Many organizations don’t know their donors and audiences nearly as well as they should. Beyond developing demographic profiles of your constituents, we seek to determine what are the key value drivers behind their engagement. In short, we find out what’s most important to them in determining whether they’re just fair weather friends or whether they’ll be with you for the long haul. When it comes to fundraising, our posture is, “If you don’t really know your donors, you don’t understand your job.”
It’s unfortunate but true. Most nonprofits can’t provide empirical data on what really drives donor satisfaction, loyalty, retention, and thus donor lifetime value. And our research with Christian organizations shows that management’s observations and best guesses about what’s most important to donors can miss the mark significantly. As Mark Twain said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us into trouble. It’s what we know for sure that ain’t so.”
The knowledge that hundreds of millions of dollars are lost annually by nonprofits due to “scratching donors where they don’t itch,” drove Larry Johnston’s doctoral research. This research, focused mainly but not exclusively on major donors, dispelled conclusively the myth of the “average” donor. In fact, not only do donor value propositions vary greatly among organizations, they can vary significantly within an organization (i.e., what matters most to major donors may vary substantially from what matters most to small donors).
The question we ask is, “If you’re working week in and week out, month in and month out, seeking to retain your donors, doesn’t it make sense to find out what really drives their retention?”