Engaging Donors with Stakeholder Interviews

Article from the Growth & Co Blog   |  Posted on April 4, 2022 by Larissa

Successful fundraising requires far more than just asking donors for money. Among other things, it involves engaging donors and improving donor experiences before asking for gifts. One way to engage this group of stakeholders is by gathering their feedback, and this can be done through a ‘stakeholder interview.’ 

Stakeholder interviews with donors are used during various projects. This includes strategic planning, fundraising audits, case for support creation, capital campaign feasibility studies, and other initiatives requiring donor feedback to achieve fundraising goals that support the organization’s mission. Engaging them in these projects results in feedback that improves your fundraising and serves donors better. 

A fundraising audit is a tangible example of a project that can benefit from donor interviews. When assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of current fundraising operations, donor insights are critical to the audit results since their donations are the intended outcome of all your fundraising efforts. The audit interview should ask questions about their relationship with the organization, how they are communicated with and engaged, why they donate, how they like to donate, and their future giving intentions. 

By spending time with donors to gather this information, this group of stakeholders feels genuinely valued by the organization rather than feeling like an ATM!. While gathering helpful feedback, an honest and mutually beneficial relationship can be started or enhanced. This relationship can lead to donors becoming lead fundraising volunteers who introduce their network of other potential donors to the organization, enabling the organization to raise more gifts than before. 

If you want to learn how to conduct stakeholder interviews consider our course "Stakeholder Interviews and Surveys in the Nonprofit Sector"

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