Asking donors and volunteers what they think

Somebody on the board suggests surveying the donors, and what gets sent is a satisfaction survey. How was your experience. How likely are you to recommend us. Everything comes back near the top of the scale, the board notes that people seem happy, and the file is never opened again. Six months later two of the organization's steadiest volunteers stop showing up and nobody saw it coming.

The survey was not badly written. It asked the wrong category of question. Satisfaction measures how the last interaction felt. What a board actually needs to know is whether the people around the organization have confidence in it, whether they can explain what it does to somebody else, whether they hear from you at a rate that works for them, and whether they expect to still be here in a year.

Four things worth asking that satisfaction does not cover

Confidence. Not enjoyment. Whether someone believes the organization is being run well and will do what it says. The core item here is short on purpose: "I have confidence in this organization." It is the question you would ask a friend about a charity before recommending it, and it moves before giving does.

Whether they can explain you to someone else. A donor who likes you but cannot describe what you do is not going to bring anyone with them. Two items separate the halves of that: "I clearly understand what this organization does" and "I understand the difference this organization makes." Plenty of organizations do well on the first and poorly on the second, which usually means the newsletter describes activity rather than result.

Communication cadence. This one is not directional, which is why it is worth asking properly. Too little contact and too much contact are opposite departures from the same target, so averaging them produces a number that means nothing. Asked as "How much does this organization communicate with you?" and reported as a distribution, it tells you whether you have a silence problem or a saturation problem, and those have opposite fixes. A companion item, reverse-scored, gets at the version people rarely say to your face: "I hear from this organization mainly when it wants something from me."

Whether they expect to still be involved. "I expect to still be involved with this organization a year from now" is the most useful sentence on the whole instrument, because it leads. Retention figures published by the sector describe what already happened. Intent tells you about the year you are still in, while there is time to do something.

There is also a plain factual item worth stealing whatever tool you use: in the past 12 months, did you receive an update about what this organization accomplished. Yes or no. Not whether they liked the update. Whether one arrived. The share of your own supporters who answer no is frequently the single most sobering line in a report, and no perception question gets at it.

The full set is published at the community questions page, including the blocks that only donors, only volunteers, or only program participants see. Nobody is asked about a shift they never worked.

Why you ask the people around the organization, not only the board

A board assessing only itself is a room grading its own homework. It will be honest, it will be thoughtful, and it will still be describing its own intentions rather than anyone's experience of them.

The interesting information lives in the gap. The board answers "The board communicates our impact clearly to the people we serve and support." The community answers whether they understand the difference the organization makes, and separately whether an update ever arrived. When the board rates its own communication of impact well above what the community reports, that is not a scoring error and it is not the board lying. It means a message that is being sent is not landing, which is a fixable problem with a specific owner.

The same structure applies to confidence. The board answers "The organization is well run." The community answers whether they have confidence in it. A gap in either direction is worth an agenda item. Internal confidence running ahead of external confidence usually means the story of the last two years never left the building. External confidence running ahead of internal is rarer and more interesting, and normally means the board knows about a problem that has not surfaced yet.

One caution about reading gaps at all. A gap only means something against the gap other comparable organizations show, because some divergence between an inside view and an outside view is normal everywhere. A report that hands you a number with no cohort beside it is inviting you to decide it is bad, and you have no basis for that. If cohort depth is thin, the honest move is to say so rather than to imply a verdict.

You need 15 responses before anything comes back

Community results are withheld until 15 responses arrive. Below that, the section is not shown at all, not shown partially, and not shown with a caveat. Breakouts by group, donors separately from volunteers, need 10 within that group.

This is a promise made to respondents before they answer, so it is worth planning around rather than discovering:

• Invite more people than you think you need. If you expect roughly a quarter to answer, an invitation list of 60 gets you comfortably past 15, and a list of 20 does not.
• Include lapsed donors and former volunteers. They are the people whose answers you most need and the ones most often left off the list.
• Do not slice a small list into segments in your head before the data exists. If you have 18 responses total, you will get the overall picture and no donor-versus-volunteer split.
• Send it once, remind once, and close it. Open-ended collection produces a long tail of nothing.

If your list is genuinely small, say a hundred names across everyone who has ever given or volunteered, you can still clear 15. What you should not do is promise the board a breakdown by group at that size.

What to do with what comes back

Read the communication distribution first, because it is the most actionable thing in the set and the cheapest to fix. Then look at the factual update item, then at expected involvement next year, then at the gaps against the board's own answers.

Resist the urge to write a plan for everything. One change to how and how often you communicate, made in the next quarter and measured in the next round, beats a nine-point response nobody executes. If you run it annually, the second round is where this starts being genuinely useful, which is the same reason an annual cadence usually beats the standard advice.

For a sense of scale beyond your own list, the National Center for Charitable Statistics publishes sector-level data on organizations and giving.

The assessment here collects the community side and the board side and reports them together, with the divergences named. It is free, and the confidentiality terms above are the actual terms, not the aspiration.

The reason to ask is not to collect a compliment. It is that the people who quietly drift away almost never tell you first, and a question asked in March is a lot cheaper than a lapsed donor letter in November.