During these last few days of the year, we hope you’re taking some time to reflect on 2017 and how your nonprofit fared. What were your successes? Where are areas you’d like to improve? 

We’ve come up with five must-do resolutions for 2018 and hope you’ll take these into consideration as you plan for the new year.

I will segment my donors. 

Mass appeals have no appeal to your donors. Donors want personalized communications based on their relationship with the organization, where they are in the donor journey and their level of giving. And not just that, but with a donor file made up of everyone from Boomers to Millennials, you need to be communicating with different segments of your donors in different ways. A good donor database and clean data is critical to implementing personalized fundraising strategies.

I will onboard new donors. 

Strategically welcoming new donors is a simple process that can completely change the way a donor interacts with you in the future, help you get that second gift, and build a long-term relationship. Yet so many nonprofits don’t have an onboarding process in place. If you invest in one simple but game-changing thing this year, make it new donor onboarding.

I will automate my communications. 

Segmenting and onboarding becomes much more manageable with marketing automation. The time and energy involved in manually onboarding a new donor is prohibitive and the reason so many nonprofits don’t have good onboarding in place. But with marketing automation, you can set up your series once and then have it automatically work for you. Marketing automation is no longer daunting and expensive either; in fact, Donor.com has automation included in its all-in-one suite of services. It’s affordable and easy to set up triggers and automated series.

I will invest in my mobile strategy. 

We don’t just mean making sure your website is responsive. Mobile continues to rule the Internet, with more and more browsing and purchasing happening on mobile over desktop each year. (In fact, major Chinese tech companies just decided to stop developing desktop sites all together. See this article: http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/3-lessons-marketers-can-learn-from-the-mobile-first-consumer-journey-in-china/. The U.S. isn’t there yet, but it’s telling.) You need to make sure your giving page is optimized for mobile giving and invest in mobile marketing and fundraising strategies (social media, text messaging, etc.) to meet people where they are.

I will never stop learning. 

A few years ago, automation, segmentation, and mobile strategies did not even exist; today, they are no longer optional. Several years from now, we won’t be thinking about mobile fundraising or automation because it will be so commonplace; what will be thinking about instead? AI? The Internet of Things? We don’t yet know how these innovations will play out in the world of fundraising and marketing, but we do know there will continue to be new innovations that require nonprofits to continuously step up their game. Successful leaders are committed to adopting a flexibility that’s dictated by ongoing lessons learned.

What are your plans for 2018? What are your New Year’s resolutions?