During World War II, the Allies puzzled about where to put armor on their bombers.  Strategic attacks needed these flying fortresses, but this necessity also made the bombers a prime target.

Armor is heavy.  And heavy is flight’s mortal enemy, as anyone knows who has run down the sidewalk wearing a cape flapping their arms.

BATMAN IS SO SCARY, HE DOESN’T NEED TO BE LIGHT ENOUGH TO FLY!

It sounds like a simple problem – look at where fire hits the bombers and put the armor there.  Officers went to Abraham Wald, a mathematician working for the Allied cause, and asked him how much armor to put on those spots.

Abraham Wald said exactly the opposite.  He said you need to look at the planes and put the armor where the bullet holes are not.  In this case, it was the pilot compartment, engine, fuselage, and fuel system.

I’ll spare you some speculation and say that Wald was right and the officers were wrong.  In fact, decades later, Wald’s paper on the subject was released to the general public because “not only as a matter of historical interest but also because the methodology is still relevant.” (You can get it here, for that special mathematician in your life.)

But why was his counterintuitive answer right?

Because of the missing planes.

The Allies could only look at the planes that made it back.  The places that were observed to have more bullet strikes – a wing, for example – could take more hits and still survive.  Put that same level of fire on the pilot, the engine, or the highly combustible parts of the plane and that plane would no longer be available for observation.

So they armored the places with fewer bullet holes.  As a result, more planes made round trips.

So where are your missing bullet holes?  There are probably more, but four places come immediately to mind:

Any place where you aren’t seeing donor feedback.

Are you:

• Reading donor comment mail?
• Asking your telemarketers to forward any comments to you?
• Reading all of the email responses that are coming into your e-newsletter’s reply account?
• Mingling at events to hear the chatter?

These are the lowest hanging fruit and, while they seem obvious, too few organizations listen to everything they are being told.  The challenge here is that these are the things that your supporters will expect that you know – after all, they told you.

Any place where you aren’t actively soliciting donor feedback.

If you are listening to what people are saying, you have taken the first step.  However, while necessary, it isn’t sufficient.  Hearing what is said only will get you the loudest voices, but not necessarily the most important ones.

That’s why you have to ask for feedback.  In our world, every time you go to a hotel or eat in a restaurant or go to a store, they ask you for your feedback afterward – on the receipt, by phone, by email – however they can get to you.  They actively want to know what you think.

They want this feedback in part because it helps them realize any problems they are having and in part because the simple act of asking for feedback makes someone more likely to return because they feel heard and valued.

Yet in the nonprofit world, this rarely happens, even though we could have these same advantages of solving problems and making our constituents feel valued.  This is important to do and it’s expensive not to make this ask.

When you don’t have an organized response

Even if you are asking for feedback, then reading your comment mail, getting telemarketing comments, and reading your email responses, you are still not fully taking advantage of feedback.

Picture if the Air Force had analyzed each plane as a separate incident.  Without the aggregated information, there would not have been enough information to act.  You’d be at the whim of whatever plane the general happened to see the day he did his tour, which would be counterproductive if he saw the exception – a plane that took engine fire and survived.

Yet that’s what often happens at a nonprofit.  The mail folks respond to the mail comments, the online folks handle the online comments, and the telemarketers deal with the phone comments.  As a result, people deal with the tactics of helping one person without the visibility to see anything strategic.  To use the old analogy, people resort to fighting alligators all day instead of taking the steps to drain the swamp.

At best, it takes longer to bring up problems because everyone has to recognize the pattern in their own area then elevate it.  This makes it so that the pain points that cause systemic problems are deal with slowly.  At worst, systemic issues don’t get brought up at all.

Thus, it’s important to have this information in one place and be able to respond to it methodically.  Ideally, all of your asks for feedbacks flow into the same system and donor relations folks are able to deal with the individual case as well as the individual cases adding up to real data for your organization.

I’m not saying you have to do this through the DonorVoice feedback tool (although we’d love it if you would).  What I am saying is if the first step is listening and the second step is asking, the third step is acting.  And acting is much harder to do if the data are scattered and fragmented.

When you are only listening to your fans and not your former fans.

This is the true “missing bullet holes” problem.  Everything that your current donors and supporters bring up as problems are the things that those people have survived.  The problems that former donors and supporters have are the things that will kill you.

So when you are looking at feedback platforms, you need to also reach out to people who have left the organization, either passively (by lapsing) or actively (by requesting to leave).  Many of the people who leave still believe in the mission and think your organization is important, but they either didn’t think it was as important anymore or didn’t like the experiences they had with you.  If it’s the latter, they may want to tell you about it but just didn’t want to look up your number and call you about it.

Using these four things will help you make donors feel valued and, as a result, help keep more of your planes in the air and flying. Thanks for reading!

PS. I first read about the missing bullet holes in Jordan Ellenburg’s How Not to be Wrong, which I recommend if this type of thing interests you.

PPS. Please let us know how this blog post met your needs in the comments below or, if you prefer to discuss it privately, at nellinger@thedonorvoice.com.