What Donors can learn from surveys

I am very much in favour of supporter surveys - ultimately if executed properly it can genuinely result in improving what we do as fundraisers and more widely as organisations.  That is of course the point - hopefully.  We learn new things about our supporters that can help us find other supporters, and it is a useful communication to provide supporters with other ways to engage with us.

On the other side of it though is the benefit that is passed on to the supporters themselves.  The opportunity to have an opinion, should they want to take it. An opportunity to feel that they are being listened to (as long as they are), and that in turn has a benefit for fundraisers because such opportunities provide great supporter care and often result in additional support.  All very positive.

But one of the less overt benefits for a supporter, which also has a positive benefit to the organisation is that of re-engagement or reconnection with the cause.  I say this from a recent experience.

I support Soi Dog Foundation - a great animal welfare organisation in Thailand concerned with the welfare of cats and dogs.  Very recently I was asked to complete a survey - which I did for two reasons. One because they asked and two, because they asked so nicely in a way that made me feel they valued my views.  A snippet of the email below:

Please, Let Us Know What You Think...

Dear Amanda,

I would like to personally thank you for your support of the dogs and cats who you help. It is you who are helping the animals. Your donations are what allows for this important life saving work to continue.

Soi Dog would like to know your thoughts about how your donations are used and how you feel we can best help dogs and cats working together.

Soi Dog runs a number of animal welfare programs and I'd like to get your feedback on how important you feel the various programs are.

Can I ask you a favour? Can you take a few moments and complete Soi Dog's Supporter Survey? Please take a moment and fill out the survey by clicking here or on the button below:


Much of the questions and the navigation were as you would expect - and it took the opportunity to find out what other ways I would be willing to support and also whether I was interested in Gifts In Wills (I am expecting a legacy follow up at some point), but what was more thought provoking was two questions asked towards the end.

1. What is it uniquely about Soi Dog that led to you becoming a supporter?
2. If you could summarise Soi Dog in three words, what would those words be?

I really needed think in order to answer them honestly and fairly.  Amazing really how difficult a question 'What led to your support of xx' is to answer instantly beyond 'I care about animals' for example.  Yet, we often start telephone scripts with such questions in the hope to build a dialogue.  

So, what was it about the charity that specifically made me want to support?  What three words would I use?  The process of recalling the when and they why brought back the feelings attached to my initial decision thus reinvigorating my support.  

Don't get me wrong, they were not deeply suppressed feelings, and I am not in the inertia marketing phase by any means but it was a genuinely re-affirming experience.

So much so, that when I saw a recent campaign and donation ask around the Soi Dog's work around the Dog Meat trade I signed the petition and donated to fund a billboard! (great campaign by the way).

Today, I also received a very lovely email, thanking me for taking the survey and how important my opinions are but also playing back my key support - which I thought was a nice touch. 

This is of course not rocket science, but I wanted to share it, because it is easy to focus on what we can learn through such communications, but may be forget the value they have for the person completing them and actually with a bit of thought could actually proactively remind supporters of why they support you in the first place.

Thank you as ever for stopping by.

When things get personal

Personalisation can and should by a key element of supporter communications - I say can be, as sometimes in an attempt to let supporters know that we know them, its use can sometimes be likened to a hammer cracking a nut. Heavy handed.

That is why I wanted to share this example. Because personally, and that is what it is about ultimately, I like how I CAN, the charity that help children communicate, have done it.

Simply. It fits with the actual creative of the pack - which opens with

"Can't was never a word I was prepared to accept when I was fighting for my son to get the support he needed to learn to speak."  A honest, heartfelt account of a mother's fight for her son.  And goes on to explain how I CAN has transformed their lives.

It is putting me at the heart of the solution for other families who may need I CAN in the future both in terms of the design and the narrative.

My name was used only once - not a hundred times unnecessarily. Back to my hammer and nut point above.

The negative is that the variable text was in a different colour to the letter - which is a shame but I assume a production or budget limitation and not one that I will hold against them.

So, can I support their work with another gift? Yes, I CAN.

Thanks as ever for stopping by.

How are you making your supporters feel?

In an industry that should be about building relationships with the people who support our vital work, it strikes me that we do not leverage those relationships to their best effect.  In fact in some cases we seem to be oblivious to the opportunities or choosing to ignore the chance to turn every transaction into a positive interaction with our supporters.

A small thing, but a friend of mine recently increased their support to the charity they have supported for a while.  He increased his Direct Debit after a conversation with a telephone fundraiser who called.  He remembered the conversation and thought it was a good call.  He was happy to increase his support.

