Donor Journeys: Are they Worth the Hype?

Introducing more donors to our cause, or at least inspiring more of them to make a first (or indeed a regular) gift, is essential if a charity wants to build their income from individuals. But this is a complete waste of resource if all we employ is an effective scatter-gun approach – lurching from one extreme of raining down appeal after appeal onto all of our cash givers to the other of throwing all new regular giving donors into a dark cupboard with no further communication, lest we remind them and they cancel.

 

The concept of the Donor Journey is to help a charity communicate with a large pool of donors using as close to an individual approach as resources allow. There is no way we can have (tens of) thousands of individual conversations with our donors each and every month to maintain loyalty to our cause. The Donor Journey gives us a strategy to group similar ‘types’ of donor together: moving beyond the simple, but still important RFV (recency, frequency, value), towards motivation, channel, type of commitment, etc, etc. But perhaps most importantly the Donor Journey automates this process as far as possible, allowing smaller charities to deliver the improved supporter experiences that today’s donor demands.

 

Decaid Consulting was commissioned to develop several conceptual Donor Journeys for MAF Norway – who were in the process of implementing CiviCRM working with Erik Hommel, of CiviCoop. Handing over to Erik “Looking at CiviCRM from a Donor Journey perspective it seems that about 80% of the necessary instruments are there with functionality like Scheduled Reminders and Smart Groups. The first development step from our perspective is to take the Scheduled Reminder functionality to a next level. This would allow users to add or remove contract to and from groups based on changed activity status, send PDF letters and SMS and even create new activities.”

 

Erik is planning the first ‘Donor Journey’ sprint for April 2014, funded by MAF Norway.  More could be on the way, especially if other NGO's assist with the funding! Please contact Erik at erik.hommel@civicoop.org. For more information on the concept and development of Donor Journeys, please contact Rupert Tappin at Rupert@decaidconsulting.co.uk .