The Case for a Chief Donor Experience Officer
Donor Experience isn’t just donor support. Yes, donor support is one aspect of Donor Experience but it needs to go way beyond just answering tickets in whatever donor support tool you use to manage cancellations and changes to a home address.
The definition of Donor Experience is exactly what it sounds like. It really is the entire donor experience end-to-end. It’s Marketing how it should be done.
The best customer experience in the world starts long before you ever make a transaction, and it should be no different for a donor making a single or regular donation. True donor experience includes the entire donor journey pre and post donation all the way down to the messaging and copy in your emails, creative in your online ads or offline activity, and products, plus things like any unboxing experience, the post donation email(s) and SMS experience, the cancellation of a monthly gift process, and yes, traditional donor support. Donor loyalty is all about how donors experience your brand, not just the extent to which they believe in your mission.
Like “customer-centricity”, donor-centricity is critical to any growth thesis. It should be your north star and folded deeply into your road map to success. In order to fully realize their growth potential, nonprofits should eliminate or at the very least evolve the role of CMO into that of a Chief Donor Experience Officer (CDXO).
What Does a Chief Donor Experience Officer (CDXO) Do?
A CDXO’s primary responsibility is to enhance the donor/user experience. The role spans across a donor’s initial discovery of your Org, donating/taking an action, their experience after taking that action, and then the donor’s willingness to continue to engage with your Org.
It encompasses a vastly larger role than a CMO, who really only controls part of the donor journey (one half at best). The CMO, by nature, has less input in terms of product or program development, tech and tools, fundraising, and donor support, which are all vital roles in the donor journey that would involve a CDXO.
In other words, the CDXO needs to engage in every aspect of your Org that affects the donor, from product or program design to marketing to donor support.
Unlike a Chief Customer Officer in the private sector, who primarily deals with issues once a customer is engaged, the CDXO role requires more forward-thinking and use of analytics to judge and then inform a donor’s experience even before it begins.
To accomplish that, the CDXO must implement processes around the collection of donor data to address each step of the donor journey: discovery, engagement, donation, support, and any call-center interactions. More on this in the “Let’s Dig One Layer Deeper into the How” section.
Why You Should Have a CDXO
Organizations need a leader who is controlling not just the narrative (CMO), but the end-to-end journey itself. And they need it now, especially as donors endure some distinct uncertainty in today’s economic climate. The right donor experience leader in your Org is going to help optimize every touchpoint in your donor experience and donor journey from day 1.
As donors seek to take more control of their donor journey, ensuring that they have a great experience becomes vital for any Org to grow sustainably. Having a C-level exec dedicated to improving donor experience brings these 3 distinct advantages:
- Become more donor-centric
Working across all departments creates a donor-centric culture that spreads throughout the Org. It boosts buy-in from each department as they see how a donor-centric model helps reach goals. Plus, by coalescing data that reflects the donor’s journey and experience, refining your positioning or product roadmap or onboarding becomes easier and more consistent as changes can be made based on a wealth of data.
- Deliver a consistent donor experience
What your events look and feel like, what your packaging looks like, what your ads look like, what your emails and direct mail look like, what your support program looks like, where you put your budget to optimize these experiences and the results they drive, how you handle issues, complaints, and negative comments on social media… this consistency across look, feel and purpose are all part of the donor experience. Which links nicely to →
- Improve donor retention
As a CDXO monitors a donor’s experience, tracks feedback, and observes trends, strategies will get developed to continue to improve donor satisfaction with the Org, thereby enhancing donor retention. See the “Resolving Tickets Before They Ever Arise” section below.
A Chief Donor Experience Officer oversees everything that not only goes out from the brand, but everything that even becomes a part of the brand in the first place, too. It’s a role and responsibility that goes deep into the details to make all of these elements shine for your brand and the donor.
