An integrated donor experience is critical in the Digital Age. You have more touch points with our donors than ever before and we have to be keenly aware of how they are experiencing your organization. In order to make sure you are fully aware of your donor’s experience, we need to back up and talk about a part of the organization your donor may not experience: the organizational culture.
How Your Organization’s Culture Impacts Donor Integration
If your organization is fairly siloed, that must change. The culture of your organization may need an overhaul to coordinate your efforts in a way that creates an integrated donor experience. You’ll need to take an objective look at your organizational structure and processes, and seek change as you evaluate and prepare your nonprofit for the shift toward integration.
Perhaps the greatest leap you will ever make toward true integration is to eliminate the barriers that keep your people (and thus your campaigns and messages) operating independently of each other. Nonprofits tend to divide themselves up internally in a number of ways:
- Donor pyramid levels
- Program and service areas
- Offline and online channels
Sound familiar? The lack of a unified effort toward shared goals results in wasted investment and missed opportunities. If the measurements of success are customized to each department or program unit and don’t roll up into broader goals, then even well-meaning teams are unintentionally being given incentive to work against each other.
Make it a top priority to realign your internal structures and metrics before launching your next major campaign. Here’s three ways to do that:
1. Give each team success metrics that tie into the one overarching goal. Every person at your organization should have a vested interest in the big goal.
2. Arrange planning meetings with key representatives from your executive, development, and program teams. This builds connection across the organization.
3. Set the strategy and allow individual stakeholders to execute their own portion accordingly. From the executive suite to “siloed” program departments, leadership must pull the organization together around common goals and objectives.
An integrated donor experience begins with a connected, unified culture. What are other ways your organization’s culture impacts the donor experience?
Learn more about implementing an integrated donor experience in the full-length content paper the Intelligent Fundraiser’s Guide to Integrated Fundraising available for download here.