Donor surveys play a critical role in understanding the people who support your nonprofit organization. By engaging donors through surveys, you can gain valuable insights into their interests, concerns, and expectations. This information is essential for shaping effective fundraising campaigns, building stronger relationships, and ensuring long-term engagement.
While the specific questions you ask may vary depending on your organization’s needs, these nine essential questions can provide a solid foundation for better understanding donors. Let’s explore these questions and how they can help you improve your outreach and strengthen your connections using donor surveys.
1. What Inspired You to Donate?
Understanding what inspires donors to contribute can offer deep insights into their motivations and values. This question allows you to identify the emotional or personal connection donors have with your organization.
When asking this question, consider using an open-ended or multiple-choice format to get answers that will be most beneficial to your nonprofit.
- Open-ended: Allows donors to express themselves freely, providing rich, detailed responses that can offer a deeper understanding of their motivations.
- Multiple choice: Predefined options can make it easier for donors to respond quickly while providing structured data that is easier to analyze.
Follow-up question: What part of our mission resonates with you the most? This follow-up question can help you pinpoint specific aspects of your mission that align with donor values. Use the answers to help guide your messaging and program development to focus on areas that matter most.
2. How Do You Prefer to Donate?
This question can help you generate more donations by tailoring your donation forms and methods to things donors want to use. This question further demonstrates that you value your donors’ experience and their preferred ways of supporting your cause.
This question works best with a multiple-choice selector that uses a list of donation methods your organization supports and uses or is thinking about using. Don’t offer a choice for something you don’t plan to use.
Follow-up question: Are there other ways you would like to support us? Open the door to explore additional avenues for involvement, such as volunteering at events, offering recurring gifts, or participating in peer-to-peer fundraising. Consider including an option for “Other” with space for donors to specify any other methods they might prefer.
3. How Would You Rate Your Donation Experience?
Asking donors to rate their experience helps you assess the quality of your donation process and identify areas of opportunity for improvement. Use this information to refine your donation page and address any issues donors may bring to your attention.
This question works great with a Likert scale format, such as 1 to 5 (1 represents a poor experience, and 5 represents an excellent experience). That way, you get a good feel for how donors liked the process with easy-to-analyze information.
Follow-up question: What could we do to improve your donation experience? This open-ended question allows donors to provide specific feedback on potential areas for improvement, with actionable insights to enhance your donation process. Additionally, it allows you to identify common donation form mistakes and improve your donation page.
4. Do You Believe Your Donations Make a Difference?
The answer to this question should be an overwhelming “yes!” Donor perception of the impact of their contributions directly impacts your overall bottom line and measures the effectiveness of your communication strategy.
Again, a Likert scale question works well here, but you definitely need a strong follow-up on the survey to understand the why behind those responses.
Follow-up questions: Why or why not? This open-ended follow-up question allows donors to elaborate on their perceptions, provide feedback on their communication practices, and highlight areas for improvement.
How can we show our appreciation? Ask donors how you can express gratitude for their support. (This also provides an extra opportunity to communicate your mission and how donations are used.)
5. How Do You Like to Stay in Touch with Us?
Communication frequency is important. Too much communication and donors may unsubscribe; too little communication and your message might get overlooked. Ask donors how often and how (email, social, mail, text, etc.) they want to stay in touch with this simple donor survey question.
A multiple-choice question works great here. Allow donors to choose one or more options based on how they like to stay in touch with your organization. For even richer data, you can also include options for frequency.
Follow-up question: What specific types of content (e.g., reports, newsletters, blog posts) are you most interested in receiving? This question helps you gain insight into the types of content that your donors find most valuable. You can then provide targeted and relevant information that is more likely to resonate with donors.
6. What Other Causes Are You Passionate About?
A large number of your donors probably support other nonprofits as well. Asking about other causes they are passionate about provides valuable insight into their broader interests and motivations. You can also look to those organizations for inspiration or even partnership opportunities.
You will need to use an open-ended question here so donors can tell you exactly where their interests are. You’ll get better, more detailed responses that way.
Follow-up question: What other organizations do you support? This follow-up question helps you identify potential partnerships with other organizations that your donors are involved with.
7. How Did You Hear About Our Organization?
Asking donors how they heard about your organization gives clear insight into the effectiveness of marketing efforts. This information can help you understand what’s working and even use your budget more efficiently.
A multiple choice format is your best option here, but the list of choices might be long. Include any of the places that are applicable to your nonprofit’s outreach efforts:
- Social media (Facebook, X, Instagram)
- Word of mouth (friends or family)
- Events
- Partnerships with other organizations
- Traditional media (TV, radio, print)
- Search engines or websites
- Volunteer opportunities
- Other, allow respondents to type in an answer here
Follow-up question: What motivated you to engage with us after discovering our organization? This question can help you narrow down the message or part of the mission that is most receptive to a donor. It can also provide additional insight into the success of specific marketing messages or activities.
8. How Likely Are You to Continue Supporting Our Organization?
Not only are donor surveys great for new donors, but they can also help you retain people who are already supporting your nonprofit. This question provides an understanding of donors’ satisfaction and commitment to your organization. It can also help you gauge potential areas of improvement in engagement and outreach efforts.
A Likert scale with open-ended follow-up is the best way to communicate this question in a survey.
Follow-up question: Why or why not? An open-ended follow-up allows donors to explain the reasoning behind answers.
9. Do You Have Any Additional Feedback, Questions, or Concerns?
Wrap up your survey with an open-ended question that allows donors to share any feedback that wasn’t already captured. Ideally, this question is optional so that donors who have said everything they want to say don’t feel like they have to repeat themselves.
Here’s the important thing – this question needs to be authentic. You have to be prepared to get all kinds of feedback – negative or positive – and be prepared to respond or implement changes where necessary. This will show donors that you took their comments seriously and care what they think.
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Remember, donor survey questions will vary depending on your organization’s specific needs and goals; you might not use all nine questions above (or you may use others). Tailor survey questions in a way that helps you best connect with and understand donors. Then, use that feedback to help improve your fundraising campaigns.
To further optimize fundraising campaigns and build relationships with donors, try GiveWP. It’s a powerful fundraising platform for WordPress that allows you to simplify the donation process and improve donor experiences. Try GiveWP for free and build customizable donation forms, manage donors, view detailed reports, and much more.
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