Look at the image sets. Clean desk or chaos corner? Friendly reminder above the sink or sarcastic passive-aggression? Still life fruit or wild abstraction? Window-gazing calm or crowd-surfing madness?  You have a clear favorite in each pair, no struggle, no committee meeting, just instant affinity.

That’s personality at work. That’s traits in action. And that same clarity, the deep, reflexive “yes, this feels right” is exactly what your donors bring to your fundraising messages, channels, and cadences. So why do we pretend they don’t?

Third-Party Data Is a Mirror.

We use third-party data to model into the Big Five traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability.

This isn’t stalking, it’s reflecting.  Those 3rd party data points are choices and those choices reflect preferences that shape the clean desk pickers vs. cluttered chaos lovers.

Those traits predict behavior because they determine, in part, what people notice and avoid.

Let’s say your donor is high in Openness (hello, abstract art and trail-blazing ideas). Why send her the same tired “We’ve done this for 30 years, help us do it for 30 more” message you blast to everyone else?

Or your donor scores high in Conscientiousness (hi, clean desk and clearly labeled folders). Maybe that donor loves a plan, a timeline, and knowing where their gift fits into the grand scheme.

These aren’t assumptions, they’re evidence-based profiles and they’re easy to tap into if you’re willing to shift from old-school segmentation.

“Active,” “Lapsed,” and “Sustainer” Tell You Nothing About the Why

You can keep segmenting by recency-frequency-monetary (RFM), channel, or, God help us, generation. That gets you behavior, past tense, what they did.  Traits give you why they did it and, critically, why they’ll do it again.

Our job isn’t to describe the file. Our job is to connect.   And that means understanding the inner wiring that responds to different messages and journeys.

You want better segmentation? Stop with the zip codes, RFM buckets, internal jargon, channel tags and demos.

We’re not guessing. We’re applying decades of psychological theory and modeling to a donor file that already told you everything but you just didn’t know how to listen.

And that’s why your fundraising journey likely feels like a monologue instead of a conversation.

Kevin