In developing the recommendations in this document, we hosted a survey for fundraisers to complete on SurveyMonkey. The survey asked about the extent to which the fundraiser measured how their donors feel, how they used the findings (if they did) and what barriers they have come across.

85 people completed the survey.

• 35 charities (41%) said they don’t measure anything about how their donors feel
• Of the 58% that do, the most common things to measure are indicators (level of engagement) rather than emotions. 
• Very few people mentioned that they run bespoke surveys. The majority either include questions in other communications or analyse data around event attendance, social media or email click-throughs.
• Most common reason for measuring feelings = ‘It’s the right thing to do”, i.e. not because they have seen evidence that it’s beneficial. Just 7 people said that they had evidence that making donors feel good leads to greater support from them.
• Over 1/3 of people who do it don’t report / share findings. Of those that do tell people, the most common people to tell are the Fundraising Director (16 people) and heads of fundraising, fundraising staff and the CEO (all 13). Just 4 tell Trustees and 6 tell the Finance Director.
• Only 2 people said they significantly segment based on findings, and only 1 person said it significantly changes the communications sent.
• When it comes to barriers, there were a large variety of challenges mentioned, the most common being not knowing how (15 people), not having time (9), not knowing what a good score would be (8) and not knowing how to use any learnings (5).

We can see that few people are measuring the way their donors feel and even fewer are then using this to deliver an improved donor experience.

Given how important we have seen growing donor loyalty to be, this is a significant opportunity for any charity that can grasp it.