Major gifts fundraising begins and ends with trusting relationships. No one gives large gifts if they don’t trust the organization. And when that process involves a gift officer, that trust must extend to them. When the gift officer or someone else makes outreach to a potential major donor, trust is on the line, and the stakes are high.
But what happens before all that?
How do you get a person to the point where they’ll even take a call from a gift officer? Trust doesn’t begin when an actual human calls a potential donor. It begins the moment that donor comes into contact with any aspect of your organization’s communication and marketing.
How can your organization gain more control and influence over establishing and growing trust right from the start?
With donor surveys.
Donor surveys facilitate trust-building communications right from the start, and they can help continue building that trust as the relationship advances – all the way up to and beyond the day when an actual human calls that supporter.
Surveys are powerful – when done correctly. We’ll briefly discuss what it means to do surveys “correctly” a bit later. But first, let’s spell it out:
Why Donor Surveys Work
Why do surveys work, and why should nonprofits be using them to initiate and grow donor relationships? Let’s look at six of the biggest reasons.
Fill the Pipeline with New Prospects
You can’t draw water from an empty well.
Most nonprofits are surviving because of their major donors. Across the industry, according to the Fundraising Report Card, about 70% of all donation revenue comes from gifts over $5000, and those gifts come from less than 1% of all donors. This means a tiny number of donors are providing nearly all the revenue.
This means, if you lose a handful of your major donors, you’ll be in serious trouble. And that means you need to be continually attracting, identifying, and cultivating new major donors.
But if your donor database is tapped out and isn’t getting continuously filled with new supporters – including potential new major donors – where will you turn for help?
Surveys solve this problem by giving new supporters a way to ‘break in’ to your circle of influence. Rather than you having to go out all the time to find new people, with surveys, some of them will find you and add themselves to your database of their own volition.
With effective and consistent use, donor surveys are one of the best ways to generate new leads and supporters, some of whom will become your future major donors.
Enable Relationships on Supporters’ Terms and Timing
Surveys empower supporters to share data and information on their terms, and in their timing. This is self-reported data – information they freely choose to share.
And because they get to participate on their terms, and only when they want to, they will trust you as long as you don’t violate those terms before they give permission. In other words, with smart surveys, you will be asking supporters if they’re comfortable with things like having someone call them, being open to making a gift, and sharing their wealth capacity information.
Some won’t want to share those things. Some will. Of those who do NOT want to take those steps, you must respect their wishes. And by doing so, you will retain their trust. Later on, they may change their mind, and you’ll respond appropriately at that time.
In other words, surveys are donor-centric fundraising.
Can Be Automated and Used At Scale
Making calls takes time. Sending mail takes money and resources. Doing events is geographically limited, most of the time.
But online surveys can be automated. This means they can be running all the time, 24/7. It means they don’t require any person to manage them. And this means they can be done at scale. You can have surveys running to attract new leads. And you can have surveys going to people in your existing database, in far greater numbers than you could if you had people managing it all.
This means you’ll attract and engage far more people, which means you’ll find more new major donors.
With the ability to follow up personally to each supporter, automated donor survey software like what MarketSmart offers can manage all these donor communications – it requires no staff from your organization.
Donor surveys are cost-effective.
Enable Self-Qualification and Self-Selection
With effective donor surveys, you no longer need to enlist gift officers to head down to the basement in the dark and scour through reams of spreadsheet data until the wee hours of the night.
Surveys enable supporters to self-identify as potential major donors, and to self-qualify based on how they answer particular questions our system will send them.
With self-qualification, you can monitor your supporters and take note of the ones who consistently distinguish themselves as a potential major donor. Then, the day will come when some of those supporters will raise their hand and indicate they’d like to receive a call from someone in your organization.
With surveys and associated automation technology, without any involvement from your staff, your gift officers will be given names of people they can reach out to. They’ll have all the data from that person’s interactions with your software so they’ll know why this person is interested in your mission. And, they’ll have the joy of calling someone who asked to be called. Imagine that!
That means fewer hangups and less ghosting.
Donor surveys make major gift fundraising easier.
Collect Valuable Qualitative Data
What data can donor surveys collect? While most major gift vendors talk about things like wealth capacity, giving history, and techniques like how to ask for money, the really valuable information is not quantitative, but qualitative.
This is the kind of information you can’t get from predictive analytics or even the most sophisticated AI technology – what do individual donors actually think? What do they care about? What matters to them? What do they want?
With donor surveys, your supporters will voluntarily share valuable qualitative data such as:
- Who inspired them to care about your mission
- How did they first get involved with your organization
- Why does your mission matter to them?
- How does your organization rank compared to others they also support
- How do they involve their family in their support of your mission
- Do they have any children
There’s a lot more, but these are the sorts of things you can get supporters to reveal through a consistent and strategic approach to donor surveys.
That information is far more valuable for establishing a trusting and productive relationship with a gift officer than knowing how many gifts the donor has given the past five years.
Donor surveys deepen trust.
Because Donors Respond!
Lastly, one of the best reasons to use donor surveys is because they work!
Donors respond to surveys and engage in much deeper ways than they usually can or will on social media, with conventional email marketing, or even at in-person events. Surveys allow for thoughtful responses and give donors a way to express thoughts, feelings, and ideas they wouldn’t otherwise share.
Here are 7 reasons why donors fill out surveys
Caveat About Using Donor Surveys
As mentioned earlier, there is a catch to using donor surveys. If you don’t do it right, it can actually make things worse.
MarketSmart uses a lot of surveys because they are at the heart of our Engagement Fundraising process for raising more money from more major donors at lower cost. So, we have a lot of data, and we’ve seen what happens when organizations don’t manage surveys correctly.
The most important thing to do is to be sure and build in a follow-up process for what happens after the donor completes an online survey. If nothing happens, we have seen data that shows giving actually drops and people who were previously active supporters begin to disappear.
This suggests that donors filling out surveys consider this a sort of escalation in the relationship. They’re putting time and effort into this. They’re revealing a few things. And they want to know you heard them.
Make sure you have the follow-up strategy ready to go before you send out the survey so all your supporters will feel heard and will continue engaging afterward.
MarketSmart’s system makes this happen automatically, and it sends personalized follow up communications to each supporter, for as many years as the relationship lasts – even after a gift officer has reached out and engaged them.
Want to see more?
Here’s how the Engagement Fundraising process works
Related Resources:
- Why Do Donors Fill Out Surveys?
- 6 Reasons Why Donor Surveys Work at Engaging Wealthy Supporters and Prospects
- How to build deeper connections with your donors using surveys
- Why Nonprofit Fundraising Gift Officers Quit Their Jobs