Reading Donors

Some charities find surveys help them better understand and retain supporters, but others say they don’t pay

A year ago, Food for the Hungry spent $15,000 on a telephone survey of donors and those who might give to the charity. As Matthew Panos, vice president of ministry partnerships and resources, was poring over feedback from the 500 respondents, he was especially struck by one finding: Almost half of the survey respondents said they listened to Christian radio stations at least several times a week.

Mr. Panos used the data to encourage the Phoenix charity to spend $50,000 it had budgeted for other purposes on additional radio promotions over the next year in an attempt to increase donations.

The payoff: a $500,000 rise in private donations over the previous year, which Mr. Panos directly attributes to the radio promotions.

Surveying donors rarely pays off so directly, according to charitable organizations and research companies. But in an increasingly competitive fund-raising environment, a number of charitable groups say they survey their donors.

Charities say surveys allow them to discover the best ways to re-engage lapsed donors, to learn what issues and topics resonate with donors, and to see how well their organizations rate against other charities.

In the past, many nonprofit organizations frowned on spending money on surveys, says Lisa Dropkin, a principal at Edge Research, a survey company in Falls Church, Va. But as more and more charities are being created and groups of all kinds are becoming more aggressive in their fund raising, the risks of not surveying are greater than the stigma of doing it, she says. “I think it’s very much now a way people think strategically,” Ms. Dropkin says.

Economic Changes

Not all charities agree. As the economy worsened over the past few years, some nonprofit groups saw surveying as nonessential and stopped doing it, says Bruce Campbell, chief executive officer of Campbell Research, in Santa Maria, Calif.

Mr. Campbell, who has done surveys for more than 100 charitable organizations during the past 11 years, saw a 50-percent drop in his company’s business in the first nine months of 2001. This year, business has bounced back to where it was in 2000, he says — not because more charities are commissioning their own surveys but because more of them are buying research results conducted for a large number of groups.

Cost is a big reason that some groups avoid surveys, which usually cost at least $25,000 apiece to conduct. But organizations say the time spent preparing a survey and analyzing its results is another reason they avoid them.

Charities that are not daunted by the time or expense of a survey take a wide variety of approaches to collecting data on donors. Some poll a small number of donors — perhaps 5 percent or fewer — or other segments of the public once or twice a year, while some groups wait four or more years between surveys and seek responses from a much larger sample.

A typical survey takes 15 to 25 minutes of a donor’s time, and can be conducted by telephone, by mail, or on the Internet. Some surveys are also done as focus groups — discussions among a small group led by an expert on sampling public opinion. Phone surveys, which typically receive responses from half of those who are called, are the most cost-effective, popular, and useful for charitable groups, according to survey experts.

Surveys usually take from two weeks to a few months to complete. Because of the costs — some complicated surveys can cost as much as $100,000, though that is unusual — research companies say they typically only work with charities that raise more than $2-million a year from private sources.

Internet and electronic surveys continue to gain in popularity, too. Internet surveys represented 40 percent of the $10-million in surveys that Harris Interactive did last year for foundations, associations, and other nonprofit groups, compared with just 5 percent of its business in 1999, says Gordon S. Black, chief executive officer of the Rochester, N.Y., firm.

Internet surveys cost about one-third as much as telephone surveys but still can yield scientifically representative samples, according to Mr. Black. The ease of electronic surveys makes it possible for more organizations to do some simple research on their own, and a lot of charities are beginning to do that, he says.

Most charities use surveys to garner general information about donor attitudes rather than to find out information about specific donors, like their annual income or net worth, that could be used to figure out what size gift they might make. But if they plan to gather such information on individual donors, they should be clear what their purpose is, says Donna L. Gillin, director of government affairs at the Council for Marketing & Opinion Research, a trade group in Cincinnati.

Charities aren’t required by federal law to disclose such information about their purposes, but companies are — and one day the same rules could apply to nonprofit groups, Ms. Gillin says.

Special Room

Boy Scouts of America, which surveys more extensively than many charities, focuses largely on understanding public attitudes toward the organization — including information that local Scout councils often use in fund raising. The organization considers surveying so instrumental to its work that it has just finished building a 2,000-square-foot research facility in its new National Scouting Museum near its headquarters in Irving, Tex. The facility includes a room for conducting focus groups that is equipped with digital recording equipment and a viewing area behind a one-way mirror.

Boy Scouts of America does some research and survey work on its own, but also spends about $125,000 annually to hire outside companies to conduct five to seven surveys that poll 1,500 to 5,000 scouts and nonscouts. Every other year, the organization also spends an additional $100,000 to $150,000 on more extensive surveys. It is currently conducting an online survey of 12,000 Boy Scout volunteers selected at random.

“We do surveys to give donors at the local level the information they need to see that the program is effective, and that we’re delivering on what we promise,” says Pat Wellen, director of research service. Data from one recent survey, for instance, was used to show donors what scouts say they get out of the experience and persuade them to contribute to an endowment-building effort.

