Satisfaction – as a concept or framework for loyalty has been around a long time.  It is, like most good ideas in the social sciences, based on a theory; exchange theory to be exact.  In a nutshell this theory suggests people make decisions in a rationale manner, weighing (subconsciously in many cases) the benefit and cost of certain choices and picking the one with the biggest delta.

Satisfaction as a survey question and framework for customer loyalty exists because of this theory – meaning, the concept of being satisfied was applied as a way to measure the delta between cost and benefit.  High levels of satisfaction were considered a proxy for a big delta and vice versa.

Xerox Corporation is one of the “founding fathers” of applying this customer satisfaction framework on the grounds that satisfied customers would be repeat buyers.  And so are the legions of other companies and non-profits who use Satisfaction, and whether they know it or not, rational exchange theory to guide their business.

The only problem, which Xerox and many others have since discovered, is that it doesn’t work.  The problem is not the measurement, it is the theory.  People often, and in fact, regularly act in ways that are not entirely rationale.  As it turns out, having a satisfied donor or customer is necessary but not sufficient to expect or predict future, repeat business.

Relationship Theory has largely replaced, at least in spirit, the notion of exchange theory.  The former includes a more emotional or personal component to complement the more functional or satisfaction based factors.  You can find out all you ever wanted to know about Relationship Theory and our model built on it in this whitepaper here.

The point of this post is to share some recent analysis we did looking at what we call the “key drivers” of both Donor Commitment – our brand of donor loyalty  – and donor satisfaction.  Satisfaction or Donor Commitment scores (or Net Promoter Scores) are a lot like one hand clapping .  What you really also need is identification of what your organization can do to impact those scores – i.e. how do we create more Committed or satisfied donors?

To answer this one conducts a statistical analysis to identify the “key drivers” – the marketing, communications and fundraising activities that show a math based link to stronger donor attitudes and loyalty.

We did this key driver analysis using both Commitment and Satisfaction as the framework.  What we found is there are seven activities (or key drivers) of Commitment (broken out into Personal and Functiona)l and hence, the roadmap to higher retention requires adhering to all seven.  Using satisfaction only identifies 3 of the 7 – the roadmap is incomplete.  The insidious part is that groups often don’t know what they aren’t getting – i.e. they are blind to, in this case, the missing 4.  But make no mistake, the theory one ascribes to for why people elect to engage in repeat business matters.  Get it wrong and you wind up with incomplete answers to mission critical questions.