At DonorVoice, we are constantly monitoring the satisfaction of donors.  Was it easy to donate online?  How was your experience with that canvasser?  How satisfied were you with that event?

It may surprise you, then, to hear me say that you can have donors who are satisfied by an experience and it doesn’t matter at all.

This is clearly an exception, not the rule.  If someone is dissatisfied by a donation process, they are less likely to give then and less likely to give in the future.

But just because someone is satisfied by an experience doesn’t mean it matters.

Let me explain.

What got me thinking about this is a nonprofit that was asking what they should do in this situation: the people who created their magazine wanted to see if people liked the magazine by putting a survey in the magazine.

Let’s leave aside the obvious self-selection bias here, except to say that only people who don’t throw the magazine away would be the ones taking the survey.  This is rather like asking only people in red hats how the president is doing; you will get results, but not representative ones.

Oops.  Guess I couldn’t leave that aside.  Sorry.

But there’s another fundamental problem with this.  As you ask whether someone is satisfied with something, you must also know if that something matters.  Does it make them more committed to the organization? Does it increase donations? Could it, even if it worked well?

In Other People’s Money, Danny Devito has a great speech that says in part:

“You know, at one time there must’ve been dozens of companies makin’ buggy whips.  And I’ll bet the last company around was the one that made the best [expletive redacted] buggy whip you ever saw.  Now how would you have you liked to have been a stockholder in that company?”

Same thing here. People can be satisfied, even delighted, by your buggy whips.  But they are still buggy whips – untethered to your success as an organization.

Your newsletter, cultivation series, welcome emails, webinars, etc etc etc, can be highly satisfying and completely irrelevant.  That satisfaction may not matter to people when they assess your organization.  Or it may matter, but not to the people who matter.  Either way, satisfaction doesn’t equal effectiveness.

That’s why in our commitment studies we look at not only what people like (and don’t like), but we use that information and model it against commitment and financial metrics. That way, you know what doesn’t matter, what does matter, and how much it matters.  Then you get a simple breakdown directing the proper action you should take:

• Scale it: it matters and you are doing well at it.
• Fix it: it matters and you are doing poorly at it
• Drop it (or know that you are doing it for non-fundraising reasons): it doesn’t matter (and you are doing well or poorly at it – if it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter)

Then,  you want to be setting up tools to assess satisfaction – when you have determined that that satisfaction will lead to results. (You can read more about the system we use at DonorVoice  here.)

We all have enough on our plates that we need not spend time on things that don’t matter.  When you measure satisfaction on something that doesn’t matter, it’s a double waste: wasting the time to collect and analyze the data and wasting the time you will inevitably fixing things that won’t move the needle.

Do you know what matters to your donors?

Nick