How to enhance your supporter journeys

A supporter journey refers to the experience donors, volunteers, and others have when interacting with your organisation. It describes how supporters feel about engaging with your charity, whether online or offline, directly or indirectly. The supporter journey includes everything from the first click to the first gift, from the first browse of your site to the cultivation of a lasting relationship. 

 

Supporter journeys are absolutely essential. In a digital world, consumers are increasingly demanding, placing extra scrutiny on every interaction. Leading organisations have long realised that a personalised service can increase loyalty, rapidly boost retention, and ultimately improve fundraising.  

 

Consider, for example, that optimising the supporter journey led to a 72% increase in donations at the Alzheimer’s Society. The lesson is clear: charities cannot afford not to improve supporter journeys.  

 

But it can be hard to know where to start. Worry not. Below, we explore some of the findings from a recent Apteco report and discuss three steps that charities can make to improve supporter journeys. 

 

 

Effectively analyse your user journey 

 

“You can’t improve what you can’t measure,” according to Apteco. That creates a slight problem. Measuring a supporter’s journey is not seen as an easy task. An alarming number of charity professionals still manually track and analyse the journey, which creates myriad problems. It means dealing with assumptions, relying on personal bias, and ultimately indulging subjectivity. 

 

Another problem with manual testing is the scale of the task. It’s simply not feasible for charity workers to map every possible supporter journey. That would take decades. How would you map the journey from the first click to the recurring donation, for example? Or, better still, how would a charity worker manually map the journey from recurring donation to legacy giving? 

 

The solution depends on supporter journey analytics tools. The tools process huge amounts of data, including email open rates, donor feedback, frequency of website visits, bounce rates, social media behaviour, average value of the donation, and so much more. The tool paints a complete picture of your organisation’s support journey and gives you meaningful insights at the click of a button. 

 

 

Make use of the insights 

 

“Almost 60% of organisations say that they’ve experienced an increase in retention rates and loyalty after investing in analytics,” according to the Harvard Business Review. But analytics are pointless if they are not used – and used properly. Charities must remain impartial in their reading of data, avoid bias, and uncover the real story. Let the insights pinpoint areas of friction, frustration, and tediousness.  

 

You should change areas of the supporter journey that are causing problems or add real-time support to placate donors. You can incrementally improve the supporter journey, plugging the worst gaps identified by the data and then working your way through to lesser frustrations.  

 

The changes you make should depend on experimentation. The best solutions to friction may not be immediately clear. But thankfully supporter journey analytics tools allow you to test, adopt, and trial different strategies, evaluating what you think might work best. You can try new functionalities and methods, too, but always remember the analytics to evaluate the success of the change. 

 

 

Automate and personalise 

 

Automation is about allowing tech to support comms, freeing up resources, and removing tedious tasks from human activity. Automation should make the supporter journey more seamless, while simultaneously freeing up time for your charity employees to engage more meaningful work. You could automate birthday messages, for example, or simply automate event or donation confirmations.  

 

Remember, though, not to over-automate. We’ve all experienced the mundanity of dealing with automated phone operators that don’t grasp our concerns or chatbots that fail to respond. Over-automating tasks that should have the human touch is the quickest way to turn off users. Again, if in doubt, return to the data and look at how the automation of tasks sits with your supporters. 

 

Finally, remember to personalise wherever you can. Studies show that personal journeys drastically improve retention and loyalty. Consider, for example, that donors are 400% more likely to give again if thanked within 48 hours of giving. That shows the massive impact of personalising the journey. 

 

So track your user journey and pinpoint areas that lend themselves to personalisation. Look at the data, find weak points of the journey, and consider how you might add something personal. Test each change, review the analytics, and make your decisions based on the insight. Repeat that process, continue to incrementally improve your supporter journey, and reap all the rewards that follow.