Change the world in one easy step: happy donors!
Meeting the needs of your donors is one of the most important factors in a charity achieving their mission. Why do I say that? Because without income, you can’t function (like absolutely every other business).
However, the big difference to the for-profit sector is that charities have 2 entirely distinct groups of ‘customers’:
- The ‘paying customer’ – donor
- The ‘recipient customer’ – beneficiary
Recently I’ve been exploring how we can adjust our thinking to better tackle this complex challenge of ‘distinct customers’.
Background
In most money-spending scenarios, the person who spends the money also receives the product or service. To succeed in securing them (and their networks) as loyal customers, you simply focus on delighting your customers.
Donors, on the other hand, spend money so someone else can have the benefit, which makes it incredibly hard to directly delight them.
Most of a charity’s activity is, rightly, focused on the ‘recipient customer’, the beneficiaries. The ‘paying customer’ or donors’ experience of your work is at a remove.
If you speak to people who have benefited from a charity’s work, you find loyal ‘customers’ - people who love your work and viscerally understand its impact. Speak to donors and a far lower percentage can speak in the same way about impact.
Problem-solving workshop
This split between paying for it and experiencing it is the dilemma I put to Kingston university’s current MBA students in a lecture workshop I ran last month. I presented this truly international group, with vast customer and retail experience, with the following brief: to bring the donor experience closer to a customer experience - making the impact of a gift feel (nearly) as real as it does for beneficiaries, staff and volunteers.
They came up with a few smart ideas which I’ll get to later in this blog and I hope you can use.
It was immediately obvious to the students how challenging it is to make the donor experience feel more first-hand, like more than a removed update - they are simply not living the transformative change:
- It’s not their child who no longer has to collect dirty water from miles away and is now in school because there’s clean water readily available in their village.
- It’s not them who’s been struggling alone on the margins of society and now has support, help, community, treatment
For the exercise, the students chose a charity that they know and care about. The following are the ideas that got the best response, that offer donors an experience closest to a tangible, beneficiary experience:
Tree planting/rewilding charity wilderness experience raffle
Every single regular donor is entered into a lottery to be one of the handful of people each year who are allowed to stay in the wilderness they have rewilded. This, combined with intimate updates and photos of beautiful nature returning to a barren space, lead the donor to imagine themselves in the new landscape they’re making possible.
The students spoke of bringing back the long-ago ancient Scottish rainforest, the existence of which has become as mythical as the mythic creatures people used to think lived there. They painted an enchanting fairytale which donors could enjoy from their urban officescapes. And, importantly, they offered everyone tantalising access to this rarefied retreat.
Children’s charity connecting donors to a member of staff
Less fairytale, but very connecting and real was the idea of building a direct relationship between donors and those working directly with vulnerable children. You cannot connect donors to vulnerable children, but they can hear from a social worker about the work that is being done and the difference it’s making to specific (anonymised!) young people. Donors could also offer moral support to the practitioners. These could be powerful relationships for both parties.
The jobs and housing charity bringing stories to life via social media
Finding some beneficiaries who are happy and able to share videos of their progress towards employment and housing would make the work feel tangible for donors.
And, with strict moderation and indirect communication only, they could enable messaging/advice between donors and beneficiaries. If handled properly, this is known to have a positive impact as it introduces people with low self-esteem and limited support networks directly to strangers who care about and invest in their future.
Those are the 3 best ideas. Lots of charities already have similarly innovative stewardship programmes to bring donors as close to the beneficiary experience as possible.
It was both disappointing and reassuring that the MBA students didn’t come up with anything groundbreaking; anything that truly solves the ‘distinct customers’ challenge at the centre of the charitable proposition. We will always be asking the paying customer to offer up some of their finite resources to help somebody or something they have no obligation to support and get no tangible benefit from.
The answer is to bring them as close to the tangible benefit as possible so that it does bring joy and the feeling that they are part of a collective effort to make things better. We need our donors to encounter and feel a part of our impact.
The next challenge I will set MBA students is taking an existing charity and devising a viable stream of social enterprise funding that strongly allies with their expertise and mission. That might just be the best way to close the gap between your distinct customers!
Ilana Jackman is a Fundraising Coach & Consultant (and now visiting lecturer!) To explore and get a fresh new view on your organisation’s challenges with income generation message her at ilana@ilanajackman.com. To read more blogs all about fundraising visit https://www.ilanajackman.com/ideas-blog