Do you know why your donors give? Is there consensus within your organization about the reasons they dip into their pockets to fund your mission? Or are there simply “best guesses” floating around that may or may not accurately answer that question?
Unless you ask your donors directly, your gut instincts are merely opinions. And research kills opinions.
A well-crafted donor survey delivered in a savvy way can provide the facts you need to make smarter fundraising and marketing decisions going forward. You know all those small and mid-level donors on your list? They are the perfect audience to answer your questions. (For now, we’ll leave the major gift donors alone. You should already know why those donors give based on your conversations with them.)
But before you create your survey, let’s take a look at the five-and-a-half principles that will ensure you solicit accurate, authentic feedback that doesn’t also annoy the heck out of your donors. And while this article is specifically about donor surveys, many of the lessons here apply to all surveys.
1. Purposeful
You should not conduct a donor survey unless you know exactly what information you need to obtain from the survey and what you’ll do with the info once you get it.
Every time you ask your donors for something—even just a quick survey response—you’re making a withdrawal from the relationship. It’s only worth asking for a favor if you know the results will be put to use. In other words: Don’t ask your donors to take the time to fill out your survey unless you’re prepared to make strategic changes based on what you learn.
What’s the Goal?
Are you clear about what you’re trying to accomplish? Do you have concrete goals for what the survey will achieve? Are all internal stakeholders in agreement? Are the goals prioritized? Are they written down?
It’s important to write down your goals and how you’ll know that you’ve reached them. Otherwise, how will you know if your donor survey was successful?
2. Targeted
You probably don’t want to send this survey to everyone in your donor CRM. Instead, you’ll want to target specific subsets of your donor base. Selecting the audience for your survey depends on the purpose of the survey.
For example, is your goal to find out why your monthly donors choose to make an ongoing commitment? Or do you want to know why younger donors give to you versus other audiences?
There are a ton of ways to segment your audiences. Some of the most popular include:
- By donation amount — e.g., Why don’t donors who give less than $25 give more?
- By frequency of donation — e.g., Why do people who donate only once per year not give more often?
- By when they give—e.g., Why do donors who give only during the holidays not give in the summer?
- By age or other demographics—e.g., Why do donors younger than 30 donate?
- By how they give—e.g., Why do some donors refuse to donate online?
3. Short
Research shows that shorter surveys are more likely to produce higher response rates, so keep the survey as short as possible. Try not to include more than 10 questions—and quite a lot fewer, if possible.
Most, if not all, of your questions should be closed questions.
Closed questions provide a list of acceptable responses—e.g., multiple choice, yes/no questions, checklists, etc. Closed questions are quick and easy to complete.
Meanwhile, open questions—which require the respondent to type in an answer of their own—can increase survey abandonments. Users simply don’t want to write much. In a 10-question survey, we recommend having no more than 1 open-ended question.
But what if you have 20 things you really want to know and you can’t possibly get the survey that short?
First, we’d urge you to review those 20 questions. Do you really need to know all of them? Do they make sense together? Be ruthless in your editing. It’s better to get 100 responses to a short survey than 10 responses to a long one.
You can also split your long survey into two smaller ones. (Or even two audiences.)
4. Delivered Well
Chances are, your survey will be delivered online. With cost-effective tools like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms, the only reason to use mail-in survey is if it’s best suited to your target audience (e.g., older donors). Most people are used to taking surveys online and find them easy to use and understand.
Whichever online survey tool you use, make sure it’s:
- Intuitive for you and your users
- Works well on all web browsers (you can use your Google Analytics to see the most common web browsers used by your online audiences)
- And most importantly, is mobile-friendly! Many of your users will get the invitation to take your survey on their phones. Make sure it’s easy for them to take the survey on their mobile devices.
When you send follow-up reminders about the survey, don’t send those reminders to people who have already responded. Not only does it make you look out-of-touch, but they’ll start doubting whether they completed the survey the first time and whether it actually went through. Don’t give them reason to doubt you!
5. Tested
Just as you fully edit and proof your blog posts, you should also edit and proof (and re-edit and re-proof) your survey before sending it out. Unlike a blog that you can later update, you get only one chance with a survey. Don’t let a typo or strangely-phrased question mess you up.
A quick way to be sure your questions make sense is to read the survey out loud. You’re more likely to catch small mistakes when you hear them rather than when you read them.
Share the survey with a friend who’s not familiar with the survey (or better yet, your organization). Ask them to complete it while you sit alongside. Where do they get hung up? Where did they turn to you to explain something? Those are the areas you need to work on before releasing the survey.
And be sure to test the survey on multiple web browsers and devices so some users don’t get a bad experience.
5 ½. Incentivized
Why the half? Because this last principle is optional.
Incentives can increase your response rate by 5-20%, but you want to use them thoughtfully. Incentives are best used when the survey is longer (i.e., more than five minutes) or the audience is less likely to be engaged (i.e., lapsed donors).
Over the years, we’ve used lots of different types of incentives—everything from gift cards to event tickets to give-away items. And respondents are typically entered to win one gift card or one of several if we expect a large response.
A few warnings about incentives:
- Don’t make them so big that they sway your results. A $500 gift card is overkill. Typically, a $50-100 gift card is a good incentive.
- Make sure you can easily give the incentive away. If you plan to give a t-shirt to everyone that completes the survey, how will you fulfill those orders? Do you have the resources to package up and mail hundreds of t-shirts?
