Nonprofits often survey donors, but if they’re not asking the right questions, they may not be getting the data they need to maximize the chances that donors will continue to give. Including one or two crucial questions on a survey can provide the information needed to reach the donors most willing to give, fundraisers say.
“Any survey you can get someone to fill out is a helpful survey if you ask the right questions,” says Erik Daubert, a nonprofit management consultant. “By asking simple questions on a survey, you can ideally learn key, important pieces of information about your donors, and then you can utilize that in general cultivation and stewardship.”
So, what are some key questions? It will differ based on your organization, but questions that find out where your donors’ priorities lie are a good bet.
“A simple survey question would be, ‘What part of our mission excites you the most: our work with kids, our work with adults, or our work with seniors?’” Daubert says. “Then, provided you listen to that information and utilize it, you can customize your next direct-mail piece, your next digital fundraising piece, or your online communication efforts through emails.”
The Armed Services YMCA San Diego sends out a five-question survey to new donors. The survey asks two key questions: what elements of the group’s mission are most important to the donor and why the person donated previously. Additional questions look at how the donor prefers to be contacted, how the donor heard about the group initially, and an open-ended query where donors can express “any questions or concerns about the organization.”
Phillip Sammuli, the group’s vice president of development, says the responses guide future contact.
“If they were to choose youth development as most important, we can craft information and segment them that way,” Sammuli says. “We could easily graph what areas are resonating with more of our community and make sure the content of our newsletters and other collateral feature that.”
After learning which programs donors are interested in, Sammuli says Armed Services YMCA San Diego invites donors out to “take a program tour and see some of the families they’ve impacted with their donations.” This really cements donors’ appreciation for the organization.
Sammuli notes that asking donors their priorities and then following up in this way leads to better donor retention. “We’re up by 10 points,” Sammuli says. “We were at 36 percent a year-and-a-half ago. We’re at 46 percent right now. The national average [for donor retention] is 45 to 50 percent.”
Sammuli and Daubert were looking primarily at using short surveys. Daubert notes that “the shorter surveys are, oftentimes, the more they’re filled out.”
But that doesn’t mean that key questions aren’t important in longer surveys, too. Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C., recently completed a roughly 40-question survey sent to 32,000 alumni and supporters. The answers to some key questions are helping direct the university’s fundraising efforts.
“We asked, ‘What are you willing to support in the future?’ And the ‘university’s greatest needs’ was in the top three,” says Nathan Rice, director of development for Campbell. “Unrestricted fundraising is tremendously important for us in helping to maintain a balanced budget for the university.”
Rice says knowing donors are receptive to campaigns for unrestricted funds is extremely helpful moving forward. Another beneficial question to ask is one that allows donors to self-select for additional contact.
“We have questions in there about planned giving,” Rice says. “If they self-select, that helps us with prospect research and development. In this last survey, we had close to 300 people who self-selected, and we have gone through and assigned them out to our gift-officer team.”
Melissa S. Brown, a veteran fundraiser who runs her own consulting firm, notes that short communication surveys also offer up self-selection information. “Ask donors how they want to be communicated with,” Brown says. “It can ask them about their interests, how often do they want messaging, and do they want to learn more about planned giving. It lets donors be in the driver’s seat in terms of communications.”
For nonprofits that have seen a decline in giving, asking a question that gets at how connected donors feel to the organization can be helpful. Those who don’t feel connected aren’t going to give, Rice says. Knowing who is disconnected can help nonprofits put those donors on a path to better connect with the organization.
“Connection is the highest benchmark that you can hit with a donor or with an alum,” Rice says. “Their connection is very validating for our philanthropy funnel and leads to future giving.”
The biggest mistakes nonprofits can make when it comes to donor surveys is not using the data.
“If you cannot do anything with the responses that you get, don’t ask,” Brown says. “Do not take people’s time and energy if you cannot change how you interact with them based on what they say.”
If an organization, for example, conducts a communication survey, but doesn’t follow through on the answers, complaints will follow. “There’s a customer-service aspect to this, as well,” Brown added. “If you put donors in the driver’s seat, then you need to be willing to support them however they want their relationship to go.”
For fundraisers who haven’t done a lot with surveys before, Daubert recommends using software to help track data and segment campaigns.
“If you use a donor software, there are fields where you can say what areas of work that donor is passionate about,” he says. “These types of fields can help you prepopulate direct-mail letters, or they can help you understand that when they call on the phone, they’re probably more interested in talking about A than B.”
