“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”

― Stephen R. Covey

In the previous on boarding post I  emphasized  the imperative to listen as soon as possible. But that brings up the question: listen for what?

There are several variables that, when learned from donors during the onboarding progress, can increase retention and revenues:

Identity: Roger put this well last month:

“Donor Identity should become the central element in the process of segmenting a donor database. …  Organizations of all types and sizes dramatically increase the commitment/loyalty and lifetime value of their donors when they segment their fundraising appeals and donor communications according to donor identity and utilize messages that go directly to those identities.

More fundamentally, they change the economic engine from one of pure volume (make more, ask more with all its diminishing returns and inevitable slow/no growth trajectory) and guesswork on what to send, to one based on donor understanding.”

I have but two things to add:

• Amen.
• These identities change for each organization. Cat person versus dog person will not work for an international relief charity; it may not even work for an animal charity.  You must do rigorous research to discover identities that 1) want different things from your organization, 2) increase giving when activated and customized to, and 3) have more differences between groups than between group members.  (This last point, as I’ve discussed here, is part of why demographic variables are so poor as a differentiator.)

Consider the ASPCA’s “Tell us about yourself!” page that asks for identity and topic preference.  From this information, they customized emails and subject lines to fit the cat versus dog preference of the donor.  The response rates increased 230 percent as a result.  Now, that was in 2007, so donors are probably more accoustomed to customized emails.  But that’s also part of the point: people are now used to customized emails.  If you aren’t sending them, you are well behind the times.

Satisfaction with their experience: when you reach out to donors based on only transactional information, you are assuming they are happy with their experience.  Not everyone is.

I currently have a fitness watch to monitor my lack of fitness that, for the sake of anonymity, I’ll call a FitGit. I’m embroiled in a technological fight to get this to work as advertised and have been for months.  I’ve been having trouble getting emails back from customer service about this product.

Simultaneously, yet in a different universe, I have been receiving an aggressive number of emails asking that I order another FitGit.

I haven’t.

The fact that I bought doesn’t necessarily make me more likely to buy again.  Likewise, the fact that a donor donated doesn’t necessarily make her likely to donate again.

You have donors like this.  Perhaps they don’t like your stance on an issue.  Or that you telephoned for a donation.  Or that your memorial donation form required her to put in the address of the deceased. (By the way, check your online form for this; it’s more common than you’d think.)  Or because of mail frequency,  or any number of other things.

The point is that a dissatisfied donor – shocker – is less likely to be a repeat donor.

By assessing experience data immediately, you can not only better predict whether they will donate again; you can also fix the issue, both for this person and for the others.

But, oddly, many organizations don’t ask for this information or, if they do, it’s often only  after the “Share your donation on social media” acknowledgment.  My advice would be to assess whether they have good things to say before you encourage them to say them.

Commitment: we discussed the immediate benefit of the commitment + satisfaction questions yesterday – it creates effective models and remediation plans, with the example of Amnesty Belgium’s F2F donor bleed being cut in half (full story is available in detail here).

But there’s a benefit to knowing a donor commitment that goes beyond knowing whether they will retain or not. Donor who are highly committed donors are (far) more likely to become your monthly donors, multiple year donors, major donors, bequest donors, etc.  In short, your committed donors are not only the donors who will retain; they are the ones you want to retain.

Preferences: Lynne Wester has never and will never donate to an organization through the mail.  At right is a photo of her charity solicitations for just June and July.  She highlights some good preference captures on her blog post here.  Every mail piece cited wasted the cost of creating and sending it.  We can do better by asking people to opt in (or out).

An online example of this type of opt-in is up at Make-a-Wish America; when you sign up for email updates, you can also opt in to mobile and mail alerts.  Despite this being a benefit to both the donor and the organization, only ten of the top 100 nonprofit organizations (revenue-wise) ask for channel preferences upon email sign-up.

While this does benefit the donor, it also benefits the nonprofit.  Not only are you increasing retention, but you are also cutting waste out of your program.

In addition to channel preferences, you can also ask donors what topics and what frequency they desire.  Considering that ten times more nonprofit professionals think they are communicating too little compared to the number of donors who think so, we can bridge this disconnect by asking.

Putting it all together

So what goes first?  That is, what’s most important to capture earliest in the onboarding process?

It depends on a few factors:

• How big a value difference is there between your donor identities? For some organizations, one donor identity may have more than twice as much value.  They may also have entirely different reasons for donating.  In this case, it’s imperative to learn this factor and segment on this immediately at acquisition.  Other differences may be subtler.  That said, identity is the most likely variable to lead you down one donor journey or another, so it’s generally important to get first.
• How tight are your donation processes already? If you haven’t been collecting feedback from your donors, there’s a good chance you have some undiscovered changes that can make a significant difference.  If you have been and your dissatisfieds are low (below 2%), you may be able to prioritize other questions first.
• What are you capable of doing? If you feel like all you – or your database – can take on at first is getting satisfaction measures, go for it. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of better.  This is especially true if you think you might not be able to suppress already-answered questions.  Donors like to be asked why they give the first time; less so the second time.

But this may all be a false choice, since many of these can collected in short order and all at once.  Consider Jackie Fowler and Ken Burnett’s case study of Botton Village.  Their preference form at right asks about frequency, channel, and topic preferences.  They also are capturing information for bequest giving – a modern version would probably ask about email and phone capture.

Once you have all this great information (or you don’t – not everyone responds), now what?  That’s what we’ll be discussing in the next post on this subject.

For what sorts of information are you listening?

Nick