The next time I saw him, knowing what I do, he made a point of showing me the confirmation letter.  It was pretty standard to be honest but he seemed a bit disappointed.  I asked him what would improve it from his perspective and his response was quite interesting - "I didn't speak to the person who signed the letter, I spoke to someone else entirely.  If anything my relationship was with the person I spoke to - it didn't even reference the person I spoke with".

It made me smile. A simple observation, but would it be the hardest thing in the world to at least reference the person who makes the calls on our behalf or the street or door to door fundraisers that sign up the supporters for example?

I know some organisations do and it is something I have done in the past but why stop there, why not have the street or telephone fundraiser themselves or whoever made the contact as the signatory? We capture the information, or if not it is certainly available, so why not make use of it.  In fact there is so much more we could be doing to link up our supporter interactions.

Don't get me wrong, my friend isn't going to end his support or decide against the increase just because of the signatory of his letter, but after a positive experience - it all ended up a little flat.

This is not new and as I note, I am certain there are organisations that are already doing this.

My point is that despite the constraints on day to day operations, we need to do more to ensure that the overall supporter experience is as solid as possible.  Taking the opportunity to turn transactions into interactions.  So, it doesn't end with the thank you or confirmation letter being mailed - it's also about what the person who receives the letter/email thinks and feels about it and is it consistent with their earlier experience.  I certainly think that is worth thinking about.

Thanks as ever for stopping by.

More on mobile - one charity's experience to date.

Following on from the absolutely refreshing post last week from Paul de Gregorio from Open Fundraising about mobile - I wanted to add my two pence worth.  We've been offering Regular Giving via mobile for just over a year now at Sense via Cymba, so still early days, but I wanted to echo and add a couple of other points from my experience to date. I stress this is just one experience of one charity.

• Yes, Mobile Regular Givers will give more if asked by way of another one off gift - and that response varies quite considerably depending on how they joined your organisation
• Previous Mobile Regular Givers who have 'lapsed' are also quite generous if asked for a one-off gift via their phone - again this varies depending on how they were recruited to your cause in the first place
• Retention rates on mobile recruitment are not a million miles away from what you would expect for direct debit recruitment. So attrition for RG by mobile recruited on the street is much higher than those converted from PSMS via the telephone for example.  No surprise really. 
• One of the barriers to click through on content is people feeling they are going to see more information that could upset or make them feel guilty - so being clear, and upbeat on what people will see when they click through has helped increase engagement or so it would appear.
• As does not holding the link to content to ransom.  When we first started we would send the link to a new update to those that successfully made a payment that month - now we send it anyway, and people can choose to make the payment or not after they have had the chance to view.  We are still reviewing the figures but that to me is the better thing to do.
• Regular Gift via your mobile is a great drop ask, there are genuinely people who don't want another direct debit and this does appeal to people who would not have other wise converted. I personally would not advocate a direct to Regular Giving via mobile campaign again for now for Sense - though many charities are having success I am sure. It's just not right for us for now.

This is just a year's worth of experience, and one charity example - so please take from it what you will and however many pinches of salt as well.  With anything, the best thing to do is test for yourself obviously - but I thought I would share one experience, albeit a limited one of mobile giving.  There's much more to test and much more to learn but so far it is has been a positive experience.

Thanks as ever for stopping by.

How not to do Thank You letters, unless you are Steve Martin

I, like many I am sure, read this wonderful book over Christmas, and I did laugh at this letter from Steve Martin.

Steve Martin wrote this 'highly personalised' letter in response to the fan mail he received. Simple, entertaining, personal... well kind of, just what you would expect from Steve Martin.  But he could get away with it, as I dare say he was being 'funny' and the overt token and random personalisation probably made the letter for the people receiving them.  Many of the them were probably framed!

However, beware of a generic thank you letter. Those that are punctuated with a few merged fields - it is something we, as an industry do quite badly in my opinion.

The worst letters are the ones crafted to be in response to 'ad hoc' gifts where they are not identified as being in response to a particular appeal or campaign but just seen as a general unprompted gift.

These are the letters that are a 'catch all'.  The ones quite often written as an after thought, rarely updated with new and exciting information and frequently full of rhetoric about reaching xxx people and helping charity do x,y,z vaguely.  And when you read them, they look and feel as though little effort went into them.

As much as thanking and asking are about good manners and politeness - the 'thank you' as much as the 'please' needs to be heartfelt and genuine.  I am not saying we can physically write each and every letter on our PCs for our kind and lovely donors, but we can work much, much harder in making it look and feel as though we do and that starts from valuing every donation, whatever the channel and motivation and ensuring we are set up to do so with warmth and gratitude.

Thanks as ever for stopping by.

Donor recovery - is there a way back?

