We are ready to open our mind, our heart, and our imagination to create new journeys and experiences for our donors. These stunning experiences leads the way to meaningful engagement and shareable journeys. This makes all the difference to a connected donor.

A key is continually walking in the digital footsteps of our donors to assess how engaged we feel. Does the experience inspire our imagination? It is all about embracing our connected donors. If we do, they will embrace us in return.

Even feelings of empathy, relevance and reciprocity are measureable with traditional nonprofit metrics. The impact to our bottom line and mission can be known. It takes courage to decide to find out the results of our efforts.

We should be ready to define the experience our programs deliver that brings our mission to life and how the technologies we employee contribute to that experience. See yourself as the CEO – the Chief Experience Officer. If no one else will appoint you, appoint yourself.

Your connected donor takes to search engines and status updates to research, ask questions, and share experiences. This presents to us an opportunity to listen, learn, engage and improve the experience. It makes the experience enjoyable, easy and relevant to the donor’s goals.

Some issues to work through are:

1. Now would be the time to listen to how people are responding to different messages and are guided along a journey. Understanding the steps they take can help you frame the overall journey and intended experience. This can all be tested easily. Do donors become more engaged after becoming an advocate or a participant or a volunteer?
2. After listening, learning how the journey unfolds allows us to improve the experience. Who are the experts? What communities are donors gravitating to? Who is influencing them? What are donors finding and learning? What technologies and services are they using?
3. The donor expectation of their experience is discoverable. We can engage them at every step of the journey.
4. Listening, learning and engaging allows us to adapt our strategy, people, processes and technology.

This is a loop not a linear system.