Getting their viewpoint
Getting your constituents’ perspective on your next big campaign — or just to refine your ongoing outreach efforts — is hugely valuable.
But it probably shouldn't become a major project in itself.
Here's a common approach, but it has significant drawbacks:
Set up an online survey with 20 multiple choice questions like, "What's the most important issue for you?” and “How likely are you to give again to our work?"
Email-blast everybody who's given you a donation in the past year, asking them to complete the survey.
Wait several weeks to get as many answers as you can.
Collect the answers into a series of bar charts for your board to review.
That approach has some important limitations:
It constitutes another ask from a big portion of your potential donors.
It doesn't give the respondents an opportunity to speak freely.
It takes a long time to get results that are fairly generic.
Here's an approach I think is significantly better:
Identify 5 to 10 individuals whom you think could be of a stage of life, demographic, or mindset similar to the people you'll be reaching out to.
Arrange a short one-on-one phone call with these folks, in which you’ll ask them open-ended questions to tease out their hopes, concerns, and motivations.
Do your very best to record their exact words — either by fully disclosed audio recording or by taking copious notes.
Then review your conversations. Look for patterns in meaning. Look for poignant expressions of emotional weight.
Treat this as a decent snapshot of your audience, and use it to inform your communications, your programs, and your overall outreach.
Here's the difference:
It can certainly feel "safe" to try and collect dozens or hundreds of organized responses to a consistent survey instrument.
That's great for clinical research and peer reviewed studies.
But that's not what you are doing here.
You're just trying to step out of your own viewpoint and into the mind of the people you're reaching out to.
And you don't want that — valuable as it is — to put a significant and needless delay in your actual outreach.
Simple, and personal, is likely to be much better for you.
From my own experience, I would much rather have five simple interviews with the latter method than 100 survey responses from the former method.
Real people. Real conversations. Real insight. Simple.
All the best,
A.