Imagine that you’re interviewing someone for a job. They wow you with their energy, enthusiasm, and ability to strike up an instant rapport, so you give them the job.
But instead of turning up to work on their assigned first day, someone totally different comes along in their place. Maybe you like this new person. Maybe you don’t. Ah well, you think, I’ll just have to make do.
It’s not a great situation. And yet that is, in a sense, what face-to-face (F2F) fundraising sometimes does to donors. The person who wowed a total stranger, won their trust and convinced them to sign on the dotted line, is never seen again because that step is done. The donor experience that won them over is totally different to the donor experience you’re now going to provide.
As a fundraiser, it’s really easy to ignore this fact when we map out donor experiences. It’s also really easy to forget that actually, what we hope a donor’s donor experience will be, may very well not be the experience that they actually do experience.
How many unopened emails do you have in your inbox? Have you got text messages or WhatsApp you’ve left unread or never quite engaged with? Magazines sat around the house you intended to read, but never got around to?
Closing the gap
It’s vital for F2F success that we close the gap between what we think the donor experience is, what it actually is, and also what donors want it to be. Have you asked and listened to their preferences, or just made assumptions?
If someone doesn’t receive a phone call, doesn’t open an email, or doesn’t engage with that piece of content you’d spent ages working on, what does that mean for their donor journey? Are they now less likely to be retained or to upgrade in due course? Perhaps they interacted with one thing but not another. Maybe it doesn’t make much difference, and you’ve been investing time in something that isn’t critical to success.
Digging into these questions requires creating donor case studies and analysing them. While this absolutely isn’t something that needs to be done at scale, I’m aware that it can be difficult, especially in smaller charities, to find the resources and time to make that happen.
We’ve begun thinking about this at Oxfam America, and I’ll be sharing some of the insights from that exercise when I speak at the Global F2F Fundraising Summit 2022, a free half-day online event on Thursday, 22nd September.
A donor journey that’s right for F2F donors
Another aspect which we can sometimes neglect is how the F2F donor journey should differ from that of other donors. We know that F2F has a higher rate of early cancellations compared with other methods, and while that may just be the nature of the channel and we might never completely reverse that trend, we have to do what we can to at least stem the flow.
At Oxfam America, we’ve begun getting our F2F fundraisers to record short videos to thank donors for their time and their donation. In these videos, they’ll think back to a particular aspect of their conversation and what they enjoyed about it.
This means that we’re avoiding that situation where someone aces the job interview then disappears, which is what happens when your F2F donors are just lumped into the general pool alongside everyone else.
Getting together to learn
There are no magic solutions in F2F fundraising, and nobody has all the answers. But it’s vital that we get together as a profession to share our learnings. This helps us to inform the decisions of our peers, essentially providing shortcuts and speeding up the pace of innovation.
Anything that improves the donor experience can also improve the public perception of fundraisers and charities as a whole, not to mention the extra impact our organisations can have as a result.
Ali Jones is a National F2F Fundraising Manager for Oxfam America. She is speaking at the Global F2F Fundraising Summit 2022 on Thursday, 22nd September.
Get your free ticket for this online event.
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