Are Donors And Nonprofits ‘Misaligned’?
In his four-part series — Raise More, Ask Less — Roger made a plea: listen to your donors and honor their preferences. Even if this suggests hitting them with fewer fundraising appeals.
Indeed, Roger offered ‘contrarian’ evidence that asking less can actually yield more money.
You can review Roger’s case here — Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
Why did he write the series?
“Because I believe that the lousy retention and no-growth rates we’re experiencing are related to the way we treat donors. And then fail to listen to the voices of these donors whether they’re saying ‘stop sending me so much mail’ or ‘I can’t figure out your donate page’.”
Now, here’s some evidence of the misalignment between donors’ preferences and the approaches nonprofits actually take.
It’s a study — What Really Matters — from marketing software firm Abila that reflects online surveys conducted with 1,263 US donors and 206 nonprofit fundraising professionals who work at organisations with annual revenue of $1-$49 million. Abila queried about channel preferences, the value of different types of engagement, frequency of activity, etc.
Their bottomline: Donors and organisations are misaligned on communication frequency.
Here’s the slide that says it all …
42% of nonprofit professionals believe they communicate ‘not enough’, compared to 4% of donors. So on that basis, we might expect the nonprofits to significantly step up their contacts, and many, if not most, will be fundraising appeals.
But 92% of donors say they’re getting the ‘right amount’ or ‘too much’ contact already.
Does this not foreshadow the collision of which Roger warns?
Are you ready to abandon the ‘shove it down their throat’ school of fundraising?
Tom
P.S. Of further interest, the Abila study indicates that, across all channels, Boomers and Matures want less communication than Millennials and Gen Xers. And the favourite channel of Boomers and Matures … no surprise … direct mail.
P.P.S. Thanks to Mike Cowart for the heads-up.
2 responses to “Are Donors And Nonprofits ‘Misaligned’?”
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Thanks for link, guys. In order to compare apples to apples you might want to highlight a second chart in Abila’s study: The one that shows the overlap between what donors feel is “the right amount” and what nonprofits actually do.
For direct mail, according to the study, that overlap frequency is two times per quarter (8X per year). Not including thank-yous, that’s roughly equivalent to 4 newsletters and 4 appeals.
Most nonprofits still don’t approach this.
I also found it interesting that the biggest mismatch was for social media. Donors have a far lower frequency tolerance than what the chart shows nonprofits are delivering. It would have been really cool to know the final piece of the puzzle: the retention rates of the nonprofits in the survey.
Thanks for sharing this, all. Enjoyed very much.
It’s important to remember that people don’t always do what they say.
I’ve seen this so many times!
For instance, donors and customers say that they hate pop-ups on websites that ask them to sign-up for alerts. Honestly, they even annoy me sometimes.
But they work!!! The key is to test the timing (after 5 seconds vs. 30 seconds, for instance), test the page views (after 1 page view or 3), after they exit (a landing page vs. the entire site), etc.
What I’m saying is… you can’t only measure what donors say. You have to measure what they do.
Be careful with donor surveys. I’ve reached 10’s of millions of supporters using donor surveys AND online engagement measurement tools. Again, what they say isn’t always what they do.