In the course of our recent webinar on “How to Stop Donor Churn Before It Starts” , Kevin Schulman made the statement that “good donor service is a far better way of bringing in money than what most of the direct response world calls ‘fundraising‘. A lot better.”

No doubt a lot of webinar participants rolled their eyes or at least scratched their heads. That’s because the received wisdom in our trade is that the transactional and mechanical stuff like copy, frequency, asking amounts, offers, segmentation, and the annual string of appeals is ‘fundraising’.

Kevin’s point deserves exploration and discussion. Not because it challenges conventional wisdom, but because it is true and if heeded will improve your organization’s bottom-line significantly.

The reality is that while many organizations claim to be ‘donor-centric’, most merely concentrate their ‘donor centricity’ on the transactional and mechanical dimensions of the appeals or collection process itself.

By ignoring or neglecting the human interaction that results from great customer or donor service, most organizations forfeit enormous sums of money and increased levels of donor commitment and loyalty.

Sad but true. Most organizations do not appreciate the damage that poor service or great service does or doesn’t do. There’s little understanding of its overall impact on fundraising’s bottom-line.

The idea of ‘servicing’ donors is generally treated as a cost center and not as the enormous profit center that great donor service represents.

That’s why there’s so much focus on appeal after appeal and virtually no focus on the experience of the donor. We go to enormous lengths and expense to improve/tweak and optimize the offline and online appeals process, only to destroy or erode those investments by holding back and denying donors great customer service.

Take ‘donor feedback’ as one simple, easy, inexpensive, but mightily effective donor service as an example. The value of seeking donors’ feedback is reflected in chart below presented in the webinar.

[Here’s a larger PDF.]

In a test involving only a single instance of collecting donor feedback here’s the performance 6 months after the test:

• Contributions/purchase of additional offers increased 3 times over the control group.
• There was a 50% decrease in attrition; and,
• A 35% increase in net income from the test group over the control group.

As the chart notes, “If ever there was ever a ‘silver bullet’ this is it.”

My point in raising all this is to NOT condemn the current transactional and mechanical appeals processes, but rather to urge folks to go beyond them. To realize that the current way of doing things is limited and relying solely on it constitutes what I consider a terrible way to raise money. ‘Terrible’ because it will only get us so far. We can tweak and tweak, but the limits are quickly realized as many organizations can attest.

By placing all our eggs in the appeals/communications basket — believing these alone will ‘educate’ donors and make them more committed and loyal — we are simply deceiving ourselves.

If you truly want to break through the false ceiling of the status quo, start looking at the range of customer service and experiences you offer donors. When added to your current appeals/communications processes you’ll find it’s a lot better way to raise money.

Roger

P.S. For those Agitator readers who couldn’t attend the webinar, here’re some goodies we’d like to share with you.

• You can find and download just the slides from the webinar

• You can find, listen (and even download) the full, recorded webinar here.

• Here is the link to the free whitepaper on donor churn. This is well worth the read and covers aspects of the webinar in more detail, plus topics not covered in the session.

• You can self-serve your way — in mere minutes (seriously) — to getting in the donor feedback and service business on your website by setting up your free, forever DonorVoice Feedback Widget account here.

• Finally, check out this demo site on donor feedback.