Mystery shopping – sadly no surprises
Howard Lake | 9 February 2008 | Blogs
First, apologies to all for the tardiness of my posting on here – I have many excuses, but none that are any good so I’m not going to bother making any. I’m just going to resolve to be better organised with my blog this year!
Anyway, in advance of our imminent article about Mystery Shopping in Professional Fundraising, I’m going to give it a plug on here.
Hopefully, before the collective heavy sigh from fundraisers echo round the sector, this is a Mystery Shop with a difference, I promise.
First, to try and make it consistent and to make any comparisons more meaningful, we decided to focus on just one ‘cause’ that was broadly common to all the charities we approached – that of Overseas Development.
Secondly, rather than just consider speed and quality of initial responses, we wanted to evaluate subsequent communications and, most importantly, try and make an accurate judgement on the quality of these communications as well. To do this we convened a panel of charitable donors and asked them to evaluate each and every response across a range of criteria. The exercise has lasted seven months so far and is ongoing.
£10 donation, and then we waited
We selected 25 charities, large and small (the full list is given below) and made a £10 credit card donation to each. Then we sat back and waited for our acknowledgements.
And in some cases, fourteen of the twenty-five to be precise, we’re still waiting.
This was just the tip of the iceberg. Without trying to come across as the proverbial stuck record, the overall results were predictably disappointing. They can be read in far more detail in the magazine next week (for non-subscribers who want a copy of the article, please just e-mail me at jo**@jo*****************.com).
However, lowlights included poor Gift Aid requests, error-ridden letters, poor segmentation, poor data protection, and no feedback on how our money was used. Unfortunately the list of mediocrity goes on and on.
Fundamentally, despite our lip service and protestations to the contrary, we are abysmally failing to implement even an average level of stewardship. We are still satisfied with the lowest common denominators, and seem unable or unwilling to accept and meet the challenge of committing to and delivering an outstanding experience for our donors. In short, despite pretending otherwise (with a few notable exceptions), we continue to take them and their gifts for granted.
Did I mention the full article can be read in the forthcoming issue of Professional Fundraising?
For those charities that we included (see below), your own confidential report with a full evaluation and comparison with the overall benchmark averages, can be obtained by contacting us directly. It is of course free of charge!
Charities selected
ActionAid
Amnesty International
British Red Cross
CAFOD
Christian Aid
Concern
Farm Africa
Hope and Homes for Children
Medicins Sans Frontieres
Opportunity International
Orbis
Oxfam
Plan International
Power International
Practical Action
Save The Children
Sightsavers
SOS Children’s Villages
Tearfund
UNICEF
Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO)
War on Want
Water Aid
World Development Movement (WDM)
World Vision
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.