I’m always interested in why donors choose different means of formalizing their giving and the ever-expanding set of options they have to do so. Because of that, I read the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s recent report What Donors Value: How Community Foundations Can Increase Donor Satisfaction, Referrals, and Future Givingand related blog posts.
In a survey of more than 6,000 donors of 47 community foundations, the Center found that:
- The strongest predictors of donor satisfaction are donors’ sense of the foundation’s level of responsiveness when they need assistance and their perceptions of the foundation’s impact on the community. (The first predictor isn’t new information and the second one confirms community foundation’s hunches and hopes.)
- 1 in 4 donors were “moderately satisfied” or less with their community foundation. (Oddly, the report glossed over this second point. I don’t know what good business manager would be happy with that metric.)
- A donor’s level of engagement wasn’t a driver of her or his satisfaction. (This shouldn’t be a surprise, but likely was to many community foundation staff).
I steward a multi-generation family foundation and am writing this while attending a symposium by the National Center for Family Philanthropy. Family foundations don’t have the pressures that community foundations create for themselves to grow assets, grow the number of donors with funds, and grow the number of donors who give to the community foundation’s initiatives. However, the report surfaced important questions for those of us in the family philanthropy business.
Shouldn’t family foundation staff worry about the satisfaction of our board members and/or trustees? For the most part, they choose to participate in these roles, even if that choice is coerced by other family members.
- What would customer satisfaction metrics look like for family foundation board members? How would those metrics be different from those for other nonprofit boards?
- What if 25% of your family foundation’s board members weren’t very satisfied with their experience with the foundation? How would that damage family dynamics behind the scenes and harm discussions at the foundation? How would that change their description of their experience to their friends and colleagues who sit on nonprofit boards?
And, shouldn’t family foundations pay attention to the report’s third point about engagement? Community foundations often set metrics for increasing the level of engagement of donors. Those metrics are often drawn from university fundraising models. The community foundations falsely presume that success means more donors moving up a ladder of participation in the community foundation’s activities, communications tools, and goals. As the Center’s report notes, donors can be satisfied even when they have, or desire, little or no involvement from the foundation in their giving decisions.
The majority of family foundations (and many donor-advised funds) are established as vehicles for families to give together and learn together about giving. Ideally, the foundations are safe places to learn and grow together. But it is easy for staff and founders to fall into the same trap as community foundations – that all board and family members desire to be fully engaged in the foundation’s work.
- How do we ensure that our family foundations are safe places to learn and don’t force a one-size-fits-all approach for participation?
- How do we design customer-centric experiences that meet our volunteers where they are? Can we allow them to flexibly dive in or dial back over time, perhaps learning from techniques of good network management models?
- How do we blend the engagement expectations of founders or other family leaders with trends in how younger people choose to interact with organizations and choose to give of their time and skills? Especially for endowed foundations, how do we ensure that institutional culture doesn’t automatically turn people away?
Unfortunately, I have more questions than answers at this point and NCFP’s forum didn’t have sessions addressing the topics. I’ll be doing my own research on the issues and hope that you’ll feel free to send me good ideas and your own experiences.
Tony Macklin 