Editor’s Note:  This guest post by international fundraiser Francesco Ambroghetti was triggered by our piece, Your Call Is Important To Us. Please Continue To Hold.

At last month’s International Fundraising Conference in the Netherlands, participants in a Master Class made calls and online visits to a variety of charities posing as donors attempting to make a contribution. 

Francesco summarizes team’s experiences and outlines lessons learned.

By Francesco Ambrogetti with Reuben Turner, Sabine Wagner, Lynn Clausen, Suzanne Ryder Richardson, Joe Jenkins and Valerie Froome

In our jobs we create processes and standards. We clearly need them to optimize our work, to plan allocation of resources and be efficient and effective– especially when we have complex operations and huge numbers of donors and communications to handle.

The problem is that we become so addicted to the processes that often mistake them for reality. Donors are categorized as  “lapsed” or “active”;  our communications become “welcome packs” or “upgrade calls”.

Although these are great internal tools the problem is that we forget these are just labels and that a “regular donor” —  whom we created on the basis of his/her history in our database — does not exists in reality. Consequently, his/her experience when dealing with us is often completely different from what we would like or imagine it to be.

We all know about the importance of donor retention and loyalty. Who has not tried and tested and has a great system in place, online and offline, to welcome and thank the donors? And yet how many donors do we lose every day, every week and every year?

So last month at the IFC in Holland — with a group of bright and experienced fundraisers from around the world (from Argentina to Germany, from Canada to UK and Australia) — we tried to do what millions of people do every day: to make a donation to a nonprofit organization. Armed with real money, a phone and a laptop these fundraisers tried to donate online, to call and make a one off donation or to leave a legacy to the top ten nonprofits in several countries.

I can hear some of you already: yes we know about mystery shopping. Been there, done that. Really? Here is summary of what they experienced during these calls or navigating our websites. I tried not to edit their accounts because I firmly believe in a fundamental principle: donors will forget what you said and what you did, but will never forget how you made them feel. And this how a fundraiser trying to walk in donor’s shoes feels. Just imagine, it is 5PM of a normal day and you are about to make a donation to your favorite cause or organization.

 We tried to leave a legacy….

“If you walked into a restaurant or a Bentley shop with $100,000 in cash you would be treated like royalty. And there is no way they would let you walk out with that money if they could help it. When you call a charity to talk about a legacy, that is potentially who you are. Yet our experience was very much as though we were calling about an administrative matter. No passion, no emotion, no ‘thank you’, and no discussion about the work of the organisation. More like we were calling our bank. During the call I said that I was going to see my solicitor ‘next week’ (i.e., this week). It’s now Thursday (over a week later) and I haven’t yet received the information they promised, so in real life the likelihood is that that £100,000 (or £1,000, or £1,000,000) would now have gone somewhere else”.

“The lady who picked up the phone was cold and unfriendly and said that at 5 PM she did not know who the right person to talk was and that I had to call again the day after. It was hard to get any information from her, no call back offer, no need to give me any feeling of being important for the organization. Did they need legacies?”

“We rang and the person on the line was very informative but didn’t once ask the name of the legator or the name of the caller. He also didn’t ask for our contact details, despite us asking for his!”

“The animal welfare charity failed to mention animals or their welfare at any point during a conversation with a legacy prospect, focusing on meaningless jargon and an obvious desire to end the call and leave the office (well, it was ten to five – which would explain why it had taken us 3 attempts before we managed to find anyone willing to talk to us about legacies).”

And we tried to make a donation….

“To this day have not received an email receipt for my online gift.”

“When I asked where our gift would go one of the worst phrases I have ever heard was: Into the Head Office Collection Account!”

“The animal charity was so focused on the marketing of their adoption product they overlooked the experience for donors who just wanted to leave a simple cash gift — all the emotion, cause-related messaging and supporter care they lavished upon adopters was wholly missing from other donation processes”

“ After searching and searching where I can click to donate I found the right button in between of thousands of links and then I arrived to a Pizza-like website. There was a big link “donate now”, full of hope I clicked. The exact same site loaded again and again … I scrolled down and there was finally a wonderful little donation tool at the end of the site. And it works. My donation was done successfully after 15 minutes of hard work!”.

But there is hope

“The contrast with the cash call we made is stark — friendly, passionate, and ready to go and find more information, all in return for a £10 donation. I wonder if this is about timing and feedback. Would you do more for £10 now or a possible £100,000 later? Rationally you say the £100,000, but charities seem set up to pursue the £10”.

“At the end of the conversation he asked about my friend, the reason why I want to donate to this particular charity. Did she get everything she needed from them? Could they send her more books? And would I please give my friend their number, so she could call them to make sure they are doing everything they can for her? My money was already being put to good use!”

“I found a telephone number for the legacy fundraiser on their site. I phoned it and was hugely surprised to be answered immediately. I felt like apologizing to them for being surprised — it was a great call, they did a great job.”

And the winner is….

We know that emotions drive decisions. We know from our experience as fundraisers and we also know because behavioral economics and neuroscience are increasingly producing evidence and insights.

Yet too often we focus entirely too much of our effort on the rational/mechanical part of our communication: the processes, the targets, the calendar, the report.

Here’s what we learned and what we recommend:

1) Walk the talk. Donate regularly to your organization, via phone, online and offline. You can learn so much about the real experience of a donor and you can immediately identify gaps and issues to resolve and improve it. As one of the participants said, “Call your organization as a donor and find out where the gaps are to become a really donor friendly and “powered by service” organization”. And do  the same to other organizations:  you can learn and copy so many good things.

2) Make it personal. We know people give to people and we know the importance of a personalized donor service. So why do we have on our websites a number to call with a real person that doesn’t pick up the phone? Or why should the call be like calling a bank or the tax office? It doesn’t take much to have a 24/7 real person, warm and passionate about our cause. If companies like Zappos invested most of their marketing budget on this to drive revenues, why shouldn’t we?

3) How do you feel? Finally, let’s try to use the hard data and processes to support the emotional connection we want to create with donors starting from a different point of view: how do we want to make them feel? Because it is not only the transaction or the demographics that account for donor engagement; it is the “Wow” effect we can deliver in every interaction and experience.

When is the last time you called your organization, or a competitor, to make a donation? 

Thank you Francesco and the IFC Master Class team. You get an Agitator raise.

Roger