7 steps to a supporter centric organisation
Our work is only possible due to the generosity of our supporters.
Supporters include staff, volunteers, campaigners, donors and the wider community.
Becoming supporter centric is no longer a nice to have, it's absolutely imperative to sustainable fundraising growth.
An important lesson from early adopters is that becoming truly supporter centric requires transformation from the insight out.
Below are seven steps to becoming a supporter centric organisation.
1. STRATEGY
Unite the organisation around a single vision for an emotion-led journey that supports multiple journeys across multiple touchpoints and treats the supporter as the determiner of their interactions and behaviours with your organisation.
2. ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE
Change current practice by considering organisation wide performance indicators. Explore experience measures such as net promoter score or a commitment / engagement metric that all the organisation can collaboratively work towards.
3. WHO
Invest in audience insights. These are ideally a combination of qualitative and quantitative research combined with external data. Utilise this information to create your data-driven personas that will be used for your journey mapping.
4. WHY
Recency, frequency and monetary value (RFM) tell us what people are doing but they don’t tell us why.
5. MOTIVATION
Motivation should be part of our supporter data sets, by utilising surveys and a commitment to the ‘voice of the consumer’ your future segmentation strategies will be driven by RFM2.
5. HOW
Frequent empathy-based journey mapping by cross-organisational teams is the only way to start moving towards rapidly delivering journeys informed by frequent testing and measuring to optimise outcomes. Don’t develop your journeys then set and forget. Not only do journey mapping sessions deliver your journey maps but they also go a long way to driving organisational cohesion.
6. EXPERIENCE
Our journey mapping session defines our ‘moments that matter’ and it is these moments when we must exceed our supporter’s expectations (or address the low points when we are not meeting expectations). Memories are short and supporters aren’t charity exclusive, so innovate and create emotional highs that your supporters will remember.
7. VOICE OF THE SUPPORTER
Turn supporter feedback to a focus on accelerated improvement of your journeys. Significant investment by the commercial sector in customer experience has, in turn, resulted in customer feedback loops designed to inform the experience it has with the brand. Journeys shouldn’t be guessed by using a scattergun approach to see what sticks, but informed by rich donor profiles, supporter feedback and iterative test & measure prior to full implementation.