A while ago a friend of mine briefly explained her thoughts in relation to cancelling her Direct Debits to charity - and at the end she made the point that she had yet to be contacted by any of the charities.

To be honest I am a little hung up about reactivation because I do believe it is a neglected element of many supporter care programmes - I say supporter care, because we should care who is ceasing their financial support to us and also why.

So, I thought I would try this for myself and cancel some of the DDs that I have had in place for several years.  To these charities I am not a recent recruit to a high attrition channel so my behaviour is not expected statistically, no, I am a long-standing supporter - who gave generously and also for many years.  So what happened.

Charity 1:

Within a week of cancelling, I received a telephone call.  Polite, upbeat and very much leading with the fact that they could see that my DD was cancelled and whether that was a mistake?  It was a nice call but I felt it was interesting that the starting point was that it had somehow been an error - when I had actively cancelled the DD with my bank.

BACS error codes are numerous and quite granular - and cancelled at bank is a clear  and probably a frequently seen code.  So would it be rude to actually say what is seen?  I see that you cancelled your support to us - would you mind telling me why or if there is anything we could do to help you continue your support? Or something to that effect.

I say this as for many recovery calls and approaches - there is an inherent problem that unless you find out why someone has cancelled to ascertain if your organisation has specifically failed the person you are purely offering the same again. Whether good, bad or indifferent.  Is that really an approach that would engender reactivation for longer than the length of the telephone call?  I am not sure it is to be fair.

Charity 2:

I received a letter - probably 10 days after the payment was due - it was a standard admin letter - providing me with tick boxes of my intention - either to resume payment or to indicate that I did
intend to leave.

It was an okay letter to be honest....it contained a warm thanks for my support until now - and then gave me some tick boxes to tick to indicate if the reason for my cancellation was due to 'too many mailings' or that charity x had upset me somehow.  Again, all very useful but there was something quite fait accompli about the whole thing.  Almost as though they knew it wouldn't work.

So the question is, is it worth trying to win people back and the bigger question is if you do for how long will they keep giving?

I can't answer that for sure, but what I do believe is that we have more chance of success if we find out what the problem is and if we are ultimately at fault rather than blaming the bank or assuming it is an error. We may as a result learn some invaluable insight, and be able to do something about it.  Better than not knowing and carrying on regardless.

Thanks as ever for stopping by.

Life's ups and downs and why it could change how you view lapsed supporters

There is a great song lyric by Barry White 'You always have my unspoken passion,
although I might not seem to care.' Now in any relationship this is not much use really.  It's good to know of course (if people ever tell you that), but in terms of relationship building and understanding - well it's all a bit rubbish to be honest. 

When  you think about it though, it is probably more common than you think.

Life's events like birth, deaths, marriages they all have a profound affect on relationships - even the strongest ones. Just from my own experience of late - life changes. It throws you curve balls, it means time is something that doesn't exist in the same way as before and your priorities change. 

Therefore, how supporters engage with your cause may not be all that different.  After all, they are people with lives and life events change things and as a result they may not be able to engage with you in the same way as previously.  But I think the worst assumption that we can make therefore is that they all no longer care.

Looking at it from a basic RFV model, in relation to my own commitment to the causes I support and admire based on recent behaviour I would probably be a lapsed cash giver on a few files. The irony is that I like the causes just as much as before, admire the work and am probably still supporting them through Regular Giving - but believe it or not I just fail to get the donation form in the BRE and into the post.  I don't think I am alone.  

What that means in a lot of cases is that I stop receiving appeals, or I get letter variants referring to the 'past support' I have shown.  When if you looked at the data I may have given to every appeal I was sent three years previously.

Now, this is not an argument  for continuing to mail or communicate with 'lapsed' givers in exactly the same way as before, of course some people don't want to support you any more  - but I think there is an argument for looking at it from the supporter perspective and acting accordingly.  

This is where working to know as much about your supporters, their life stages, their giving patterns and appreciating the changes in life stage will have an impact on their giving could provide us with a valuable opportunity.  One that allows us to better tailor what we do, how we communicate, how we ask and how we facilitate that support.

DD uplift for one month only as an alternative way of cash giving was something that worked amazingly well when we trialled it at ActionAid - just a tick box. It's still being used. Use of SMS could be so much more than PSMS or RGPSM - it could be a useful way for people to direct and instruct on their giving.  My thinking is as much about breaking down barriers to giving as to understanding what the barriers are in the first place.

It can be tempting to give up on friends if they never get in touch or can't ever make your requests to meet - but in understanding those demands and the pressures acting on your friends ultimately makes for a stronger relationships.  Of course the challenge is knowing who is worth the patience but it is worth weighing that up before you decide to stop communicating with whole groups of people entirely.

Thanks as ever for stopping by.