Supporter Centricity, Supporter Experience, and Supporter Engagement. What’s the difference?
Over the past ten years, these terms have been bandied around a lot in the charity sector. Some might call them buzz words.
In fact, sometimes they have been used interchangeably.
After working on a new engagement strategy at my day job, I felt it was important to draw some clear lines between the three.
I would like to posit my definitive differentiation between the three.
To do so, I’ll use an analogy.
A supporter’s interest in the cause is the seed. Water and sunlight are the experience, and help engagement (the flower) to grow.
Supporter Centricity is all about how well set-up a charity is to deliver excellent experiences. How fertile is the soil?
This is about internal factors. How committed are leadership to having a great supporter experience? How are they investing in improvements? How good are your thanking and complaints handling processes? What about data processes? Are strategic decisions grounded in robust supporter insights? Are communications planned based on what the charity wants to say or what the supporter wants to hear? How do you know?
This is where a SX maturity model can help. It can identify the steps needed to become a more supporter-centric organisation.
Take a look at this Maturity Model that we’ve adapted from Forrester’s Customer Experience Model:
Supporter experience is about the individual interactions, as well as the overall feeling that supporters are left with when engaging with your charity.
Is every interaction providing sunlight and water to encourage growth? Or are supporters left feeling neglected or mishandled? Are you delighting or disappointing?
Supporter experience doesn’t stop. The experience is malleable and ever-evolving with every touch point, as well as cumulative over time.
In order to understand customer experience, you need to think about what happens during specific supporter experiences and touchpoints, as well as what supporter feels about their overall experience over time.
Things that contribute to the supporter experience include:
- Brand positioning (awareness)
- Interaction experiences (acquisition)
- Content relevance (retention)
Due to the fact that supporter experience is such an all-encompassing concept, it can be hard to measure (which is a completely separate blog in and of itself). But understanding the supporter experience is key to understanding important supporter outcomes like attrition or upgrade rates.
Which leads us neatly on to engagement.
Supporter engagement is how much and how deeply a customer engages with the charity.
It can be seen as a proxy for how invested the supporter is in the charity and it’s cause. This will grow (like a flower) if the supporter has an excellent supporter experience.
That being said, the experience is not the only ingredient of engagement. Other things that could have an effect on engagement include the supporter’s proximity to cause, current events, or their financial circumstances.
But of all the contributing factors, the supporter experience is the one that charities can best influence to increase engagement.
If your charity is truly supporter-centric, it can ensure that supporters are given an exceptional experience. This means they will support more and for longer, in other words increased engagement, which ultimately leads to more income.
That’s my hot take. Do you agree?
Let me know your thoughts.
