Back in April, I wrote a series on using your real estate better, including tips on reply devices, preheaders, online images, and more.

As I’ve been secret shopping nonprofits, I’ve noticed one more in need of real estate improvement: the humble confirmation page.

Whether it’s after a donation or a newsletter sign-up or an advocacy alert, most often these pages simply confirm that a transaction has occurred with no other interaction and no other ask.

Or you will have confirmation pages with laundry lists of possible actions that jumble together: like-us-on-Facebook-follow-us-on-Twitter-donate-volunteer-share-your-story-make-your-gift-monthly-sign-up-for-our-newsletter-etc-cetera.

To this one, I would say that asks are like NFL quarterbacks: if you think you have four of them, you have none that are going to be effective.

What these pages are excellent for is continuing a conversation. A person has just taken the next step in a relationship with you – how do you repay this and create additional value for them? Sure, you can make another ask or another engagement, but here are a few ideas for getting deeper insights about your donors:

Ask for feedback. As I talked about a few weeks ago, you can barely move about the for-profit world without being solicited for your feedback. Most of us assume that because a transaction is done, it went well. That’s often not the case. Take a nonprofit we’ve worked with to gather feedback. As you can see below, getting feedback and acting on it made their donors satisfaction with their donation skyrocket.

If you need help with this, DonorVoice has a free widget for gathering online feedback. It won’t get you insights as robust as our multichannel feedback tools, but it’s free and will get you started collecting feedback.

Ask why they gave (or signed up). Not only will you learn things in this free response that you will be able to use to get a better idea of your constituents, but you will also reinforce why the person gave, since we believe reasons that are easily available.

One study looked at course evaluations for college students and found that if they were asked to provide 10 examples of how the course could be done better, they rated the course almost 10% higher than students who were asked to provide two examples.

The idea is that two examples of why a course is bad are easy to come up with, but having to come up with 10 examples taxes the brain.

So asking for one reason your organization is good reinforces their giving.

Ask an identity question. Most organizations will have multiple types of donors. For disease organizations, there’s a significant difference in the motivations for and messages to people who have the disease or have a loved one who has the disease and those who are concerned citizens looking to help, but don’t have the same cause connection. One organization we work with has cat enthusiasts versus dog enthusiasts.

These top-line identities are things that are specific to the person, relatively unchanging, and make a difference in terms of the value, commitment, and/or messaging for that donor. And since they make a big difference, you need to know them as soon as you can – perhaps on the confirmation page.

Ask for preferences. These can be channel preferences (mail, email, phone, text, etc.). In fact, in our recent opt-in webinar, we covered how this is the type of control donors most want. These can be frequency preferences. Or they can be about the types of communications that a person wants to receive – advocacy versus newsletter versus volunteer opportunities versus program materials and so on.

You are going to want to know all of these about your constituents; the earlier you get this information, the more likely to are to retain and maximize these donors.

In fact, you might even be able to try all of these – just not simultaneously. The trick is to ask one question at a time in a series of microconversions. Generally, people’s most favorite topic is themselves, so asking for feedback doesn’t hurt. Then, a willingness to start answering these questions leads to a desire to keep answering them because of consistency and commitment.

But the key thing is to start asking one of them – any information is better than no information. We hope we’ve helped you better use your real estate; let me know if you have any questions at nellinger@thedonorvoice.com.