Yesterday was my lucky day, I received three cold MMS fundraising appeals from three different charities.   It was different sender numbers and causes but clearly the same basic machinery:

• image first
• text second
• “STOP to End”
• matching campaign-looking URLs,
• And in two cases, the chirpy little “Hi Kevin” that somehow manages to feel less personal than the one without my name

By the third one I was waiting for UNICEF to ask whether my car warranty had expired.

This was not three organizations independently deciding, in a burst of synchronized donor love, to text me on the same day. This was my name/number sold 3 times and loaded into the same SMS cannon with a single agency lighting the fuse.

And while you can bet each organization only saw its own campaign, I and lots of other lucky souls experienced the pileup.

The charity’s dashboard shows sends, clicks, gifts, bounces, opt-outs, and revenue but it fails to show the donor’s day.   This is how “innovative channel strategy” becomes indistinguishable from fundraising lint in someone’s pocket, it’s local decisions that look rational inside each campaign and absurd in the aggregate.

The pitch for nonprofit texting is easy to understand. Major SMS fundraising platforms market high open rates, fast sending, MMS testing, segmentation, donation links, click tracking, unsubscribe tracking, and revenue reporting. The appeal is obvious when email is crowded, mail feels is expensive and digital ads are a slot machine. SMS feels like a tunnel through the clutter.

A strategy that only measures the sender’s side of the exchange is not much of a strategy.   Donor experience is two words you’re making a mockery of unless measure the donor experience. Why not demand that the vendor try to measure supporter satisfaction?

We do this after every telefundraising call, sending a follow up SMS and/or email asking for feedback about the experience.

Radical stuff, I know. Asking people how the thing you just did to them felt.

And we don’t need everyone to answer, this is sample, not census, you just need some signal that the channel you’re optimizing for revenue isn’t quietly strip-mining your brand.

Doing this shouldn’t be exotic, it should be table stakes.  Finding out whether the campaign that “worked” actually worked, or whether it merely found enough people willing to click before the rest mentally filed you under “charity spam.”

SMS can be a great relationship channel. It can help with pledge completion, event reminders, donor feedback, genuinley urgent moments etc. But the intimacy of the channel living in my pocket is the asset and if the phrase “donor experience” is going to mean anything beyond conference wallpaper, then measure the experience.

The donor does not live inside your dashboard, they live inside a day. Yesterday, mine had three cold charity texts back to back in it.

Kevin