There’s a movement afoot in the tech world to put ‘people’ first — before content, before design, and before software. Hopefully the same thing will catch on in the nonprofit world and ‘donors’ will rule.

For example, Facebook recently announced they have begun referring to ‘people’ as people, not users. And before Facebook weighed in, Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter noted:

“It’s time for our industry … to reconsider the word ‘user’. We speak about ‘user-centric design’, ‘user benefit’, ‘user experience’, ‘active users’, and even ‘usernames’. While the intent is to consider people first, the result is a massive abstraction away from the real problems people feel on a daily basis … They deserve our utmost respect, focus and service.“ [Emphasis added.]

It’s long been my experience that very few fundraisers have even the remotest idea of the profound effect of what’s sometimes called ‘donor service’ or ‘donor experience’ on retention, lifetime value and their organization’s overall bottom-line. They tend to see ‘donors’ as segments, or scores in predictive models, or complainants — or worse.

Conversely and far more positively, charities who do pay attention to donor servicing and donor experience interactions often make more money than they do through the mechanical process of ‘fundraising’ — the sending out of tons of appeals and other ‘content’ through as many channels as possible.

It’s time to change this mindset. Time to recognize our mechanical processes and systems (e.g. the C-R-M) are really good at measuring our successes, but lousy at understanding our donor experience and service failures. It is time to focus on providing empathy for the donor and repair the disconnect between fundraisers and the people they’re supposed to serve.

Even more important, it’s time to explain the high cost of ignoring the most simple-to-fix Lousy Donor Experiences. Some questions all of us should ponder:

• Q: Why do 57% of registrants for a peer-to-peer event never make a gift?
  A: The registration form and subsequent ‘user’ experience is lousy and it costs you BIG bucks.
• Q: How much does the ‘user’ mentality and related, seeming desire to avoid donor contact that a lousy ‘Contact Us’ page suggests truly cost your organization?
  A: Far more than you can even imagine.
• Q: What is the ROI of a simple service-oriented phone call?
  A: 70%

For more Questions and Answers on the importance of donor service and donor experiences, please mark your calendar.

On February 17 from 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. Eastern we’ll hold an Agitator/DonorVoice Webinar titled: How to Gain Massive ROI by Understanding and Fixing Donor Experience.

Registration is free to Agitator readers. But when you register and attend please plan to spend at least 90 minutes on this topic. This ain’t a ‘5 Easy Steps’ type of webinar.

Gain Massive ROI by Understanding and Fixing Donor Experiences

In this session we’ll demystify the usual Buzzword Bingo — ‘donor journey’, ‘donor lifecycle’, ‘donor life-stage’ — and clearly explain why you need to be concerned with the experiences you offer your donors.

Through the use of ‘before and after’ case studies you’ll not only understand the financial impact of the right donor experiences, you’ll learn how to fix those experiences that are broken.

Needless to say I think this is a ‘must attend’ session for any fundraiser concerned with retention, donor lifetime value and dramatically boosting the bottom line.

We’ll show the ‘Before’ or ‘Business-As-Usual’ examples employed today by the vast majority of nonprofits.

• Before: You’ll see the way most organizations deal with donor experiences or ‘touchpoints’. More often than not, this well-intended exercise quickly devolves into a production management schedule, stored in Excel, lacking the insights required to make informed changes to increase donor value.

And…we’ll show you the far more productive and potent ‘After’ examples:

• After: You’ll see first hand a visual and strategic planning exercise that identifies which touchpoints actually matter, the donor experiences that spring from those touchpoints and how to move from your current state to the donor’s ‘desired state’.

Here’s why I think you’ll want to spend 90 minutes with us on this too-often-overlooked subject:

• If the ‘before’ sounds all-too familiar and the ‘after’ is remotely appealing, you owe it to yourself, your organization and most importantly, your supporters, to tune in.

• If you are looking for an alternative to printing out Excel marketing communications plans in 7pt font and then taping countless pages together on a conference room wall in an attempt to show all the communications that are pushed out by every department in your organization, you owe it to yourself to tune in.

• If you intuitively believe that what a real live donor experiences when they interact with your organization dictates whether they stay or quit your organization, then you owe it to yourself to tune in.

Mark your calendar and join DonorVoice and The Agitator.

Registration is free.

Bad donor experiences are not.

Roger

P.S. Again, registration is free for Agitator readers.