By Laura Wronski, Senior Research Scientist, SurveyMonkey
As we head into the holiday season, many people are eager to give back and donate to the causes they care most about. In fact, according to last year’s SurveyMonkey/#GivingTuesday survey, 76% of Americans said that donating to causes they believe in is more or equally as important to them as buying gifts for loved ones.
With 2018 #GivingTuesday on the horizon, nonprofits all over the world will look to leverage every tool they can to maximize their donations and help their causes this year. Seeking feedback from your most important constituents–community of supporters, donors, volunteers–is one of the best ways to continuously grow engagement of these contributors, and as a result, your organization’s impact.
Many nonprofits are often understaffed and may feel that they don’t have enough time to create a survey to send to potential donors or their community. But really, that means they’re losing out on opportunities. Surveys can help generate valuable insights that will surprise future donors, volunteers and establish credibility that only hard numbers can provide. In short, they build confidence.
Surveys can also help gather more qualitative information, too. Is your mission clear? Are there topics your community is interested in learning more about from your blog or annual report? What problems have volunteers run into when trying to help your organization? What feedback do they have for you on the latest event? You can use surveys to ask open-ended questions that will give you talking points when you first meet a new donor. This helps organizations’ leaders stay aware of potential issues, and builds credibility as someone who is responsible and trustworthy—and who cares. That’s invaluable.
Here are just a few types of surveys that can give you very actionable insights for this year’s #GivingTuesday and holiday giving campaigns:
- Market Research surveys help to discover specific needs from your target community before launching new initiatives. What causes do they care about? For example, our survey leading up to #GivingTuesday last year showed that disaster relief was top of mind for over a half of Americans (54%)–more than any other cause. With Camp Fire’s devastating consequences in California, disaster relief is likely still a cause that people care about this year. What can your organization do to help?
- Donor feedback is extraordinarily important to keep cash flow positive. Checking in with the donors before and after #GivingTuesday will help make sure you’re giving them the best experience as they support your organization, and find out what you can improve to keep their donations coming in. For example, in our survey last year we found out that nearly one-third (31%) of respondents who are familiar with #GivingTuesday noted that the movement makes them more likely to contribute in some way to nonprofits. Knowing this, you might want to focus on raising awareness about the movement which can result in increased donations.
- Volunteer satisfaction with the experience can mean the difference between volunteers who continue to support your cause and them moving on to something else. Ask questions like, “How appreciated did your volunteer supervisor make you feel?” and, “How easy was it to get along with the staff at this organization?” to get the information you need to keep your valuable volunteers happy, fulfilled, and coming back.
- Volunteer recruitment. Need to spread the word and recruit volunteers fast? Create a survey and post the link on your social media pages to use your social network’s built-in virality to get sign-ups quickly–and feedback later on!
- Fundraiser event planning and feedback. Before your fundraising event, a planning survey can help collect contact information and get a better understanding of funding sources, demographics, staffing, and more. After the event, a fundraiser feedback survey will help discover areas your organization excelled in, and where you could improve your efforts.
Now to the surveys and how you can make sure you get a high response rate and really actionable feedback in return. There are a few simple rules survey scientists at SurveyMonkey follow when sending any survey out. Follow them to survey like a pro:
We treat a survey as a conversation. Respondents are growing weary of poorly designed surveys. An uninspiring look and feel can easily turn your potential respondents off, so take the time to match your template to your brand standards, as well as utilize the great pre-designed survey templates you can use for surveys these days.
We skip the buzz words and explain the goals. You can get better quality results if you state the purpose of your survey up front and explain how results will be used—people get so many surveys that never lead to any action that they will appreciate being part of something important. Getting clear answers also means avoiding jargon in your questions and using relatable phrases that can be understood by a very broad audience.
We keep them short. People whose opinions matter to you are likely pressed for time. After analyzing over 26,000 SurveyMonkey Audience surveys, we found the median number of questions per survey was just 12. Shorter surveys also have higher completion rates, which means you will get better data quality overall.
We leverage existing templates and new technologies. There are great templates for…well, everything. No need to reinvent the wheel! It’s also great to keep in mind tools like SurveyMonkey Genius which brings together AI, survey experts, and machine learning to develop survey intelligence based on the billions of questions and answers flowing through our platform. It automatically applies those insights to help you create your survey and does a lot of the work for you to help you ask better questions and get better response rates.
We keep mobile users in mind and test surveys for them. More and more respondents complete surveys using mobile devices. Keep images and video usage to a minimum to streamline your surveys for mobile and use the Preview/Test function to see how it will look on mobile devices.
We analyze and report back on the results. If your survey reveals an unhappy donor or volunteer, reach out to address the issue. If larger trends are discovered, then maybe a newsletter or email is the right channel to share it more broadly. It’s important to let respondents know that you hear and understand their feedback and are working on an action plan.
Companies and organizations with CSR programs in place can also take advantage of gathering insightful feedback and driving engagement through surveys. For example, survey data played a crucial role in the recent launch of SurveyMonkey for Good, our new corporate responsibility program with the mission to speak up for those without a voice to advance equality and make a positive impact on society. In order to best define the mission and pillars of this program, we sought to capture opinions of our key stakeholders to identify a mission that would resonate the most with them.
Holidays are a critical time of year for nonprofits as it is the last big push for annual contributions. Organizations that prioritize gathering actionable insights this #GivingTuesday will be in a position to foster greater communication with their communities and ultimately help a greater number of people and groups who need it most.
