Because The Agitator is so committed to improving donor retention as a strategic priority, we are equally committed to convincing fundraisers of the importance of delivering terrific donor service.

You can’t control death rates, stock market collapse, or loss of employment/income as causes of diminished donor retention, but you can control the experience your organization delivers when donors interact — or attempt to interact — with you.

These days, delivering superior customer experience is a really big deal in the corporate world. Here’s the opening of a McKinsey report, The CEO guide to customer experience …

“Leading companies understand that they are in the customer-experience business, and they understand that how an organization delivers for customers is beginning to be as important as what it delivers.”

There’s a heap of jargon in this report (the kind The Agitator often pokes fun at) … McKinsey is a big-time advocate of the “customer journey” — “a progression of touchpoints that together add up to the experience customers get when they interact with companies”. But setting that aside, their message is on target. And they make buckets of money showing major companies how to be genuinely customer-centric.

Why are companies interested? Here’s McKinsey:

“Armed with advanced analytics, customer-experience leaders gain rapid insights to build customer loyalty, make employees happier, achieve revenue gains of 5 to 10 percent, and reduce costs by 15 to 25 percent within two or three years.”

They go on to note: “But it takes patience and guts to train an organization to see the world through the customer’s eyes…”

Why should your nonprofit care?

McKinsey makes a critical point about rising customer expectations:

“Increasingly, customers expect from all players [my emphasis] the same kind of immediacy, personalization, and convenience that they receive from leading practitioners such as Google and Amazon.”

Your nonprofit, like it or not, is one of those players. And your donors are being trained to expect high standards of responsiveness and recognition. You might indeed need to step up your donor experience game if you want to remain a player!

If you could afford McKinsey, they’d take a quick look around and ask: “Where’s your chief customer officer?”

But you can’t afford McKinsey, so this report gives you the cheap, but still sophisticated, version of their advice, which you can scale down to your organizational environment. It’s worth a read if you’re interested in improving the way you interact with and service your donors.

Tom

P.S. OK, so maybe you get it. But this is the “The CEO guide…” after all. Does he or she get it?