general availability in December 2024, makes it easier to build entire campaigns with the power of artificial intelligence (AI). Using Microsoft Copilot, this capability allows you to describe your campaign and objectives in plain language. It then automatically generates audience segments, messages, and customer journeys using your description and your data and templates in Customer Insights.
By giving you a head start on your marketing campaigns, it can help you accomplish more by simplifying most of the steps needed to create sophisticated campaigns.
2. Collect extra customer data without custom attributes.
With public preview planned for October 2024, this feature provides more flexibility when collecting data from forms. It allows you to add custom fields to your marketing forms without needing to introduce new fields for those data points in the contact record. So, for example, you can create fields to ask for one-time/temporary information, such as meal preference for a special fundraising event, and have that stored with the forms submission without needing a meal preference field on the contact record. This allows you to keep your data cleaner by not cluttering it with one-off data.
3. Boost customer confidence with branded content links.
Also planned for public preview in October 2024, this feature allows you to use branded domains in system-generated URLs to give your links a more professional and authoritative look. In today’s world of spam and distrust, this feature can go a long way toward building trust with your constituents and improving brand recognition and campaign performance for your nonprofit.
4. Build and test journeys before deploying to production.
This feature, planned for general availability in October 2024, makes it easy to run simulations of your constituent journeys before rolling them out. As your journeys become more complex, this feature is especially useful because it allows you to fine-tune your journeys and make sure they work the way you intend them to work.
5. Personalize customer messages based on web interactions.
With general availability planned for February 2025, this capability allows you to easily track and utilize your constituents’ online behavior to deliver a more personalized experience. It lets you easily embed a tracking script on your website that can be used to trigger custom experiences based on web behavior. It’s an ideal way to use first-party data to give your constituents a more engaging experience while protecting privacy and complying with data privacy regulations.
6. Get insights on email engagement with heatmap analytics.
Public preview for this feature is planned for October 2024. It provides a visual representation of how constituents interact with your emails, allowing you to see which email areas and links get the most and least engagement. You can filter the heat map based on the email version, journey version, and date – giving you the ability to easily see what’s working and what’s not, and then optimize your email communications for better results.
7. Generate insights from marketing interactions.
With general availability in December 2024, this feature allows you to access interaction data from your Customer Insights Journeys campaigns – such as emails opened and email links clicked – in Customer Insights Data. This marketing engagement data can then be combined with data from your other technology systems to create more complex segments to bring back into Customer Insights Journeys.
Learn more about Microsoft solutions for nonprofits
If your nonprofit is interested in moving to a platform approach to technology, keep in mind that Microsoft offers multiple solutions for nonprofits. As a Microsoft partner, our team at Heller Consulting is well-positioned to help you determine if Microsoft products are right for your organization, develop a business case and roadmap, and implement and support the solutions. Contact us today to learn more and get started.
About the Author
Comments