6 tips to keep in mind as you ask for monthly donations
- Digital communications & marketing
- Fundraising ideas
- Nonprofits
- Donor Engagement
Wish you could get into the minds of your nonprofit organization’s donors? Donor surveys can help. With the right survey questions, you can measure donor satisfaction, understand donor motivations, and evaluate and improve your fundraising efforts.
Moreover, asking a donor for their input is a crucial step in the stewardship process and a great way to get them more involved with your nonprofit organization. When you know what your existing and potential donors value, you can improve their giving experience, raise more, and acquire new supporters.
To get you started, we’ve compiled a core set of sample survey questions to ask. You can use these key questions across a variety of surveys: online surveys, in-person interviews, and registration questionnaires. In all cases, these questions will help you collect valuable input and show donors that you care about their feedback.
Sometimes the most obvious questions are the most important to ask. Asking “why” gets at the motivation behind a donation. You might also frame this in the retrospective: Over the years that you have generously supported us, what motivated you to give and get involved?
Additionally, ask this follow-up question: Which programs/services do you care about the most? To prompt responses, you can list your core services or programs beneath the question.
You can understand how well you’re demonstrating impact to donors by asking how they feel about what their gifts have accomplished and why they feel that way. Here, you might also ask: How can we better show that your gift is meaningful?
Break this question down by asking about donors’ preferred frequency of giving (one time, annually, monthly), preferred type of giving (in-kind, cash, stocks, auctions, event tickets), and preferred method of giving (check, text-to-give, online, peer-to-peer).
Look to other organizations to see what methods they’re using to engage donors. Then, determine if and how you can incorporate their methods into your own donor engagement strategy. Under this question, you might also ask: Which organizations do the best job sharing the significance and impact of your gifts? How so? Of all the gifts you’ve given, which have given you the most joy? Why?
Use this question as a way to determine your donors’ overall level of giving satisfaction. Consider framing this question on a scale of one to five, with five being very satisfied and one being very unsatisfied.
Ask donors about their preferred communication channels (email, phone, mail, social media), frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, annually), and content (newsletters, opportunities, reports) they like to receive. You can also break this question down to ask for specific ways donors found past communications helpful, accurate, illuminating, responsible, and meaningful.
Often, supporters have particular ideas and topics on their minds that you can’t predict. That’s where this catch-all question comes in. You might also get an answer to this question by asking: How can we enhance our efforts? How can we better show our appreciation?
Looking for more questions to dig into your supporters’ minds? We’ve got you covered:
Now that you’ve reviewed the many questions you can ask your donors, it’s time to build your survey. Let’s look at how to assemble these individual questions into an impactful survey.
Considering the range of your survey’s goals, you’ll likely need more than one survey to meet each of your distinct needs and audiences. As you might expect, each survey will leverage different questions tailored to a specific subset of donors, what you want to know about them, and how you’ll use that information.
For example, do you want to learn about your small donors, new donors, recurring donors, major donors, or lapsed donors? Do you want to learn about their motivations for giving, communication preferences, or funding interests?
Answering these questions will help you determine which survey questions to ask and how to deliver them. Generally, there are three main considerations to take into account when designing surveys:
Give yourself ample time to define your questions and review them with relevant stakeholders from your marketing, fundraising, and engagement teams.
In addition to continuing to survey your donors regularly, plan to listen and respond in a meaningful way to the feedback (both positive and negative) you receive.
Ready to Get Started?