Making a Decision?
Ask Your Constituent Through Research.
When you’re making decisions, it’s smart to ask your constituents. Whether your constituent is a donor or an organization member, good research will help you make better decisions.
Whether dropping a program, adding a service, building a partnership, starting a capital campaign or another initiative, constituent research can help guide and affirm the decision you make.
Research: Grow And Engage Constituents
Senior leaders need to hear the voice of constituents—the people who furnish income to the organization.
- For Donors. The donor’s perception of the ministry can fluctuate and cause upturns or downturns in giving. Donor Perceptual Research lets the donor help senior leaders make informed decisions about ministry programs, donor approaches and significant strategic opportunities.
- For Members. A member’s perception of your organization shifts and creates enthusiasm or reluctance to participate, renew or join. Member Perceptual Research helps leaders grow and keep members while expanding sponsor support.
When To Research Your Constituents
Leaders typically engage Constituent Perceptual Research when:
- New senior leader takes the helm and needs to know the likelihood of continuing donor support
- New development leader needs to see gaps that previous donor development programs overlooked—and that created gaps in donor enthusiasm for the cause
- Merging of organizations to determine best path for future income growth
- Donor giving downturn to discover causes and opportunities to remedy
- Member participation decline to reveal reasons for reduced involvement
- Donors response dips during fundraisers to see ways to broaden the base of donors
iEncourager helps leaders make data-informed decisions to connect deeper with donors,
Assess Income Impact Of Decisions
When you combine Perceptual research with your organization’s Behavioral data from donor or member records, leaders can see the financial consequences from programming decisions or solicitation strategies.
iEncourager connects donor or member data with perceptual research to help understand economic impact viewpoints from decisions. Often, we discover:
- Major Donors give for different reasons than Mass Donors
- A Program Change could lower Mid-Level donor involvement
- Business Partners may be more (or less) excited about different opportunities
- Mass donors may respond better to solicitation if they see different words or stories of organizational impact
Action Plans From Constituent Input
Applying your constituent inputs throughout your organization is as important as the research itself. iEncourager works with your organization to identify ways to improve organizational impact with your constituent input. These are Strategic Implementation meetings.
After reviewing the research together, iEncourager facilitates a leadership meeting to identify applications and deliverables from the team. These Strategic Implementation meetings make a significant difference in helping constituent involvement increase in your organization.
Research Process For Better Decisions
iEncourager’s research process grows ministry impact with data-informed decisions. Each step helps organizations discover ways to creatively grow and engage their constituents.
Let’s Talk About Your Big Decisions
When you want to pursue bigger impact, leaders know donors and members may either be enthused, confused, disinclined. What will that mean for their financial support?
Let’s schedule a few minutes to talk over your vision and a way to ask your donors and members to help bring your vision into focus.
I look forward to an encouraging call together soon.