The importance of providing your supporters with a positive donor experience cannot be overstated

Research from the Institute of Fundraising suggests charities in the UK have a fair way to go before the donor experiences they provide are as good as they would like.

Do your charity’s supporters feel good about donating to your cause? This is the question you need to be asking yourself every single day. Charities should be constantly striving to improve their supporters’ donor experience to ensure a long-standing, fruitful relationship.

The Institute of Fundraising is the professional membership body for UK fundraising — its organisational members raise more than £9 billion for good causes every year — and it has been supported by Salesforg.org, a non-profit social enterprise, to produce a report entitled ‘Improving the Donor Experience.’

The report details the findings of a survey that takes the opinions of over 300 fundraisers from across the UK into account and it’s encouraging to see that 85% of small charities (those with an annual total income of less than £1 million) said they ‘go out of their way to meet the needs of their supporters.

That number is encouraging but it needs to be higher; 15% higher. From a fundraising perspective, every charity should be making time to ensure that all supporters feel good about donating to their cause. Unfortunately, however, a fifth of respondents also said that their organisation is resistant to change and that they don’t know where to start on improving donor experience.

For every charity, a ‘positive donor experience’ means something different — one organisation’s main supporter demographic might be women aged 55 and over, while another’s might be men under 45. The donor experience, clearly, needs to be different for these two demographics so as to still be positive for both.

Take some time to consider factors such as: how easy it is to donate to your cause; the safety of supporters’ data when they donate online; how often you communicate with your supporters; how you let your supporters know what their support has achieved; and whether you ever ask for something other than financial contributions.

Do your answers to these questions match what you know your supporters would like? If not, how can you change your working practices to give them a better experience? Leave a response below and let us know how you have improved your supporters’ donor experience recently.

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