It’s crucial to invest in your supporter experience. Every interaction that someone has with your charity can influence how they feel about your cause – and About Loyalty’s research has shown that this feeling has a direct impact on their future giving behaviour. 

But creating an excellent supporter experience doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And just like the brave souls who take on this long-distance challenge (I’m more of a yoga girl myself), understanding where to start and having a solid plan for your progress is essential for achieving your goals.

That’s where About Loyalty’s SIMPLE framework comes in. It’s a maturity model, designed specifically for the charity sector, to help organisations assess their current capabilities and identify areas for improvement. And it highlights the six key areas to focus your efforts and transform your charity into a supporter experience superstar. 

Charities that give their supporters the best experience possible have these six things in common:

1. Strategy: They have a clear strategy for developing supporter relationships, which is shared across the organisation.
2. Insight: These charities understand in detail who supporters are and why they support, so they can go on to create communications that inspire them. Insight drives and informs decisions.
3. Measures: They also have clear and specific measures in place to ensure that improving the supporter experience is a consistent priority.
4. Process: To deliver excellent supporter experiences, whether that’s fundraising, campaigns, retail, services or any other route, the best charities have efficient and consistent processes in place. 
5. Leadership: A charity’s leadership (trustees, senior leadership team and management structure) visibly champions and celebrate excellent supporter experiences.
6. Employees: These charities have motivated employees working together to provide excellent supporter experiences. People understand their roles in providing excellent experiences and are empowered to do so.

I’m a huge fan of this model – and have been for some years. Here are a few examples of how these six SIMPLE principles helped me to embed the importance of the supporter experience when I led the Customer Experience team at Diabetes UK:

• Meeting ‘at the fridge’. This was a chance, once a quarter, for anyone in the organisation to come along and listen to stories and quotes from real supporters and beneficiaries. I would invite colleagues to host with me, including senior leadership, and we would literally put the stories on the fridge in the office. The fridge is at the heart of the home –  (or at least, it is in my house!) –  and hosting this event was a regular reminder that supporters are at the heart of the organisation. 
  • Tash’s top tip: keep it fun! Asking senior leaders to champion the supporter experience doesn’t have to be a formal occasion.
• Empowering colleagues to assess their approach to the supporter experience. I asked everyone at Diabetes UK to complete a SIMPLE survey alongside our first time taking part in About Loyalty’s supporter research. It really added value to hear where our supporters and our teams thought we were performing well – and where we needed to prioritise. At times, the results even contradicted each other, which helped to highlight the areas we needed to investigate further. 
  • Tash’s top tip: involve as many people as possible. Everyone will have a unique perspective on how well you’re performing against the ‘SIMPLE 6’, and this could help you to prioritise where to start your planning.
• Showcasing your plan to senior leaders. By using this model to create a ‘gold standard’, of how you could be prioritising the supporter experience as an organisation, SIMPLE can help to secure buy-in from the top and accelerate your progress towards that vision.
  • Tash’s top tip: If you can’t run the SIMPLE model across the whole organisation, creating a working group that represents different teams and sharing their views with senior leaders will be a great starting point.

The SIMPLE model is your equivalent to a runner’s training plan. By understanding how good your experience is, and outlining the areas you can start to improve it, you can take intentional steps toward delivering a better supporter experience – and seeing your fundraising income grow as a result.

If you’d like to discover more tools, tips and tricks like SIMPLE to help you improve your supporter experience and secure more long-term income, please join About Loyalty (and a fantastic line-up of charity guest speakers) for their FREE Loyalty Day on Thursday 21st November, 14:00 – 17:00.