- If you offer an incentive, it’s harder to make the survey anonymous. Keep in mind that anonymous surveys tend to produce better information. So, there is a tradeoff between anonymity and incentives.
There’s plenty more to crafting a great survey—i.e., writing unbiased questions, the order of questions, how to properly analyze responses, etc. But most important to your survey’s success is making sure it’s purposeful, strategic, and targeted from the outset.
If you obey these principles, you’ll surely garner some fascinating insights into your donors’ motivations and your organization’s goals. From there, the sky’s the limit. Best of luck!
Editor’s note: After following these great steps from Rachel, get some additional benchmark insights into donor behavior in Blackbaud Institute’s 2017 Charitable Giving Report.
Thank you, Rachel. These are great tips and reminders.
Great article! Very informative and this will be useful the next time we prepare a survey.
Love that 1/2 item – sometimes a mystery to nonprofit execs!
Incentives? That half step is something I’ve never considered for a survey, but since it works so well with certain donor drives, I already know it will work for our donors.
Excellent points.
Such a challenging topic! We keep talking about doing this…..
This is great thank you for sharing.
Thank for the great ideas.
How timely! We’re undertaking a survey now in preparation for our day of giving activities. Thank you for the info, Rachel!
We have instituted a survey in follow up to our estate planning consultations. They’ve been a wonderful way to collect new donor referrals! A good way that our planned giving officer thought outside the box with surveys!
We shortened our survey recently to our donor to about 10 questions and noticed that more people are now filling it out.
You must also think about how responses will be tracked and utilized to make strategic decisions. Understanding your audience will contribute to the how, where, why and what you track.
Thanks Rachel… good to know
These are interesting ideas. We’re considering doing a survey in my organization, so I’ll pass this along.
Excellent points! Thanks for sharing.
Great point on the 1/2 item!
SHORT! If I can’t fill out a survey in 5-10 minutes, it’s not going to happen.
Great eye opening insights Rachel.
Great article, looking forward to sharing
We use surveys after all of our programs at the organization, but we have never surveyed donors. Definitely something to look in to!
Love this. Have been thinking about doing a donor survey of sorts and this will be a huge help if we go down that route!
Excellent tips, thank you!
Great point on incentives!
I think incentives are a great way to get people to fill out the surveys.
Thank you, this confirms a lot of my beliefs. Refreshing.
Interesting article and good tips! Thanks!
I think it’s time for a donor survey!
Would be nice to know what a typical response rate for snail and e-mail donor surveys looks like?
Great tips.
Great tips!
Thanks for sharing, very timely!
Great tips, Rachel. Thank you!
I liked point #1 about surveys being a withdrawal from the relationship
Great advice, thank you!
Great advice, sharing with my team!
Interesting article. we have done survey’s after events for feedback but never for donors. Something to consider.
Thank you!
Excellent! We always assume we know why people are donating, but we could be way off base.
We use incentives for our surveys we send to event participants, and it’s really the best way to get responses.
Thanks for the tips!
I don’t know that we’ve ever done surveys for donors, but I love the idea. Typically, we focus on surveying those we serve– visitors in our museum– about what they like or want to see.
Helpful tips and a great way to better know who your donors are.
Great tips!
We have done surveys with awesome success and your points are well taken!
Being able to complete things quickly in my opinion is very important. If a person gets tied up in a time consuming survey, it increases the likeliness to either stop finishing it, or not bother doing it in the first place.
Good advice all around. Simple is better and more likely to get results
Incentives have been frowned upon at my org for surveys and non donation engagement for a long time. It looks like that is starting to change though and maybe we will get the chance to see how an incentive program would actually work.
Simple, clear, concise, and well thought through questions are key.
If the questions are too long to complete, you can lose many opportunities for large-dollar gifts.
keeping it simple. Great article. Unfortunately, we can’t do incentives either.
Great tips, thanks for sharing!
Great tips – I will definitely pass them on to my new fund development director.
I will certainly share this with our Alumni team – thanks!
Having an electronic survey is a great reminder!
Good tips and reminders!
This is helpful! We’re trying to incorporate more donor surveys in our communications, so this comes in handy!
Excellent tips and concise!
Excellent
These are great in theory, but when surveys are put together by “committee” they become a real challenge. I’ll share with our survey people.
Great advice! Thanks!
Great Tips. I think our surveys are targeted but rather boring.
Wonderful things to think about! Thank you!
an interesting article
Thank you for the tips, will pass along.
Clear and concise steps – this is definitely something I am going to bring up with our team. Thanks for the great article!!
We’ve never even considered a survey. This could be very helpful for us. Thank you!
Great tips. I also recommend that the questions you ask have actionable follow up. The info may be interesting but why ask about how often someone gives if there is no follow up to change how often they are solicited?
Great tips! I think planning what to do with the information you gather is a big help in developing the questions to ask.
Thank you for sharing. Your first tip is most important – Purpose. The statement that, “…you’re making a withdrawal from the relationship”, by asking the favor of reply is so true.
Thanks! I will pass this info on to our Development team.
Great article, looking forward to sharing
“You should not conduct a donor survey unless you know exactly what information you need to obtain from the survey and what you’ll do with the info once you get it.”
THIS. So much this.
Know what you need and how you will use it.
Thanks for the article.
We need to do one soon. Thanks for the ideas.
If you give an incentive, do you have to worry about the laws around raffles?
Thanks for the tips.
Thank you for the tips
This is great! So many points I would never have thought about!
Great ideas. Thanks for the tips.
Good information we need to think about all these points