Many organizations have started mapping their donor journeys—actively attempting to understand the steps donors go through in their engagement with the organization. However, most organizations take an inward-focused approach to mapping their donor’s journey. They use touchpoints from their own fundraising team’s perspective, mapping out when they reach out to donors and on what channels. This inward focus misses a crucial part of the picture—the donor’s actual experience with the organization.

Journey mapping

To build truly effective engagement strategies, we need to shift our perspective outward and map the journey from the donor’s point of view.

When we look at the donors experience from the donor's perspective, we call it Extrospective Journey Mapping, as opposed to Introspective Journey Mapping (your organization’s touchpoints, your organization’s perspective). It’s important to do both sides of journey mapping to get the complete picture.

Consider this example of an organization who is dedicated to empowering young leaders experiencing gender-based discrimination that we worked with last year. Without speaking to their supporters, their internal-looking journey map missed an entire subsection of supporters—those who had already interacted with the organization as program participants. After having one-on-one conversations with their donors, supporters and advocates, we were able to fill in the gaps between the organization’s touchpoints to fully understand the supporter’s journey. We were able to uncover that for this subset of supporters, being spoken to as if they didn’t already know about the benefits of the organization felt disconnected and left them feeling unrecognized. To top it off, we were able to uncover opportunities for program adjustments that could be made to better prepare people for the transition from program supporters to becoming donors and advocates.

But, we did a survey?!

Often, an organization might think they are conducting extrospective journey mapping—for example, using a donor survey to ask questions about donor feelings and their experience. Surveys are usually a great start; however, they typically only answer the questions you know to ask or are so broad in scope that the answers are vague, without context or depth.

Surveys typically allow for the creation of an assumptive journey. Direct conversations, on the other hand, allow the interviewer to respond to points that interviewees bring up. Delving deeper into those areas may uncover insights that aren’t even in your organization's list of assumptions. This allows for a true picture of your donor’s journey and provides deep insights required to out assumptions, define the true donor journey and ultimately, action change.

Organizations often feel uncomfortable with the idea of having to speak with their donors about their experience, perhaps because it starts with having to apologize for something gone wrong when donors call to complain. Truthfully, these kinds of deep conversations can be daunting, uncomfortable and make people sheepish. But, if you really want to get to the heart of what moves your donors to act, and what makes them stop in their journey than an Extrospective perspective isn’t a “nice to have”, it’s a requirement.

Building a sustainable donor pipeline

There’s more to be gained than just identifying your target donor archetypes, improving donor retention, and increasing lifetime value. There are also very real benefits that can happen outside of fundraising and marketing.

We worked with a provincial environmental organization and discovered a number of people who would have been legacy donors (self-stated) but were so disappointed by how the programming side of the organization interacted locally that they turned from advocates into detractors. We gained a number of insights to improve how programs needed to be rolled out within different communities. Without doing the Extrospective work, the organization wouldn’t have been able to understand the specific qualms some supporters had in regards to their community programming. They also would’ve continued losing potential legacy donations they didn’t even know they had!

If you want to build a sustainable donor pipeline, you have to see the journey from the donor’s perspective. Where do they feel unseen or disconnected? The answers are not in your internal processes, but in the lived experiences of your donors. When you get into their shoes, you learn how to make improvements that will keep donors moving towards the end of the journey—where become your most loyal, engaged and valuable donors.

Here's a list of tools your organization can use to conduct both Introspective and Extrospective journey mapping https://www.realpath.ca/post/extrospective-journey-mapping.

Leigh Sandison started her career in fundraising in the UK—first in corporate partnerships, then product development and innovation in mass market fundraising. She then moved agency side with a focus on strategy and insight-led experience design for top global companies. Drawing on experiences from both the nonprofit and for-profit worlds, Leigh is a founding partner of Real Path, an insights and strategy consultancy focused on helping nonprofits maximize the lifetime value of their supporters.