At first blush the terms “donor commitment” and “donor engagement”  sound similar.  After all, is it not a truth universally acknowledged, that a loyal donor in possession of strong commitment, must also want to be engaged beyond beyond their donation?

No!

It is possible to be committed to an organization,  but not engaged with that organization.  The reverse is also true.

Think of those folks who take every email action alert you send out, along with every action alert 10 other organizations send out.  They are engaged with your organization, but not committed to you as much as they are committed to barraging their Member of Congress with messages for or against specific issues.

Conversely, consider someone who signed up for monthly donations in 2007 and has stuck with you through the Target and Equifax hacks, and the Great Recession.  She’s upgraded five times over that time.  She gives you more than she gives other organizations.

What she hasn’t done is read your annual report or newsletter, walked in your 5K, “liked” you on Facebook, or any of the other myriad of activities you’ve tried to interest her in.  She is committed to you, but she isn’t engaged.

In Building Donor Loyalty (from 2004), Adrian Sargeant and Elaine Jay type donors based on commitment (the strength of their relationship to the organization) and engagement (participation beyond donation and the potential to invest in the relationship).

We’re all well familiar with responders who are low in both measures.    (Per the book: “Nonprofits can thus do little to manage retention among this group, and rather than persist they might do better to conserve their resources and invest them elsewhere.”)

And for those who are high in engagement, you have “potentials: those who, with the right treatment, can turn into “advocates,” who are high in commitment and engagement.

This leaves us  the passive loyals:  the committed donors who don’t do much beyond simply making donations. That’s not a bad thing – -these are good, loyal donors.  As Sargeant and Jay say,  “Campaigns that generate high numbers of this category of supporter have successfully matched their cause with individuals with a genuine interest and concern.”

But, you say, I’ve looked at many a graph that goes up and to the right indicating that Volunteers tend to be more committed and better donors.  Advocates tend to be more committed and better donors. Walkers tend to be more committed and better donors.  And on and on.

Before you remember to test for alternate causality (e.g., new donors both are less likely to have done other activities because of mere lack of exposure and have lower commitment levels on average), you are off to the races bombarding them with a range of with engagement activities.

There is certainly a correlation – higher commitment folks tend to have higher engagement and lower tends to have lower.  But there are outliers in the passive loyals and potentials.  And the relationship isn’t causal.

Looking at the passive loyals, then bombarding them with irrelevant (to them) “asks” commits two cardinal sins: wasting your money and annoying your donors.  They signed up to do their thing; and they are doing it.

So how do you know which is which?

Ask.

People will tell you what type of relationship they want to have with you and how they want to engage.

On the commitment side, if they are committed, they’ll tell you.  If they aren’t committed, they’ll tell you.  And if they don’t tell you, they are telling you they likely aren’t committed.

If a donor is committed, but not engaged, s/he just shows love by donating.  Leaving them alone and not bombarding them with additional offers for engagement is your way of showing that love back.

Nick