March 2023: Have you surveyed your non-donors?
I recently saw a Twitter poll showing that people prefer to read newsletters early in the week, so I’ve bumped my typical Thursday send date up to Wednesday. I’ll try this out for a few months and crunch the numbers in June (!) to see if there’s been a bump in open rate.
Can you believe the end of Q1 is already in sight?
My client work this quarter has been all about conducting user research to inform messaging, marketing, and fundraising strategies. I’m wrapping up two big survey projects, and in both cases, we surveyed the organizations’ donors and non-donors.
I realized, I’m always hearing about the importance of donor surveys but I never hear anything about non-donor surveys.
Why is that? It’s critical to understand…
Whether there are key differences between the donors and non-donors who follow your work
Whether these groups have similar or different perceptions of your organization
Whether these groups use similar or different language to talk about your work
What’s holding non/lapsed donors back from giving
Whether there are non-donors who want to get more involved
In addition to the valuable insights you’ll glean from conducting this research, sending thoughtful surveys is a wonderful way to strengthen your relationships with people in both groups.
When I survey donors and non-donors, I ask a lot of the same questions so I can directly compare the results.
Then, I add a few questions that are specific to each group. For example, I might ask the donors what motivated them to give in 2022 while asking non/lapsed donors what prevented them from giving in 2022.
In my experience…
Non-donors who are motivated enough to complete a survey are an extremely valuable group. They care about your organization enough to reflect on why they haven’t supported you financially—recently or ever.
Non-donor responses often reveal misconceptions and messaging issues that are causing cognitive dissonance and preventing people from donating.
Non-donors may share more negative/critical feedback than donors.
There are non-donors in your network who want to get more involved with your organization, they just need a nudge.
I find few things more exciting than sending out carefully crafted surveys and watching the responses flow in. If you’d like my help designing surveys to answer key questions about your audiences, messaging, and marketing, reach out here or reply to this email! My Q2 schedule is filling up fast.
Surveying your donors and fans is easy and the responses will definitely illuminate some blind spots—or may completely change the way you understand your fanbase.
Here’s to audience-informed growth this spring!
-Caroline
P.S.
Here’s how I brought in almost 3,000 leads for the Antarctic & Southern Ocean Coalition with Meta ads.
Christina Edwards and I are going live on LinkedIn later this month. We hope you’ll join us!
I have one slot open for a Nonprofit Digital Assessment in April. Here's a recent LinkedIn post with more info on this offering. Let me know if you're interested in learning more!
