Learning About Donors’ Expectations: a Guide to Improving Fund Raising

Listening to Your Donors: The Nonprofit’s Practical Guide to Designing and Conducting Surveys
by Bruce Campbell

Conducting research to determine what potential donors want their contributions to accomplish can help nonprofit organizations attract more money, writes the author of this new guide.

Bruce Campbell, president of Campbell Research in Santa Maria, Calif., says that charities should conduct research of donors and potential donors much in the same way that businesses do to gauge consumer interest in a product.

He offers this step-by-step manual for designing and administering what he says is the most effective method of market research: the survey. All nonprofit executives “who must design or oversee fund raising and member research,” he insists, will strengthen their organization’s financial standing and further its mission by surveying donors.

Mr. Campbell begins with several case histories that illustrate how donor surveys have benefited both large and small nonprofit organizations. For example, he presents an urban renewal organization that used survey results to redefine its potential donor profile and augment its annual gifts income by 22 percent.

Subsequent chapters provide an overview of the survey process, show how to create a budget and timeline for surveying by telephone and mail, give instructions for actually preparing and carrying out a survey, and present sample questionnaires and evaluation forms that nonprofit executives can tailor to their own organizations.

Making clear that his guide can serve as a tool for executives involved with fund raising, communications, marketing, or public relations, Mr. Campbell also explains how to design a questionnaire that will determine donors’ opinions accurately, select sampling groups, and analyze survey results.

Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94104; (415) 433-1740 or (800) 956-7739; fax (415) 433-0499 or (800) 605-2665; http://www.josseybass.com; 214 pages; $27.95 plus $5.50 postage and handling; I.S.B.N. 0-7879-5037-8.