Say What? Listen to the Messages Your Donors Are Sending

Ask them what they think
Surveys can tell you what your donors are thinking as well as deepen their involvement. If you have an older donor base, you’ll need to rely on paper surveys that donors complete and mail back to you. Online surveys are great for younger donor bases or when getting a large cross-section of your file’s opinion isn’t critical.

Whether you use surveys regularly or only on occasion, make sure you (and everyone above you) are willing to use the information to learn and even change. When the majority of donors who reply to a survey refute your deeply held belief, it doesn’t mean your donors are ignorant — it could mean you were making a wrong assumption.

A survey to recently lapsed donors, asking them why they stopped giving and why they first gave to you, is effective in reactivating donors as they consider why it was that they first “fell in love” with you. One of the possible answers for, “Why have you stopped giving?” should be, “I am on a fixed income.” This is another great way to identify planned-giving prospects.

Don’t abdicate your responsibility to strategize and make decisions to donors by relying totally on survey data. Use surveys to help you make better decisions while you get to know more about your donor base.

Be proactive
Some things just trigger donor questions. Answer those questions before they're asked, and you’ll remove a rabbit trail that donors may run down rather than making their gifts to you.

For example, an organization located in the Midwest used a service bureau for donation processing. Because its return envelopes had an East Coast address on them, the back of the return envelope had a question (“Why is this going to a different address?") and the answer printed on them. For donors who didn’t care, this was “white noise” — neither helpful nor a hindrance. But those that wondered had instant satisfaction by getting their question answered, almost before they asked it.