Best Friends Animal Society, a Utah-based organization that finds homes for animals nationwide, has nearly 400,000 supporters, many of whom are known to the organization by little more than their names and addresses.
Yet in the past year, Best Friends has learned a great deal about some 5,000 of those donors. About two-thirds in that group don’t have children. Around half consider Best Friends their favorite charity. And hundreds are eager to share with others their favorite pet-friendly hangouts.
These findings are part of an effort by Best Friends to deepen relationships with a set of supporters who are chiefly midlevel donors — those who have contributed $1,000 to $5,000. The nonprofit has had tremendous success in the past five years with donors who give at higher levels: Revenue from donations of $5,000 to $20,000 has grown from $400,000 to $2.5 million. Now the group aims to strengthen ties with donors the next level down with the goal of upgrading some of those.
“We really want to build an experience for midlevel donors that allows them to engage more deeply, feel more committed to the organization, and feel like the organization is paying attention to them and cares about them,” says Barbara Camick, director of membership for Best Friends.
The vehicle for the deeper relationship is invitation-only membership in an “insight panel,” a de facto focus group. Best Friends sends these self-selected donors a monthly email survey seeking their views on such topics as the importance of various programs and the effectiveness of its online dashboard with state-by-state data on cats and dogs killed and saved through no-kill shelters.
The surveys also ask donors to tell the organization about their pets — nicknames, photos, stories about them. A call for recommended pet-friendly parks, beaches, restaurants, and the like netted nearly 800 suggestions, from off-leash dog parks in Alaska to the Cheshire Grin Cat Cafe in St. Louis — all of which Best Friends shared with the group.
“We try to make it a fun experience for them and add some value to it as a reward for being part of the group,” Camick says.
Donors at Arm’s Length
The importance of forging donor connections through two-way communication is a theme of a recent survey of more than 1,300 donors by the RKD Group, a fundraising and marketing firm. “Simply put: Donors want to be heard,” RKD’s report concluded; supporters loosely tied to a charity often don’t believe the organization values their opinion.
Alia McKee and Mark Rovner, the principals at Sea Change Strategies, a fundraising consultancy, have seen similar strains in the supporter-charity relationship for more than a decade. “What we often heard from donors is that they felt talked at,” McKee says of their donor interviews for fundraising audits. “While they had so much passion and so much appetite to engage with nonprofits, they kind of felt held at arm’s length.”
Groups rightfully focus enormous energy on messaging — words, photos, frequency — yet seldom listen to supporters, Rovner says. “There’s a tendency for organizations to spend millions of hours figuring out how to craft exactly the right message, like you’re tying a lure on a hook to throw in the water to catch a fish, and not nearly enough time really trying to establish any kind of two-way communications.”
McKee and Rovner noted the popularity of customer communities, online or physical spaces that airlines, banks, and retailers have created to seek the input and perspectives of their most loyal customers. The goal: better understand what customers want and deepen their loyalty.
In 2018, Sea Change began working with clients to create digital insight panels with similar goals. A half-dozen groups now run such focus groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Best Friends, Doctors Without Borders, and the Wilderness Society. McKee and Rovner have created a workbook to help organizations launch and run the panels. The guidance includes:
- Invite key donor segments to join the panel. McKee and Rovner like to target midlevel donors, but groups also have included monthly supporters and legacy donors.
- Send panelists two communications monthly — a short survey (completed in less than five minutes, with a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended questions) and a summary of the results.
- Focus the first survey on the donors. Ask how they got involved in the cause and what they’d like to know about from the CEO, for example. “We’re asking you, the donors, what’s most important to you, what makes you a whole person, because we want to walk in step with you,” McKee says.
- Never include a gift solicitation. Organizations probe supporters’ motivations for giving and preferences — Do you like to volunteer? Give cash? — but they ask donation-focused questions sparingly.
The National Audubon Society started its insight panel with Sea Change in 2018 with about 650 donors. Each year, it gives participants the chance to opt out, but few do. The panel now features more than 5,000 donors.
The organization asks participants to identify the most compelling part of its mission and also gauges donors’ views on the conservation movement at times of political change, like after an election.
“We say, ‘This is really about you helping us,’” says Steve Abrahamson, who leads Audubon’s direct-response fundraising program. Answers help the organization craft messages that resonate with its broader set of donors.
The organization also gives donors an opportunity to express their passion for birds, often asking panelists to send photos or stories of their bird-watching experiences that it shares through a panelists-only digital hub. “WOW … cannot believe [my] picture made the inclusion ... that was a truly wonderful day!” wrote one panelist whose photo was featured.
Such responses are “a constant reminder to us of things that connect with donors,” Abrahamson says. “And the number one thing is the joy that they get from birds.”
Best Friends, which created its insight panel in 2021, shuffles the roster of participants each year. By year’s end, some 10,000 supporters will have taken part.
Fundraisers add to donor profiles in the database the information gleaned from surveys, tidbits that can help establish a personal relationship with those individuals later. They don’t yet know whether panel participants are increasing their support and moving into higher tiers of giving, Camick says. But anecdotal feedback suggests they are forging deeper connections.
“If Best Friends was a rock band, we would be groupies!” one panelist wrote to the group.