The Supporter Connection Survey is very, very good at helping you connect meaningfully with your donors in ways that will motivate them to give.
But it’s very, very bad at some other things.
There may be people at your organization who would really like to use your Supporter Connection Survey to do things it’s bad at doing. Your job is to keep that from happening.
Here are some of those “wish list” destructive approaches that you should keep out of your survey:
Don’t use your Supporter Connection Survey for research
It will lead you astray with misleading information that seems to be data but is really just fog.
Why someone will try to do this: It’s a survey. It looks just like a true research survey. There are curious people
But it’s not. Not even close.
You don’t make any attempt to control for a representative sample of your donors – you can send it to anyone you want, and the more the better.
Quality research carefully builds the questions to avoid conscious and unconscious types of bias in the answers. Doing this is a high-level skill that should only be done by research professionals. The Supporter Connection Survey isn’t worried about bias. It’s just looking for conversation. You don’t need to be a research professional to ask great conversational questions.
If you include research questions in your survey, you are wasting time and space. You’ll get results, but they won’t be actionable. Because you didn’t control for representation in the audience or for bias in the questions. You’ll just get garbage information.
And that’s worse than just a waste of time: The garbage won’t look like garbage. It will look like well-ordered data. But it could – and probably will – be dramatically inaccurate. That means you could confidently make terrible decisions based on the “data” you collect.
Here are some types of questions you should not include – even if someone really wants to include them:
1. Don’t ask about communications preferences.
Nearly all donors will dramatically understate how often they should hear from you. If you follow their direction, you will suffer a steep loss in revenue, and your donor retention will plummet.
2. Don’t ask them about offer preferences.
This may seem like a good idea; if you knew what donors were more likely to respond to, you could improve your fundraising. Right? Nope. What people think they prefer is often very different from what they respond to in real life. Conscious “what I want” is not the same thing as unconscious “what I do.” Donors will tell you what they believe to be true. But it usually is far from truth. You will likely have less successful fundraising if you follow their advice.
3. Don’t ask where they first heard about you.
This and similar questions would be nice to know. But not in this non-research context, where you will not get accurate information about where people on your file are coming from.
If you avoid these common Supporter Connection Survey pitfalls, you will be amazed at the long-term results of doing it.
Discover how the Supporter Connection Survey will help you create an amazing pipeline of legacy, major donor, and monthly giving leads that will powerfully boost short-term and long-term revenue. Download your free ebook: 5 Easy Steps to Your Game-Changing Donor Survey.
Related Blog Posts:
- How the Supporter Connection Survey Transformed This Fundraiser Forever
- Your To-Do List for Skyrocketing Income in the Coming Years
- The Donor Survey that Can Shape Your Annual Fundraising Plan