The DX Team Org Chart
There are a few critical roles we should consider when it comes to donor experience, and I would have the Director of Brand and Director of Individual Giving feed into this CDXO function:
- Chief Donor Experience Officer
- Donor Experience Tech Lead
- Donor Support Lead
- Community Team
- Donor Support Agents
Chief Donor Experience Officer: Sets the vision and strategy for what an exceptional donor experience program looks like at your Org. They’ll also directly manage all of the other DX-related departments in the Org, including the brand function and the Individual Giving program (online and offline), and be a peer to Chief Development/Philanthropy who oversees mid-major-corporate donations.
Donor Experience Tech Lead: Responsible for researching, testing, and implementing all of the relevant technology and tools that will empower your donor experience and donor support workflows from end to end. These are the people who inform which softwares, chat bots, and automation tools, etc your Org should be using to make the donor experience as seamless as possible.
Donor Support Lead: Oversees ticket resolution and manages your team of donor support agents who spend all day interacting with and problem solving for prospective donors, existing donors, and returning donors.
Community Team: Responding to comments on social media, executing fun surprise and delight missions for new and returning donors, plus sending out countless DMs, likes, and emails, to ensure your community feels heard and excited about your mission.
Last, and certainly not least, are your Donor Support agents. These are the people managing donor support tickets, monthly giving upgrades and cancellations, compliments and complaints, and more. Depending on the scale of your Org, you may have a mix of human and chat bots on this.
One Layer Deeper into the How
Customer Value Management (CVM) is a mix of methodologies and practices derived from marketing (but also applied math, data engineering and sociology) and is very useful to us in this proposed scenario. In my view the CDXO is central to the effort of capturing and leveraging value from donor data (usage, donation, behavior). The goal is to optimize all the key steps in the entire donor lifecycle journey to improve value for both sides: donor and Org/mission.
Practically, the CVM approach starts with driving donor acquisition, unlocking the full value of the donor (improving stickiness, engagement, donations), and ensuring engagement across all relevant channels with a view toward retention.
Ultimately, all donor interactions need to be recorded in the CDP and CRM platforms and connected by applying (as close as you can) 1-to-1 marketing to understand donors and treat them as individuals with hyper-personalized comms. This all falls within the purview of the CDXO.
Of course, real donor-centricity thinking is to differentiate donors that drive sustainable (margin) growth for the Org (worthy of another post) and deliver that cohort of donors the Rolls-Royce treatment.
9 Metrics That Matter When It Comes To Donor Experience
- Donor Retention Rate
- Donor Acquisition Cost
- Donation Conversion Rate
- Donor Engagement Level (e.g. volunteer participation, event attendance, social media engagement, and email open/click rates)
- Donor Satisfaction Surveys
- Response and Thank You Time
- Donor Feedback and Complaints (look for common themes)
- Referral Rate
- Lifetime Donor Value
The Best Donor Experience Teams Build Strong Feedback Loops Which Rapidly Improve Your Brand
Out of any employee or department in your Org, your donor support team likely has access to some of the most critical and relevant data that can help you rapidly improve your brand. As is probably obvious, your donor support leaders are in the trenches every day listening to real donor feedback, compliments, and complaints. They know (often before many others in the Org) when something is working and when it’s not. This is the opportunity to transform what you already have and enable step-change growth in the form of donor experience.
The best donor experience teams act as a flywheel for innovation and improvement because they have so many core insights and data points about where to streamline or double down. They can gather this feedback in real-time from their day-to-day ops, then communicate it to other departments, and help your Org troubleshoot issues as soon as they arise.
Don’t Give Your Donor Experience Away To AI
AI is a hot topic and many companies across every industry are thinking about how they should or shouldn’t use AI tech and tools going forward.
AI can certainly augment and improve your donor experience program, but you shouldn’t give your brand away to it. Not only are some of the tools not ready, there still needs to be a core group of humans thinking about donor experience strategy, resourcing, training, managing, ops, retention, conflict resolution, and more. AI just isn’t there yet. To get great results, you need a combination of people (CDXO and team) + software to do well.