Do You Really Know Your Constituents?

In the commercial world the most successful businesses are obsessed with understanding customer needs, motivations and preferences. They align their brand and products to the customer segments they can most profitably service. As a result, they can rattle off answers to key questions like these;

• Why do customers like my product? • What is it about my brand that motivates customers to keep buying from me? • Are customers really committed to my products/services or are they making decisions based on

something else? • Which of my customers are most likely to continue buying and which ones are at risk of

defection?

How many nonprofits can answer these same questions about their donors or other constituents?

Why bother you ask?

Living In The Past

For years nonprofit marketers and fundraisers have relied almost exclusively on transactions to determine loyalty, audience segmentation, marketing messages, etc. Constituent insights are inferred, sporadic and rarely connected to planning and execution.

This set of so-called “best” practices occurs against the backdrop of everyone acknowledging the significant issues with acquisition; namely costs going up, yields going down and retention; namely not enough of it.

In short, the increasingly expensive, newly-acquired donor has little motivation to stay and yet the financial argument for holding on to donors is well known. It can cost up to 10 times as much to bring in a new donor as keep an existing one, and it takes, on average, 18 months for a new donor to cover the cost of acquisition.

Said another way, unless you have a specific plan to keep a newly acquired donor on the file for at least two years then your organization, its mission and programs would be better served by not even bothering to seek a donor’s initial contribution.

The old set of best practices must be replaced with the new to have any hope of cracking the retention code. The sector is well served by looking to the commercial world where that new set of best practices is already being written.

The Commitment Connection

The path to improvement includes, among other things, measuring and managing donor attitudes with the same bottom line focus used to measure and manage donors’ transactional behavior.

Simply put, impacting attitudes is the key to retention because attitudes dictate behavior AND attitudes are what an organization directly controls and impacts with its communication, marketing, fundraising and service level actions.

Little known to most practitioners it is the measurable Commitment level of donors –not the appeals schedule, or copy or state of the economy--that dictates or triggers donor behaviors. That’s why Commitment, not transactional history, is the most important leading indicator or predictor of future behavior.

The advantages of measuring and steering Commitment don’t stop there. It is the measure of Commitment that also separates your donors into addressable stewardship segments as a way to better allocate marketing spend and increase the efficiency of moving donors to the top of the pyramid in ways not possible with conventional RFM or constituent type classifications.

Best of all, Commitment is directly influenced by actions the organization takes. By identifying specific actions that improve—or erode—Commitment an organization, through its communications, donor services and branding can steer a clear –and measurable – course toward higher commitment and higher donor value.

DonorVoice provides the tools, guidance and insight necessary to start measuring and managing Donor Commitment in order to increase the key attitudes and behaviors driving the bottom line. We have proven that every donor stewarded from Low Commitment to High Commitment results in an average increase of 131% in giving.

Even better news—posting dramatic improvement in net income DOES NOT require new investments in your marketing and fundraising budgets. What it does require is a new, constituent-centric framework with retention as the key goal.

The DonorVoice Approach

Importantly, our approach recognizes that measuring Commitment and deriving critical, constituent level insights into how to improve the relationship is simply not enough. Dramatic and measurable retention and income improvement require greater coordination across functional areas and some reallocation or focus of existing resources. In short, it requires doing business differently by managing your biggest financial asset, the donors, for the long-term with specific financial projections and key performance metrics to evaluate and calibrate along the way.

Through the DonorVoice Experience & Relationship Management Approach, nonprofits not only get access to the most important and proven indicator of value - The Commitment Model - but also a process explicitly designed to put the insights into practice, the Experience and Contact-Point Mapping Tool.

Through these two steps, nonprofits can take charge of and steer their future income and sustainability.

• The DonorVoice Commitment Study to measure the levels of Commitment across key, constituent segments and identify the key experiences across your marketing, communications, fundraising and donor service areas that will positively impact Commitment (and by extension, those that do not).

• Experience & Contact-Point Mapping to visually and dynamically capture the current experience provided to constituents by consolidating campaign calendars and contact-points in a planning tool built exclusively for this purpose. Further, the tool accommodates the flagging of those contact-points and experiences that increase Commitment and the pain points detracting from the relationship.

Through these two practical, measurable steps, nonprofits are in a perfect position to not just SEE what experiences are currently being served “when”, “how” and “why” but to implement changes across multiple programs and channels to move from the “current” to “desired” experience guided by the lens of Commitment and the specific experiences that matter to the constituent and the bottom-line.

Call or email a DonorVoice Partner now to schedule a one-hour briefing and demo of the Commitment Model and Experience and Touchpoint Mapping tool.

Better retention through better constituent relationships is possible but only if there is a systematic and proven way to measure, manage and lead the change required to bring deliver it.

DonorVoice can start helping you get there, today.

Please contact any DonorVoice partner to schedule a briefing,

Angie Moore, amoore@thedonorvoice.com

Kevin Schulman, kschulman@thedonorvoice.com

Josh Whichard, jwhichard@thedonorvoice.com