Developing the Capability for Better Supporter Experience

Historically Supporter Experience has lagged behind it’s more advanced counterpart – Customer Experience. But we know from other sectors that focusing on Customer Experience delivers competitive advantage, more streamlined working practices and greater insight. The charity sector realises this and is no longer categorising Supporter Experience as a ‘nice to have.’

Significant investments and major Supporter Experience transformation projects are underway to drive this change. These initiatives have the potential to deliver market-leading communications that rival commercial brands, but they also come with challenges.

Organisations are keen to tackle these challenges quickly to maximise the impact of their projects. But how can charities take their Supporter Experience to the next level?

Let’s explore some of the most common questions we receive about typical Supporter Experience challenges—and, more importantly, how to overcome them.

1. We've shifted to an audience-first approach, but our teams still think in product terms—how can we help them adapt?

There are lots of examples of organisational re-structures to provide a better platform for Supporter Experience change. However, a challenge arises if the organisations’ culture doesn’t evolve to align with these new structures. The following approaches can help accelerate this cultural change:

1. A powerful moment often happens when teams realise the impact of thinking only in product silos. By mapping out the combined effect of their individual product communication decisions, it becomes clear how those choices influence customer decisions and can be a real eye-opener This understanding helps drive the move to an audience-first approach.
2. Teams can be helped to adapt by moving to KPIs and budgets that have audience metrics built in, rather than a focus on product income alone.
3. Break down the silos one step at a time - If you haven’t got to the stage of organisation structure changes, you can still make rapid progress by allowing Supporter Experience challenges to be tackled through cross-functional working groups. Bringing together peers from Communications, Data, Technology, Insight and Content will help make better, faster Supporter Experience decisions that everyone is a part of.

2. Every one of our Supporter Experiences and journeys has to change. Where do we start?

It’s often the case that there is a long list of experiences and journeys all needing to be redesigned to align with the organisation’s new Supporter Experience vision. This can feel overwhelming and teams often struggle with the size of this challenge, finding it difficult to determine the most effective place to start. The following approaches can really help teams get going:

1. Map your existing journeys, plotting out comms hotspots which teams can quickly resolve and which will bring immediate Supporter Experience benefits.
2. Overlay your target Supporter Experience KPIs (Lifetime value, Supporter Satisfaction) onto your journeys to understand current performance and where the biggest opportunities to improve sit.
3. Use data to pick a use case to get started. Design a future-state journey/experience that turns your Supporter Experience strategy and technical capability into an organisational reality. This can be your north star and help you effectively work through the backlog.

3. We’ve made significant investment in technology, but how do we make sure we unlock its full value?

New technology always requires significant investment, but in many cases the value from this investment isn’t fully realised from a Supporter Experience perspective.   To change this, we recommend the following:

1. Supporter Experience teams need to become good customers of their colleagues in data and tech – becoming partners in driving the direction of technology investment to support the Supporter Experience vision.
2. Ensure that people, data, and process changes occur in parallel with technology investments, integrating holistic approaches into new tech solutions.
3. Where possible use the future state journeys as a key input into the requirement gathering stage for the new technology solutions, or as a use-case to focus minds on how to best use your technology capability to support audience ambition

4. How can we move away from ‘one size fits all’ mindset and begin creating bespoke customer experiences and journeys?

Supporter Experience vision nearly always aim to move from generic messaging, timing and content to a position where supporter’s actions and preferences drive the most appropriate/personalised communication. But challenges need to be overcome to enable this new approach:

1. Always ensure that journeys are being designed for each of your significant audiences/personas
2. If you can, use behavioural science to establish the principles that each journey should deliver to deepen engagement
3. Adopt a data-driven template design approach, providing a framework for personalised content based on your audience insight, working with your new technology to automate the delivery of these comms.

What next?

We know the sector faces a long list of challenges that must be tackled to maximise the impact of transformation projects and drive market-leading communications—today, we’ve only scratched the surface by covering four. The good news is, these challenges are being recognised, and real progress is happening.

What else should we be thinking about? Get in touch to talk to us about your challenges.

You can also read our most recent research on Supporter Experience and meeting audience needs in the critical DM Channel here.