What makes a loyal customer? Feeling valued, familiarity or called by name, cared for, trusted, sense of competence, knowledgeable employees, clean and safe environment, courtesy, respectful…. all these elements also create loyal donors. It is these emotional aspects, the feelings and soft touch moments, that help ensure a memorable and positive experience to keep donors coming back.

I don’t believe the donors come in just for the gifts or the altruistic feeling they get. I believe they keep coming back because of how the donor center staff made them feel during the experience. Was it a great experience or just a mediocre one? Is it one I will remember in how I was treated or was I one more body/arm/unit for the staff? Did you look through the lens of the donor and identify those things that would make me feel special and want to come back?

In today’s world the customer experience is the last frontier, the differentiator between you and your competition. To blood donors, the competition is any place I could go during that time available vs. the blood center. You’ve got to make me feel so great that I can’t wait till I CAN come back!

Blood centers are competing for the donor’s discretionary time and unless they feel the experience they received was worth the effort and time lost, they may or may not go back again.

I’m doing a golf outing that everyone around me was saying was not going to do well this year (especially since I’m in Michigan). Golf outing is two weeks away and I am at 80% of goal for being sold out and sponsorships are going very well and I intend to meet goal and have a successful event – bottom line may even be best ever. Other area outings are at 50-60% attendance from last year and everyone is saying that sponsorships are down – again not so in our case. Is my organization so phenomonally different from the others that it isn’t falling to the same fate? Not especially, I’m just working harder and smarter at it.

The economy shouldn’t be a reason to let yourself be lazy – you are doing a disservice to your donors who you are serving if you do that!

We’ve seen organizations utilize social networking as part of a successful strategy for engaging existing donors. There’s not much of a better way for help supporters inspire future supporters than through an active community of people sharing causes and how they are lending their support.

Donor retention doesn’t just ride on a single factor. We believe the success of donor retention rides on the overall donor experience. Inspiration is a component of donor experience. And, it may not even be the most important component.

Donor experience is the sum total of all the “interactions” that donors have with an organization. The donor experience pendulum swings from “I love you and will bring my friends to you” to “never again.”

Great experience is at the heart of donor retention. The biggest mistake that nonprofits make with donor experience is focusing donors on the uneventful, the unmemorable. When nonprofits focus only on the giving transaction, it approaches “uneventful” and “unmemorable.” There is so much more to delivering great experience to donors than going after wallet-share.

The fastest growing Fortune 100 companies realize this. They are all about delivering a better customer experience that will capture their customer’s imagination and wallet.

It’s about time we in the nonprofit world follow the lead of companies like Apple and Starbucks. How else could a company like Starbucks make money on a commodity like coffee beans that sells for about $1 per pound on the futures market? (By the way, this translates to roughly 3 cents per cup of coffee.) The other $4 that we are paying for coffee at Starbucks is all about the richness of the customer experience!

Kn Moy
Senior Vice President of Insight and Innovation
Masterworks