HOW TO

Invest in the supporter experience.

Optimising each and every interaction a supporter has with you to increase loyalty, advocacy and ultimately income.

Written by Nikki Lamb

7mins read time

Most of us that are of working age know, and are familiar with the term ‘customer experience’ (CX). It’s a given, we expect a certain level of experience when making an online purchase or visiting a shop / restaurant. And when we feel like the company we are giving our money to hasn’t considered how all the touchpoints make us feel and what it’s like if it’s broken, we’re not happy. Maybe we complain or give them a bad review. We even make decisions about where to spend our money on the reported experiences of others without ever trying for ourselves. This ubiquity in expectations is as a direct result of years of investment and a laser sharp focus on CX. Why? Because you can’t argue with the return on investment it brings:

• Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers.
• Brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience.
• 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue. 
• Two in five consumers would consider switching to another brand after two bad experiences.

With such strong, and measurable benefits being displayed time and time again by our cousins in the commercial sector, why is it that so many charities have yet to even consider how they can harness this thinking for themselves? Especially as, in my opinion, the experience that a supporter has with a charity is more important than one they have with a brand. After all, charities aren’t really selling a product or a service, they’re selling a feeling. An emotion. The chance for the supporter to feel good about their actions. They’re selling the experience.  

A recent study found that 93% of charities say supporter experience (SX) is important. However a staggering 75% said, when looking specifically at their own organisations, supporter experience was of average importance, or less. Why is this? The report highlighted 3 main barriers:

• Lack or budget to invest in the tools and skills needed.
• Lack of understanding about what SX is.
• No one is championing SX within the organisation.

If all of the above describes your organisation, then I’m hoping that I can give you a few pointers to how you can get your organisation thinking about SX.

Supporter experience is the way a supporter thinks and feels about your organisation across every interaction and touchpoint.

DEFINITION OF SUPPORTER EXPERIENCE

WHY IS SUPPORTER EXPERIENCE IMPORTANT?

Because optimising each and every interaction a supporter has with you will increase loyalty, advocacy and ultimately income.

HOW DO YOU GET STARTED?

The below assumes that you have some way of categorising your supporters into key groups e.g. corporate supporters, community fundraisers, volunteers etc. If you’re not currently capturing this data at all, you’ll need to start there first. 

1

DEFINE YOUR STAGES

There are different journeys our supporters go on depending on whether they are just finding out about you, are supporting you, or are leaving. Defining what those stages are is the first step. For example, the acquisition journey stages usually look something like this:

2

DOCUMENT ALL SUPPORTER TOUCHPOINTS

A touchpoint is every type of interaction a supporter has with the organisation in each stage. This could be a facebook advert, through to a piece of direct mail, a telephone call or letter or email they receive. 

The size of this task can vary greatly depending on the size of your team and organisation. If you are the only one that communicates with supporters, then you’ll find this easy, but if you have different departments looking after different comms, this could take longer. Stick with it though, as this step will really help in the future – and it’s a great exercise to look for efficiencies, are you duplicating things? 

3

MAP THE JOURNEY

Time to bring how our supporters engage into the mix. Map the typical journey our supporter types go on through the different stages. What touchpoints do they have, what are they asked to do, and most importantly, how do they feel about it? This may seem daunting, and there are lots of flashy examples out there of highly designed supporter journey maps, however, you don’t need to do that unless you have the skills and time. This works just as well in a spreadsheet.

4

RESEARCH

You’ve got this far with your own wealth of knowledge, but now it’s time to make sure what you’ve documented is right, and to validate how we think our supporters feel. Reach out to some of your different supporter types to see if they will be happy to discuss their experience. Aim for supporters that are at different stages i.e. one that has just signed up for regular giving, one that has been a long time supporter, one who volunteers etc. and ask them to tell you about what the sign up process, or support is like. Have they created workarounds or is there one part of the journey that made it amazing for them?

5

PLAN

Once you’ve validated what your supporters are actually doing, and how they feel about it, you should easily be able to spot where things need to change, and where they need to stay the same. This should form the basis of your plan. Use the baseline you have documented to set yourself realistic objectives for improving the SX over a set time, 12 months for example.

Then prioritise, are there simple quick wins that are low cost and low effort that you can implement that will have a huge impact on how supporters feel? Or have you identified a duplication in effort and spend that supporters have told you they don’t need / like that could save your organisation money? It’s these things that will help you get your board behind the value of SX and, hopefully, allow you to invest time and money in optimising it. 

6

MEASURE

Arguably the most important part, you need to keep track of how the changes you have made have impacted both the supporter, and the organisation. Ensuring the data you are tracking is clean and accurate is essential here, and will vary depending on what part of the journey you are focussing on. 

For example, if you have identified that your website isn’t clear and supporters are finding it hard to donate online, often calling up, frustrated that they couldn’t make the form work, you can track a number of things to monitor this. Calls, completed online donations, bounce rate on the donation page etc. The key thing to remember here is that the team around you need to be aware of the measures you’re taking and the importance of logging data that will contribute to this metric i.e. have you got a system to log calls from supporters? 

One final piece of advice, especially if you’re the only one in your organisation who currently sees the value in this activity – start small. Pick one small area to work on and test and learn so that you have a solid foundation to build a case for getting more investment in optimising the supporter experience and increasing your revenue.

If you know someone who would like this, then please share

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