Commission on the Donor Experience: evidence of impact and effectiveness
Howard Lake | 9 September 2016 | Blogs
How to change fundraising for good? That’s the focus of an extensive range of research that is currently underway by the Commission on the Donor Experience.
There are 25 volunteer-led groups focusing on different elements of this challenge. Work is well underway but all of them would value further input to help enhance their understanding of the issues and the solutions that some charities are finding.
This is the first of a series of blog posts from those leading these different groups.
Group 19: Evidence of impact and effectiveness.
Project lead: Ben Russell, Director of Communications, Charities Aid Foundation.
How can charities best communicate what they’re achieving? We are looking at how charities talk to donors about their impact and achievements and how supporters would like charities to get in touch.
There’s a dilemma for charities. We know that donors like charities to be in touch and get an idea of what they are achieving. But we also know many donors feel annoyed if a generous donation simply leads to ever more requests for money.
We’ve undertaken two market research projects to try and tease out some answers, and when the Commission on the Donor Experience asked us to look at this as part of their project to help charities build better relations with their supporters, the parallels were obvious.
Focus groups on how people view charities
My colleague Susan Pinkney, CAF’s head of research, commissioned a series of focus groups around England back in the spring to look at how people view charities and how they would like them to communicate. It was instantly clear that there is a lot of frustration about what people perceive as repeated fundraising calls and contacts.
But at the same time people spoke warmly and enthusiastically about the charities who showed them concrete, human examples of the work they did and the people they helped. There was a clear appetite for people to know more, not necessarily statistics and figures (although people liked that they were available) but real human examples.
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What updates donors want from charities
We followed this work up with a wave of quantitative research, part of our ongoing UK Giving survey programme with YouGov, which polls 1,000 people a month on their giving habits and attitudes, which will eventually make up Britain’s largest annual survey on giving.
The early results are fascinating and bear our what we heard from our focus groups earlier this year. Asked about the updates they receive from charities they support about how they spend their money, only 3% of charity supporters said they hear too much about what charities do, and 26% thought they didn’t hear enough. Overall 55% thought charities got it about right.
Asked about how charities give updates on their work, again only 5% thought they had too much, 18% not enough and 62% felt it was about right.
And when charity supporters were asked about the content they received 45% thought it informative, 30% found it interesting, while 38% thought it asked them to give more.
By contrast, when people were asked how they felt if they were asked for more money, 40% said they felt annoyed, 34% felt awkward, and 16% felt guilty.
There’s more to learn from the detail. But we suspect the early lessons are that there is an appetite for people to know more, but it is probably important to get the tone right so people feel informed rather than simply asked for more.
We’ll write up the full analysis for the Commission over the next few weeks, but what would add greatly to the numbers is a sense of how organisations have gone about telling supporters about their work – what’s gone down well, and what less well. And does it have a bearing on how they give?
We’d be delighted to talk to colleagues about their experiences of talking to donors and share what we are doing. Please drop a line to Ben Russell or Susan Pinkney at Charities Aid Foundation.
Ben Russell is Director of Communications at Charities Aid Foundation
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.