When charitable groups stop surveying, it’s usually because donations have fallen off. As donations decreased with the flagging economy two years ago, Prison Fellowship Ministries held off on surveying, on which it usually spends $50,000 to $75,000 every few years, says Jo Gemma, vice president of direct marketing. “We were cutting corners, and surveying was the first thing to go,” she says.

In retrospect, the organization might have benefited from a survey of lapsed donors to find out if the bad economy was the only reason people weren’t giving, Ms. Gemma says. Next spring, even though donations aren’t back to the 1998 level, the Reston, Va., group is planning a $25,000 telephone survey of lapsed donors to try to increase the percentage of donors who give at least once a year, which has fluctuated between 77 percent and 68 percent the past few years.

Ms. Gemma says she thinks such a survey could be cost-effective, since every 1-percent improvement in the number of donors who give at least once a year translates into at least $2-million more in gifts.

Two-Thirds Respond

Donors contacted for surveys generally cooperate. About two-thirds of donors who are contacted to participate in surveys do so, says Mr. Black, of Harris Interactive. By contrast,15 percent of people typically respond to surveys performed for companies, he says.

The most scientific way to survey donors is to hire an outside research company, says Molly Smith Watson, director of direct response at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in New York. Planned Parenthood spends about $20,000 a year on such outside companies so it can find out what issues and topics are most important to donors, Ms. Watson says.

Be sure to ask a research company how much time it will put into helping design the survey and analyzing the results — and expect it to be substantial, says Ms. Watson. At the start of the process, good companies help a charity winnow its questions to get the most meaningful responses, she says.

For instance, when Planned Parenthood wanted to find out if the number of mailings donors received affected how much donors gave, its survey company suggested changing the wording of a question to get a more appropriate response. Instead of asking if donors were receiving too much mail from the organization — which most likely would have elicited an affirmative response — they asked how many pieces of mail a year they were receiving.

Originally, Planned Parenthood also planned to ask consecutive questions about how much mail donors received and how likely they were to give again. Instead, the research company suggested putting one question near the beginning and another toward the end of the survey as a way to be sure the answer to the mail question didn’t affect the giving question, Ms. Watson says.

Planned Parenthood followed the advice, and ultimately discovered that the more mail donors thought they were receiving, the more likely they were to give money. “We used this to reassure ourselves that the mail volume that donors were receiving was O.K.,” Ms. Watson says.

Getting Explanations

After surveys come back, research companies produce cross tabulations that can be as large as a phone book, some charities say. But numbers can be deceptive, so charity officials say it is important to hire research companies that are willing to extract the important results and thoroughly analyze them in written form — with an executive summary and memos describing key points — and that agree to present a synopsis of results in person.

Although many charitable organizations work with research companies, some have found innovative ways to save money by looking elsewhere. In August, the Dallas Museum of Art got a marketing class at the University of North Texas to conduct a 2,500-member mail survey free — minus the $1,000 cost of postage, says Carl G. Hamm, the museum’s director of annual programs. The results, which are still coming in, will provide feedback on a range of topics, including member services, benefits, and parking.

The Jewish National Fund says it saves about $50,000 a year by tapping donors to perform all of its survey research, according to Russell F. Robinson, chief executive officer. One of the New York organization’s donors owns a company that conducts telephone surveys, and twice has donated company time for a survey of 600 donors.

The charity also receives 1,000 responses every year to a three-page survey of volunteer leaders in the organization, who are asked to provide detailed comments about the organization’s communication with donors and its strategic direction, Mr. Robinson says. And 20 to 25 of those volunteers join the organization’s strategic-planning sessions every few years.

The Jewish National Fund uses all that donor feedback to review the effectiveness of its work, help make changes to its communications and marketing approach, and contribute to the strategic direction of the organization, according to Mr. Robinson.

The fund’s approach differs from organizations that ask donors or others to respond to Yes-or-No questions, or provide a rating on a numerical scale. Instead, it asks open-ended questions, often in person.

Research companies say such information, usually gleaned from focus groups and one-on-one interviews, is too expensive for most charities to gather every year. But if charities can afford such surveys, they should do them first — before a broader survey of donors by telephone, through the mail, or electronically, advises Mr. Campbell, of Campbell Research. “With written surveys, you write the questions and shape the issues yourself,” he says. “With focus groups, your respondents define the issues for you. That’s always more effective feedback.”

Broad Approach

Still, broader surveying can achieve results. When Food for the Hungry did its telephone survey last year, its main goal was to learn how donors and prospective donors might react to some planned changes in its communications strategy, Mr. Panos says.

The survey asked respondents if the charity’s solicitations should be more or less evangelical, what donors perceived its mission to be, and how much it stood out from other religiously oriented social-service groups, Mr. Panos says.

“We knew we were planning to move the language in our communications to more Christian-based,” Mr. Panos says. “We just wanted to find out what donors thought. The question was what could we expect in terms of a change in their response.”

Modest goals like that are appropriate for charitable organizations to set, says Mark Rovner, senior vice president at Craver, Mathews, Smith & Company, a fund-raising consulting company in Arlington, Va. “Hopes always run very high that surveys will turn up some magic bullet or phrase,” he says. “At best, they can only really yield incremental ideas and suggestions.”