What is supporter experience and why does it matter?
And my top recommendations for making meaningful improvements (and thereby increase income)
Supporter Experience is the term used to describe the way supporters feel when they are interacting with a charity. The experience is malleable and ever-evolving with every touch point, as well as cumulative over time.
Supporter experience’s more mature cousins, customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) seem to be regarded as much more scientific, quantitative, and influential measures. I would like to argue that this shouldn’t be the case and outline how I think we can catch up to the private sector.
Most people intuitively understand that when an online checkout process is confusing and arduous, customers will abandon the purchase. We have all been there.
And thanks to Google analytics and other tools, we can very easily see where in the journey people are dropping off and getting stuck. The data is readily available and conclusive — The less the friction there is in an online interaction, and the more positive the UX, the higher the conversions.
In fact, every $1 invested in UX results in a return of $100 (ROI = 9,900%)
Businesses also understand the value of an excellent customer experience. They have to, as the benefits are no longer debatable.
- 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.
- The top reason customers switch brands is because they feel unappreciated.
- Two in five consumers would consider switching to another brand after two bad experiences.
With so much riding on positive customer and user experiences, brands aren’t leaving anything to chance. If you ask any of the major brands about what their customer experience is like, they will have a range of measures dedicated to reporting on, and improving it. There are dashboards with quantitative data and insights from qualitative feedback sessions.
A popular way of tracking customer experience is by mapping it. By using a range of qualitative, quantitative, and behavioural measures, brands can get a sense of the customer experience at each touch point in the customer journey — thus allowing them to make changes to pain points and replicate the high points.
Despite the immaturity of supporter experience as a concept (at least relative to customer experience) one could argue that the experience that supporters have with charities is more important than one that customers have with brands.
After all, what are charities selling if not a positive experience?
Yet in the charity sector over the last ten years we have struggled to differentiate between supporter experience and relationship fundraising. We haven’t changed any of the overarching infrastructure, systems or processes needed in order to really get sight of the full supporter experience, let alone improve it.
In order to genuinely deliver on improving the supporter experience, we must stop thinking of it as a philosophy and start investing in it as the most important insight that charities track and act on.
Here are the areas of focus that I believe are essential for charities to achieve results akin to the private sector.
- Have organisation-wide supporter experience objectives. Make sure you know what you’re going to do to improve the supporter experience and how you’re going to do it. Report on changes to the SX at board level. And for goodness sake, measure it.
- Listen to supporters. What are the supporter’s wants and needs? What are our own blind spots? What can we change to make the biggest impact to the supporter at each stage of their journey? For answers to these questions we must be actively seeking out insights and opportunities to listen. Hold focus groups. Conduct surveys. Test constantly and track behaviour. What are supporters telling supporter care? What are they saying on social media?
- Map the supporter journey. It should be no surprise that this is on the list. Really invest in understanding what supporters are thinking and feeling right from the point of awareness and consideration through to lapse/cancellation/re-engagement etc. What are the pain points? This helps you to understand which improvements are urgent, where to allocate resource, and where you should be actively monitoring to (hopefully) ensure constant improvement.
- Join up the insight dots. Have a mix of qualitative data, quantitative data, and behavioural data. The qualitative gives a nuanced and human insight in the supporter base. The quantitative lets you analyse insights by supporter demographic, age, length of engagement, and any other way you might want to cut the data. And the behavioural data shows you how supporters actually behave, as opposed to you how YOU think they will behave, or in fact how THEY think they will behave (which is inaccurate more often than most of us like to think).
- Prioritise good data. Consistently collect good quality, clean, meaningful and measurable data. Be data cleanliness evangelists. Make sure that someone is responsible for data governance and oversight. Be clear on what data you need and collect and do it consistently across all of your audiences. An most importantly, get all of your supporter data under one roof so that you can look at supporters holistically. By that I mean…
- Look at supporters holistically. Do H&M split up their customer base into customers who buy shoes, customers who buy clothes, and customers who buy accessories? Of course not — their customers are people who want to look good, therefore all customers are potential prospects for all products. They (along with all other major brands) use data insight to customise their offering from across the breadth of their portfolio.
Why then, do we in the charity sector still need to split supporters up into individual donors, campaigners, and volunteers? Surely all supporters are people interested in supporting a cause and making a change, and could do so in any number of ways? For all the talk of breaking down silos, we often still have stiff hierarchical organisational structures and plan communications based on what supporters did for the charity first.
In order to do all of the above you ideally need a joined up supporter experience task force with real organisational pull. The team should include data and insight, research, supporter care, marketing automation, and comms planning. They should have buy in at board level. By really investing in this space, charities actually have a chance at being able to measure supporter experience meaningfully.
By doing so, we can not only be more targeted and efficient about improving the supporter experience, but as a sector we can also start to accumulate the data that we need to prove the direct correlation between supporter experience and lifetime value. Once we can prove that, we will reach the tipping point and charities will have no choice but to buy in to meaningful change.
