Find out what your donors are thinking

Do you know what your donors are thinking?  Or what they want from their relationship with you?

It’s easy to find out.

A simple donor survey can help you learn what’s on your donors’ minds and what they’re interested in.  Here are some tips for creating an effective survey.

• Plan your survey.  Be clear about what it is you want to find out.  This will help you hone in on the most important questions.
• Keep it short and simple.  Remember that donors are busy people and won’t take the time to complete a long survey.  I recommend 10 questions or less.
• Use a variety of questions (a mixture of simple answer, multiple choice, and fill in the blank).

My favorite survey tool is Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com).  It’s easy to use and offers a free version.  You create a survey then email your donors the link.

I used Survey Monkey with a client recently to find out what donors thought about their enewsletter.  The survey featured only seven questions and we were able to learn that we needed to rework the format a little bit.  The result was a more effective enewsletter that donors were more likely to read.  Cool huh?

Donor Surveys

When you know more about your donors and what they want you can do a better job of giving it to them.

I’m working with a group right now on a survey and it’s a lot of fun.  They are a state-wide environmental group with a large portion of their donors receiving an email newsletter.  We designed a survey using SurveyMonkey to find out if they like the info in the email newsletter and what they’d like to see done differently.  There are only 7 questions in the survey with a combination of fill-in-the-blank and multiple choice.  It’s short and easy to complete.

We had some gut feelings about how the responses might go and so far, we’re right on.  It’s nice to see donors jumping in to participate and help the organization by answering the short survey, and also very interesting to see the responses.

As a result, we’re going to be able to tweak the email newsletter to make it more effective.  Not just because somebody thinks that’s what should happen, but because that’s what the DONORS want!  Cool, huh?

Online prospect research

Sometimes when you’re cultivating major donors, it’s helpful to know a little more about them.  And one of the easiest places to research your donor prospects is online.

I ran across this site and thought it was pretty good. You can find out things like property values of real estate that your donor owns, which could give you a clue about their net worth.  Check it out at  http://publicrecords.netronline.com.