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?