This is simply a case of prioritisation, and is possibly an indicator that your charity believes that achieving a short-term response is more important than growing long-term loyalty.

This should be an organisational priority. If you don’t get this support, remember that many of these ideas don’t need a lot of time or any budget. Start with something you can do quickly.

What’s important isn’t the score, per se. It’s the improvement. Whatever you measure today will become your benchmark, and your goal should be continuous improvement. While some tools allow for comparisons to other charities (and commercial organisations), this isn’t as important as knowing whether you are making the experience of giving better for your donors.

There are so many ways to use it – the difficulty should be not knowing where to start.

• Tell colleagues what you are doing and what you have found. Just knowing that you are looking at this will start to change how they think and behave, and when they see what you have found, they will want to be part of the improvement.
• Look for quick wins: Can you change your creative brief? Or the way you brief your third- party fundraisers? Change your messages? Redesign your giving forms (on- and off-line)?
• Then look for more fundamental changes: Redesign your processes and systems. Create new donor products. Segment to identify and target your most satisfied donors –  or your most dissatisfied. Create new communications in your supporter journey to grow loyalty.

Your senior managers are short-sighted, and it is your job to open their eyes. 

Remember that you don’t need lots of time and budget to make this happen. If no-one will listen, start small and just do it. Gather your own results and use them to showcase your thinking. Gather advocates and champions to work with you to persuade others.

They will! It’s human nature that people like to be asked and to share their experiences. (This is especially true if the experience is bad – dissatisfied donors are the most important people to hear from.)

This is the best reason to actually do it! If you have concerns, you are probably right. You will only learn what the problems are and be able to do anything about them by listening and asking.

If you don’t understand how your donors feel, then you want be able to change that. If they aren’t happy, you’ll lose them to someone else.

You are right to be concerned about raising expectations beyond what you can deliver, but explain what you’re doing.

Remember, donors don’t expect you to be perfect, but they’ll want you to try.