Why is the norm in which most nonprofits operate based on a premise nobody believes:  every donor is the same.

Yet, this false premise often serves as the very cornerstone of our work.  For example, we run A/B tests with the ‘gold’ standard being met when the test and control group audiences are the same as each other and, it’s assumed, the same within each group.

This common testing methodology is all the evidence one needs to confirm through practice the belief  that all donors are the same.  Our control goes to everybody.  It is the exact same.  Same for most house file appeals.  Again, to drive the point home, the norm by which most of the sector operates is based on a premise that nobody actually believes; everyone is the same.

How on earth does this reconcile with being ‘relevant’ or ‘donor-centric’?

How does this advance our proclaimed desire for relationship building ? Or our aspirations to have kick-ass trigger-based automation on gee-whiz CRMs that get to one-to one fundraising?  If our entire operation is built on the premise that everyone is the same it ain’t gonna happen or it doesn’t need to since every one is the same.

Unfortunately,  “donor-centric””, a morphology of “customer-centric”, has devolved to a set of ‘best practices’ that require knowing absolutely nothing about the individual supporter that distinguishes one donor from another.

Customer-centric, at its core, aims at building a business around meeting customer needs and quickly discovering there are differing needs that must serve as the basis of different customer groups.

Humans may have some universal need to feel appreciated and be shown gratitude and feel like their money isn’t being wasted, but how that gets conveyed and framed shouldn’t be the same.  Sending out the same communication to everyone, even if it shows appreciation, is personalized with their name and giving amount, demonstrates impact or is a lovely stewardship piece (by subjective decree) is not donor-centric.  It is generic.   Everyone gets the same thing.   It is relevant to the reader only by chance.  Look no further than our sector’s retention rates to know we are failing on ‘relevance’ and our base assumption that donor-centric can be done well while assuming they are all the same is a major reason.

It’s (way past) time to put a marker down separating deeper donor centric strategy and process from the superficial.   Of course, the latter is better than transactional fundraising that’s mechanically executed as though people are widgets,  but we shouldn’t be satisfied with hopping over that crack in the sidewalk and thinking we pole vaulted.

Anything other than vaulting over the marker to a deeper, better and authentic donor-centric mode is defining success downward.

Real donor centric is no more expensive than the superficial.

Real donor-centric starts with mindset and morphs to process.  Mindset first.  Deeper, donor-centricity has two ingredients at its core.

1. Segmentation based on the donor’s “why”.  This can be Identity or personality or some other, innate donor-provided data (zero party data ) or arrived at via valid proxy data (most is not valid).  This is the donor’s motivation and reason for support.   Internally defined groupings – e.g. active, lapsed, one-time, sustainer – are, at best, tactical overlays requiring superficial changes in verbiage but having nothing to do with who donors are.

An example.  We are sending out an acquisition mailing that has 4 donor segments defined by who they are and reasons “why” they might support (reasons that are, of course, germane to the mission and context of the charity).   Here are more details using artificial numbers but otherwise real.

Instead of a 100,000 piece mailing that goes to everyone, we have appended data to the merged, mail file and created four segments tied to Identity and Personality

• Dog People whose Personality skews towards Agreeable
• Dog People whose Personality skews towards Conscientiousness
• Cat People whose Personality skews towards Conscientiousness
• Cat People whose Personality skews towards Conscientiousness

Each segment gets a fundamentally different mailing with the central messaging being about their values and needs and far less about the charity or generic copy.  You cannot write a generic acquisition piece that is relevant and donor-centric if this is the alternative – and it is.

We four controls, not one.  These aren’t really “controls” in the conventional sense as much as they are “products”.  We’ll look to test within each product/donor-defined audience group, but never again will it be one test to the entire 100,000.

Those who respond get tagged in the CRM as belonging to that Identity/Personality segment.  All subsequent touchpoints get tailored accordingly.  A big part of donor “engagement” is collecting zero-party data from these individuals and as we get it, replacing the proxy value with their personally identified value as needed (i.e. when different).

Other channels allow for different processes and approaches that use less proxy data and more zero-party.  But, the larger point is we are putting real meat on the often thin bone of “donor-driven” and “donor-focused”.  No more generic communication.  This brings us to the second maxim of real donor-centricity.

2) Asking for feedback about individual experiences.  You cannot profess to care about or be in the donor experience business if you aren’t continuously and systematically measuring the quality of those experiences from the only source that matters – the donor.  Behavior is a weak proxy.  One shouldn’t assume a response to a mailing or an online donation resulting in a final donate button being pressed or a sign-up via F2F or monthly giving invitation was positive or optimum.

How to measure is a separate post unto itself but suffice to say it is context dependent.  Further, we must get beyond the generic “satisfaction” measures.  Digging deeper requires measuring the psychological need states of competence, autonomy, and relatedness to provide the necessary diagnostic data to follow up properly with individual supporters and to fix broken experiences.

If the world has changed it may only be to accelerate that which was already trending.   The challenge and opportunity for our sector is our donor-centric trendline or bar being set way too low.

Raising the donor-centric bar and turbocharging its progress is the key to success; both pre and post-Covid.

Kevin