Are You a Modern or Medieval Fundraiser?
Donors are changing far faster today than most of the organizations they give to. Their expectations are rising at the very moment their trust and loyalty are declining.
Unfortunately, far too many nonprofits fail to understand this reality. As a result they’re woefully unprepared to cope. Few organizations understand why their donors give… few bother seeking feedback and listening to their donors… and even fewer discipline themselves to diligently measure their donors’ expectations and behavior.
Without the investment in understanding, listening and measuring donor expectations organizational decline is a near certainty.
This week we’re focusing on donor expectations and ways to measure whether those actions your organization takes toward donors are driving up loyalty or driving donors to the exits.
Sustainable success today requires an agile organization that is constantly soliciting donor feedback, constantly measuring donor behavior and constantly adapting and refining the donor experiences it offers based on feedback and metrics.
For years most organizations have had far better communication tools than their donors. This allowed them a great degree of control (and sloppy practices) over what they offered and delivered to their donors.
No more. Today’s donors often have better information and communication tools than the organization itself. The internet, smartphones, and easy-to-use tablet and computer applications — and e-commerce marvels like Amazon–have opened up new vistas and expectations for donors.
Historically, information has flowed in a top-down manner with little opportunity for two-way communication. The stone tablet, scroll and even the printed page are not conducive to easy feedback. In the digital age that’s no longer true.
Yet many organizations continue to operate in a medieval mode that assumes the donor is passively awaiting word from on high, from some central authority or font of wisdom. Consequently, far too many groups fail to take meaningful metrics and donor feedback as seriously as they should.
This is why we’ve begun devoting substantial time and space to exploring more productive metrics and feedback , as you’ve seen so far this week and will see again tomorrow and on Friday.
It’s also the reason we’ll increasingly focus on why other concepts we cover –like donor identity and donor segmentation–should be seriously explored by any fundraiser looking to grow their organization’s income and reinforce its sustainability. To that end I think you’ll find the interview between Steve MacLaughlin of Blackbaud and Kevin Schulman of DonorVoice of value.
This podcast episode is part of Blackbaud’s Raise + Engage series and goes into depth on building and using donor identities. Perhaps even more helpful is the advice on the type of mindset essential for these changing times. And, you won’t want to miss the helpful insight on why exploring new concepts like donor identity and sophisticated donor segmentation is best done as a pilot project if you want to get past initial and internal objections and resistance within your organization. You can listen to the podcast here.
Given the speed of change in communication and information we all need to become far more agile at listening to, measuring and then adapting to our donors’ expectations.
Are you a modern or medieval fundraiser?
Roger
One response to “Are You a Modern or Medieval Fundraiser?”
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This is very interesting and touches on two questions I’ve been wrestling with lately. One is data focused, the other more process focused.
1. How are we sharing information internally?
When our organizations are practicing regular data hygiene, what’s the process and how long before those updates are available to others within the organization? This has implications for who we contact, how we contact them, what messaging we should be promoting, and so on. Fundraisers are a nosy people (myself included) and we love to ask “why?” I think this is because our work is greatly impacted by context.
When an organization has decided not to include specific donors or prospects in a particular fundraising program, is there a simple “yes or no” policy or is more robust information available? For example, an organization might want to enforce a policy that they never send direct mail to major donors (not a policy I agree with, but a not uncommon one). That same organization might put the same sort of “hold” or suppression process in place for a midlevel donor who told a gift officer that they’ll be out of the country for the summer, so no mail please. And again, that same organization might suppress someone because they were offended by a communication and requested never to be contacted again. Those cases are all very different, have different next steps and action items, and have varying degrees of importance. If our imaginary non-profit hired a new fundraiser today, how would they access all of that information?
2. How are we preparing for when our donors talk to each other?
It’s so easy to forward an email and include a brief comment. Some of these comments are just a matter of taste, others are silly mistakes, but the important ones are feedback we could use to improve our messaging if only we were part of the conversation. One organization I donate to sends a lot of well-produced emails. Those emails often start a conversation between me and friends who are also donors, but not between me and the organization. That’s not necessarily bad, but those conversations are happening without us (the fundraisers). We need to find more innovative ways to listen and to solicit actionable feedback.