Donor satisfaction

Let’s start with the premise that many donors are not engaged, committed and will probably not renew their gift. You may disagree but hang with me on this.

If their motivation to give the first time was because a friend asked them, the motivation to renew is low or non existent. Motivation is not the same as satisfaction, even if I am highly satisfied.

If we survey that donor, they might be very likely to say they would recommend you to a friend. Why wouldn’t they? Are they motivated to give again?

What has that told us? They aren’t currently planning on giving again, unless the same friend asks and maybe not even then. The original motivation was from who asked not a nonprofit that they are committed to because of an amazing mission and clear results with helping people.

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 Functional) 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.

via Why a Satisfied Donor is Not a Retained Donor | LinkedIn.