Tag Archives: charity

Why Charities Should Do Annual Donor and Recipient Experience Audits

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Why Charities Should Do Annual Donor and Recipient Experience Audits

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s rapidly changing world, the landscape for charities is evolving with increasing donor expectations and the need for demonstrating tangible impact. To stay relevant and effective, it’s crucial for charities to perform annual donor and recipient experience audits. But, it is important to remember that an experience audit goes beyond mapping the donor and recipient journeys to document, score and even benchmark key elements of the experiences. This article explores the importance of these audits and highlights how they can significantly enhance the operations of charitable organizations. We will explore two insightful case studies and provide additional resources for further reading.

The Importance of Experience Audits

Experience audits focus on understanding and improving the emotions and reactions of donors and recipients during their interactions with an organization. These audits provide a thorough evaluation of touchpoints, communication effectiveness, and overall satisfaction. By implementing these audits, charities can identify strengths and areas for improvement, ultimately fostering trust and loyalty among stakeholders.

Case Study 1: Charity Water

Charity Water, an organization dedicated to providing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing countries, conducted a donor experience audit in 2021. The audit revealed that while donors appreciated transparency in fund allocations, they desired more personalized communication. As a result, Charity Water introduced a new donor portal offering customized impact reports and regular updates on specific projects funded by the donors. This change led to a 25% increase in donor retention within a year.

Case Study 2: Feeding America

Feeding America, a network of food banks, conducted a recipient experience audit in 2022 to better understand the needs and preferences of the individuals and families they served. The audit highlighted the need for more culturally diverse food offerings and simplified access to services. Implementing these insights, Feeding America revamped their supply chain to include diverse food options and launched a user-friendly mobile app that improved service access. As a result, recipient satisfaction scores increased by 30% in eight months.

Integrating Audits with Innovation Strategy

Annual audits should not be isolated events. Instead, they should be intricately linked with a charity’s innovation strategy. By doing so, organizations can ensure continuous improvement and adapt to changing needs efficiently. This approach of integrating experience audits into strategic planning aligns with key principles discussed in Catalysing Change Through Innovation Teams, which explores cultivating an innovation-friendly environment.

The Path Forward

Conducting comprehensive donor and recipient experience audits enables charities to remain connected and relevant to their target audiences. By doing so, they align their missions with the needs of those they aim to serve and those who support their cause. These audits offer a strategic advantage, as evidenced by the successful implementations by Charity Water and Feeding America.

For charities eager to harness the power of these audits, starting with a clear roadmap and involving all stakeholders will be crucial. For further guidance on implementing successful audits and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, consider exploring The Role of Leadership in Successful Change Management.

Conclusion

The charitable sector’s challenges are numerous, but through strategic audits focusing on donor and recipient experiences, nonprofits can not only survive but thrive. Investing in understanding these experiences provides the bedrock for greater impact, increased trust, and sustained growth.

Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Pexels

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Growing Shoes for Growing Children

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Shoe That Grows

I love elegant design solutions for problems that are more important than some of the silly things that we think of as problems in the first world.

Their mission is simple, make shoes that will last longer for the kids that need them most and then work to find people who can distribute them to groups of children in need, while also helping those groups raise the money to fund the shoes to take with them and distribute.

Today I came across a video for the shoes that grow highlighted in this video:

The design challenge was pretty simple, how can you design a children’s shoe with a reasonable cost that:

  • Lasts for several years
  • Changes shape so that it continues to fit as the child grows (in this case it is designed to grow up to five sizes)
  • Breathes as the majority of children in need live in warmer climates

What do you think? Innovation or not?

For more information, please visit http://theshoethatgrows.org


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Charitable Innovation – Disrupting for Good

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Charitable Innovation - Disrupting for GoodThe operational model for charities in this country is an ideal candidate for disruptive innovation. It strikes me as odd that charities, the organizations that really have the least to spend on marketing, spend such inordinate amounts of money and time on marketing to raise money. Does spending lots of money on fundraising actually work?

Let’s stop for a moment and look at how AIP defines acceptable charity performance:

  • Spending 60% or more of a charity’s budget on programs, and spending $35 or less to raise $100 in public support

Groups included on AIP’s Top-Rated list generally spend 75% or more of their budgets on programs, and spend $25 or less to raise $100 in public support.

Unfortunately, many charities don’t even meet the acceptable charity performance definition:

  • “It is sad that cancer charities, one of the most serious and popular giving categories, perform so poorly – half of the cancer charities that AIP rates in this Charity Rating Guide receive a D or F grade and only 37% receive an A or B.”

If we look across charity organizations as a whole, it is not a stretch to imagine that the aggregate reality is probably somewhere around spending 50% or less of their budgets on programs, and spending $50 or more to raise $100 in public support.

What greater positive benefit could we have on society as business innovators than to help create a disruptive business model for charities? What if we could stand the traditional, and hugely inefficient, model of list rental, telemarketing, direct mail, and list saturation on its head and instead imagine something different?

There has to be a better business model that we could collectively create as a gift to society that would increase the percentage of charitable revenue that actually goes towards the charities’ intended missions. If we created a new best practice that could be adopted across the industry, think about the impact we could have (equivalent of up to a doubling of monies raised).

I think we can distill the disruptive possibilities down to the following five key principles:

  1. Give consumers a way to offset negative side effects with a positive action

  2. Link fundraising efforts more closely to the benefit delivered

  3. Reduce fundraising friction

  4. Maximize existing communication channels to highlight benefits that others provide

  5. Improve Efficiency

Please download and read the white paper to look at the disruptive possibilities and charitable innovation opportunities each one presents.

And, if you would like to help evolve the ideas in the white paper, please post a comment with your thoughts, additions, or refinements, or join our Innovation Excellence group on LinkedIn and contribute to the discussion there.

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Charitable Quotes of the Day – May 1, 2012

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In honor of May Day I thought I would share some charity related quotes instead of the usual innovation related quotes.

“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”

– Sir Winston Churchill

“You will find, as you look back on your life, that the moments that stand out are the moments when you have done things for others.”

– Henry Drummond

“We must maximize our innovation leverage at every level of society. A stable society demands that businesses, governments, and charities work together to create an efficient ecosystem that injects hope into the populace.”

– Braden Kelley

“Charity and personal force are the only investments worth anything.”

– Walt Whitman

“I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do.”

– Helen Keller

“Make it a rule…never to lie down at night without being able to say, ‘I have made one human being at least a little wiser, a little happier or a little better this day’.”

– Charles Kingsley

What are some of your favorite charity quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation OR charity quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 19, 2012

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“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

– Thomas Edison

“Growth and innovation are driven by customer insights discovered through customer observation and conversation.”

– Braden Kelley

“The hardest part of ending, is beginning again.”

– Linkin Park

What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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