Delighting Your Donors!

If you walk into a bookstore, oh snap, wait a minute, there are no more bookstores left ... well, if you browse through Amazon.com in their business section, you'll see scores of books (actually 11,056 books) on how to create great customer service.

These books, by authors like Seth Godin, Marcus Buckingham and others, pontificate relentlessly that in order for your company to stand out in this economy, you have to "Delight your Customer." Or, in our case, "Delight your Donor."

There are two reasons there are so many books on this subject: 1) Because it actually works to provide great customer service and delight the customer, and 2) because we're not smart enough to get that it works, otherwise people wouldn't continue writing about it.

In short, we're idiots!

I don't know how many times I've sat across the table of a development director and asked, "How have you delighted your donors this week?" And all I get is a look of embarrassment on their face.

These are the same people who are running around preaching we need to be donor-focused, donor-centered, donor-you're the center of my universe ... yet, when it comes to actually putting that into practice, it falls to the wayside.

Why does this happen? What keeps us from "Delighting our Donors?" I mean, I think you do want to delight your donors, you know it's and important part of building loyalty, you know it will eventually help bring in more revenue.

What I find more often than not is the daily inertia of your work is so demanding that it's easy to forget.

Okay, you're not an idiot. You're a good person trying to meet all the demands of your day. I get it. There's a lot to do in your work. It's not easy.