Why Your Nonprofit Should Conduct Surveys

Surveys can be a great way to gauge what people think of your organization’s brand, where improvements can be made, and how to generate more support.

A survey doesn’t dig deep but it is broad, reaching far more people than could easily be asked in-depth questions in an interview. The value of surveys is that they can give you insight into how your nonprofit is perceived by many people, if it is well-known, what media are most effective in getting its message out, and what programs it is known for. Or it can help you find out why the demographic you want to target is not responding to your messages. Gaining these insights can reveal changes needed in both marketing or programming.

To conduct a survey, you need an identifiable, meaningful population to survey. This may be your database of past and current donors, clients, members or a list that taps your target demographic. To get useful results, however, you have to know the basics of survey design.

What Surveys Measure

While other research methods, such as interviews and focus groups, allow you to probe deeply into your organization’s brand image, surveys allow you to quickly assess what a broad range of people think about very specific ideas.  Surveys are also a convenient and confidential way of getting to know your audience. Using online resources, surveys often can be conducted quite inexpensively.

Understanding how your audience thinks is priceless. The results can lead to much more effective marketing. The key with surveys is targeting the right audiences and asking the right questions, that is, questions that are not biased and will give you useful information. You can use surveys to determine the following:

Awareness: Ask how people learned about your organization and how they got involved. How and when did they learn about your organization? The information can guide future outreach campaigns.

Perception: Perhaps the most valuable bits of information for an organization in evaluating its brand are those that reveal people’s perception of the brand. What did people initially think of when they heard about your organization? Were those perceptions accurate? Does the target audience view your organization positively? How does your organization’s reputation compare with the reputation of other organizations doing similar work? Knowing this helps evaluate what messages are being heard and what gaps your messaging has.

Values: Find out what your target audience values so you can craft messages that align with what they care about. What motivates them to donate? What causes are most important to them? Do they want to have local or global impact? Is transparency important? Is trust? Obviously, your mission doesn’t change to match their values but you can emphasize aspects of your mission that fit. Perhaps you haven’t told people enough about local programs. Maybe you need to post your 990 on your website.

Knowledge of Service: What does your intended audience think about your services? Do people know all that your organization does? Give them a list to check off. The results should give you a clear indication of just how much your audiences know about the ins and outs of your organization, as well as whether some programs are being overlooked. Again, this can guide your outreach.

Value of Service: Do people value the services you offer? Pair the responses to this with the responses to how much people know about your services. If they don’t know what your organization does, they are unlikely to value it.

Motivations: You can use surveys to uncover people’s motivations for developing a relationship with your organization. Insight on donor motivation is crucial for crafting fundraising strategies and campaigns that will appeal to donors. Do the respondents currently donate to your organization? Have they ever donated? Do they donate to similar organizations? Why did they choose one organization over another? How do they donate (by check, credit card, online or through the mail?) Do you have the needed functions on your website.

Volunteering: Find out why people volunteer for your organization and the specific things they want from the volunteer experience. Ask what could be done to make the experience more rewarding? You may be able to tap this valuable resource.

Communication Preferences: You want to make a positive connection between your organization and the media you use to spread your message. Are your marketing outlets effective in spreading your message? How did people hear about your organization? Do they read your emails? Do they get too many emails? What do they think of your website?

To get useful information, you have to pick the audiences to whom you send the survey and craft the questions well. More about that next week.

What do you think your organization could learn from a survey?