Search Results for: feedback
Does Your Donor Service Deliver “WOW!”?
Giving Tuesday– in the midst of a pandemic– coupled with notice of the tragic death of Tony Hsieh, founder and former CEO of Zappos, the online shoe seller, reminds me that more than ever it’s again time hammer home the importance of great Donor Service. (Of course, the first step will be to promptly and […]
Need More Sustainers?
How about Telemarketing? More people are answering their phones these days. Contact rates are up. But, it takes more than contacts for TM success, especially if TM success is considered to be more than just conversion rates. You know you need to deliver Lifetime Value. DVCalling, the telemarketing arm of DVCanvass (and sister company to […]
The Great Telemarketing Comeback
In yesterday’s post, The Great Fundraising Comeback, I opined that in order to meet the future “we will need to start over”. I don’t mean begin from scratch—much of our knowledge and experience will prove durable and improvable– but I do mean we’ll be forced to look at first principles which means challenging virtually every […]
Is Your Donor Angry or Dissatisfied?
Is your donor angry or dissatisfied? Hopefully donor dissatisfaction and anger are rare in your organization though first year retention rates make a pretty strong argument for dissatisfaction being a major concern. Service failures can take many forms – e.g. name spelled wrong, sending too many solicitations, leading donors to wonder if their donation was […]
In Their Own Words: Satisfaction and Frustration in the Donor Experience
When donors have their psychological needs satisfied, they’re more likely to give and keep giving because they’ll really want to. We previously talked about donors’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. As a quick refresher: autonomy refers to feelings of choice and volition; competence to feelings of making a positive difference, and relatedness […]
What Impact Messaging Works Best? The Goldilocks Finding
One of humanity’s basic psychological needs is a sense of competence or efficacy. Putting time in on something, feeling like you suck at it and are getting no better, and then receiving no feedback or negative feedback undermines your motivation to keep doing it. This includes charitable giving. The donor’s sense of competence and efficacy […]
To Nudge or Nudge?
Every single test should have both theory and evidence as its basis. You could test a brown kraft envelope vs the plain white control, and then find some theory of human behavior that justifies this test. But, if you start with the theory, you may discover a better test idea. Why do people give? Social […]
Why Measuring Donor Satisfaction Isn’t Enough
The great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued knowledge cannot come from raw, sensory input alone; there must also be pre-existing, mental categories to sort and organize the sensory information. A modern-day Kantianism for our world is Data without theory is blind, but theory without data is empty. Let’s tackle the first part of this maxim […]
It’s Way Past Time to Raise the Donor-Centric Bar
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 […]
Calculating the Risk of Failure
As the combined horrors of major crisis within major crisis within major crisis piled up last week there was one moment of elation. The triumphant launch of SpaceX’s Dragon and its successful rendezvous with the International Space Station. In the course of the cable news runup to the launch Brian Williams of MSNBC interviewed retired […]