The commercial marketing space is full of chatter about getting ‘customer insight’ and understanding the ‘customer experience’ with the brand and its products/services (now termed ‘Cx’).

The parallel phenomenon in the nonprofit space is all the chatter about being ‘donor-centric’.

I don’t use ‘chatter’ to be disparaging. I’m happy whenever I see marketing and our unique version of it — fundraising — discussed and approached with the customer/donor as the starting point.

Here are two examples.

The first, from the commercial space: Five Ways to Design the Customer Into Your Company, recently published on MarketingProfs.

Setting aside the corporate speak in much of this article, two key points struck me:

Ask whether you know your customers as well as you know your numbers.

The article asks: “Are there pictures of real customers adorning your desk and office walls? And how many actual customers’ names do you know?” And goes on to comment: “Although it’s impossible to have a personal relationship with all of your customers, it’s entirely possible (and necessary) to forge relationships with some of them. Relationship—not data points—nurtures intuition.”

Remember that numbers don’t speak for themselves, and data alone doesn’t move people.

The article comments: “Yes, a graph showing that 76% of respondents found Concept X “somewhat or very consistent” with your brand may be interesting as you think about potential market share. But if you want to understand and act on the emotion that drives mind share, more compelling would be video diaries from real people making real choices between your brand and your competitors’, or trying your product prototypes at home, or marking up your ideas with comments and suggestions.”

Closer to home, in the fundraising space, Angie Moore addresses Donor Centricity: How Do You Measure It? in a recent Fundraising Success article.

Angie recommends measuring/monitoring:

1. Retention — yes, yes, yes!
2. New donor growth — here’s she’s talking about increasing donor value.
3. Competitive metrics — what are your direct competitors doing to foster donor relationships.
4. Donor satisfaction — Says Angie: “You need some way of understanding how people feel about your brand … Becoming donor-centric is about making the marketing and fundraising relationship more about the donor and better for the donor. So, yes, you need to know if that is actually happening. Whether you want to look at loyalty metrics, satisfaction metrics or some other metric, they key is to actually ask donors for their personal opinions and then measure the change in those opinions over time.” Amen!
5. Process improvement — “There are many, many, many donor processes that affect whether donors are satisfied, willing to retain, etc. You should be looking at all of your donor processes: acknowledgment strategy and timeline, issue resolution process, call-center hold times (if you have a call center or inbound donor care line), etc.” Amen again!

Are you walking the talk when it comes to donor centricity? Are you designing the donor in?

Tom