Sometimes when The Agitator offers proven — and always free — advice and tools, but gets few takers, it feels like we’re playing Mozart to a pig. Silence and little response. As Grandma Craver used to say, “It wastes your time and annoys the pig.”

Not this time. Sixty days ago we offered a free-forever tool on donor feedback.

The claim: it would improve donor retention by a minimum of 15%. The result: 35+ takers. No Mozart and pigs present here.

And with 465 caring fundraisers already signed up for our Webinar on “Stopping Donor Churn” , I figured maybe here was an awakening interest in the importance of donor feedback.

So I decided to check back on some of those who took advantage of our free-forever feedback widget and others who have taken it even a step further. Here’s what I found.

Lots of good news from both very small and very large organizations.

A currently small, but growing, nonprofit, Alliance for a Better Utah reports not only is the widget easy to use and installed in minutes, but that it’s proven valuable in spotting problems with their website … impressing donors and potential donors with the organization’s interest and concern about supporters … and providing insights on the best offers to make to potential donors.

On the opposite end of the size scale, ChildFund International, the mammoth sponsorship organization with more than 350,000 monthly donors, reports a 93% resolution rate and twice the rate of up-sell and cross-sell for those providing feedback about their sponsor care experience.

Across the board it looks like the proven, but little acted upon, claim that providing donors a chance to give their feedback and acting on it is producing immediate results.

• The Audubon Society has learned that it was leaving money on the table with a less than clear — from the donors’ perspective — monthly giving offer and was undermining future giving with a confusing — again from the donors’ perspective — honor and memorial giving process.
• All in all, from the data I’ve seen it appears that the mere fact of offering donors feedback opportunities and acting on that feedback will decrease attrition 50% for those given the opportunity to provide feedback; raising the obvious point that more feedback across more channels is a clear winner.

So why don’t more organizations participate and act on the obvious. A couple of reasons come to mind:

• Their consultants don’t understand or care. Because they can’t make a buck on listening to donors.

• Sloth and complacency. It takes maybe one or two hours a month extra to listen to donors. But …”we’re under-staffed.” Further, “Who cares what the donors think. Just send us money.”

• It’s ‘new’. If you have contempt or don’t care what donors think, then this whole business of feedback is new and a pain to understand. Why bother? It will go away and you can go back to your non-challenging, complacent business as usual.

Well, donor concerns won’t go away. And unless you’re aware of those concerns you’ll continue losing donors and blaming the loss on everything but the real reason — what your organization is not doing or what your organization is doing that drives donors away. Sure, blame it on ‘The economy’. ‘Donor fickleness’. ‘World disorder’. You name it. Anything but your own complacency.

Time to get serious.

As a first step, I invite you to join Kevin Schulman and me and tune in to The Agitator’s Webinar on “Donor Churn and How to Stop It” on December 3 at 11:00 a.m. EST. FREE REGISTRATION HERE.

Otherwise keep shooting in the dark with your random ideas, nonsensical ‘cadence’ tests and other desperate stabs in the dark, like reliance on RFM.

But please be aware, ‘random’ never wins. Never.

Roger

P.S. Commercial organizations spend billions seeking customer feedback. Less than 1% of nonprofit spend is dedicated to learning what donors think. RFM and the other ‘best practices’ are sure failures, because they don’t answer the question ‘Why?’ donors stay or leave, give or don’t. Feedback does. Register for The Agitator Webinar today.