Connect the Dots: Building a Complete View of Your Supporters

Nonprofits and schools face a persistent challenge: constituent data is fragmented, inconsistent, and often duplicated across systems. As donor relationships become more complex, the need for a complete view of every supporter grows. Unifying data from all touchpoints can empower your organization to build accurate constituent profiles that drive smarter engagement, deeper relationships, and better outcomes.

In the recent webinar, Empowering Your Outcomes Through Identity Resolution, Sam Venable, manager of the Blackbaud data intelligence product management team, explored how organizations can overcome these data challenges to build stronger, more personalized relationships. This article builds on that conversation—offering practical insights to help you connect the dots, eliminate data silos, and unlock the full potential of your supporter data.

When to Get Serious About Identity Resolution

If your organization is dealing with messy, partial, or duplicate data, it’s time to take identity resolution seriously.

As Venable explains, “Most of the orphaned data is actually produced through third-party integrations.” Without a way to unify this data—whether it’s from volunteers, new students, or donors—you risk missing the full picture of supporter engagement.

You likely need to prioritize identity resolution if:

• You’re importing data from multiple third-party platforms.
• You’re onboarding large groups of new constituents (e.g., school parents or event attendees).
• You’re seeing high volumes of partial or inconsistent records.
• You’re preparing for a system migration or CRM integration.
• You’re launching a major campaign and need clean, consolidated data.

The goal is to connect the dots across systems, improve donor data integration, eliminate duplicates, and ensure your outreach reflects a complete view of each supporter. Historically, this has been difficult due to siloed systems and inconsistent data entry. But with tools like Blackbaud’s Persistent Key, powered by LiveRamp’s trusted identity graph, organizations are streamlining the process and building actionable supporter profiles.

Why Is Identity Resolution So Important for Your Organization?

The cost of bad data is more than just a nuisance—it’s a drain on your resources. A 5% duplicate rate in a database of 250,000 constituents can result in over $9,000 in wasted postage and $1,000 in unnecessary email costs annually. However, even this is a conservative estimate. The costs scale with the number of pieces sent to these duplicates, and many organizations report much higher duplication in their databases.

Beyond cost, poor data quality wastes staff time and undermines your analytics. Business development and sales professionals in the for-profit world spend up to a quarter of their time chasing down bad data. That’s a burden nonprofits can’t afford. Identity resolution, combined with effective data deduplication, helps your organization:

• Reduce outreach costs by eliminating duplicate records and avoiding redundant communications.
• Save staff time by minimizing manual data cleanup and duplicate tracking.
• Improve data quality for more accurate segmentation, modeling, and reporting.
• Enhance donor experiences by ensuring personalized, consistent engagement across channels.
• Protect your sender reputation by avoiding spam flags from duplicate emails.

Data is a powerful tool. When your organization treats data as a product—actively managed, curated, and governed—you gain the clarity needed to make strategic decisions, even in uncertain times. Identity resolution plays a critical role here by ensuring that every interaction with a supporter is informed by a complete history of your relationship.  

Understanding Lifetime Value

Blackbaud’s data science team found that supporters tend to self-select into engagement “tracks” early in their relationship with an organization, and they often stay in those tracks over time. This insight is crucial for maximizing lifetime value.

By identifying high-value supporters early and understanding their preferred modes of engagement, you can tailor outreach and stewardship strategies. Effective identity resolution enables more accurate wealth screening, predictive modeling, and long-term planning.

Generational Wealth Transfer and the Future of Giving

Over the next 25 years, an estimated $112 trillion will change hands in the largest generational wealth transfer in history. This represents a massive opportunity for social impact organizations.

To capture this opportunity, nonprofits must engage younger generations—especially Millennials and Gen Z—who expect personalized, values-driven experiences. According to Blackbaud Institute research, 84% of Gen Z support causes in some way, and one-third expect to increase their giving. But younger donors often engage through nontraditional channels like social media and peer-to-peer fundraising. This makes it harder to track their full engagement.

By linking data across platforms, Persistent Key helps organizations recognize and respond to these emerging donors with the personalized outreach they expect.

The Role of AI in Nonprofit Strategy

Artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) are reshaping how nonprofits operate. From summarizing donor communications to enabling agent-to-agent collaboration, AI is accelerating productivity and unlocking new possibilities for engagement.

But AI-powered donor engagement is only as effective as the data it’s built on. Identity resolution ensures that AI tools have access to clean, complete, and connected data, which fuels smarter recommendations, deeper personalization, and more efficient workflows.

Identity as the Foundation of Nonprofit Data Strategy

As nonprofits prepare for a future shaped by generational change, technological disruption, and increasing donor expectations, one thing is clear: identity is the foundation of effective data strategy.

Blackbaud’s Persistent Key, powered by LiveRamp, enables organizations to resolve identities with 89% accuracy at the individual level and 91% at the household level—a 20-point improvement over previous methods. This enhanced fidelity improves not only identity resolution but also the performance of predictive models, analytics, and campaign targeting. “Identity is the linchpin that pulls all of this together,” Venable emphasizes.

Identity resolution is no longer a nice-to-have, and it’s no longer out of reach. Ready to take the next step? Watch the on-demand webinar Empowering Your Outcomes Through Identity Resolution to hear directly from data strategy expert Sam Venable. You’ll gain deeper insights, real-world examples, and guidance to help you unify your data and elevate your engagement strategy.