Running a non-profit organization can be a truly rewarding experience. However, there are a lot of challenges that can hinder your growth, decrease your impact, or shut down the organization altogether. Some of such challenges take place in the environment such as changing regulations, tax reforms, and increasing competition for both donors and volunteers, while others happen on the inside, such as lack of internal resources and talent retention. According to Nonprofit Leadership Impact Study, a few of the biggest challenges facing nonprofit leadership teams were lack of resources (54%), donor acquisition (39%) and retention (25%), and staff turnover (35%). Below we would like to show how you can leverage journey mapping to solve such challenges in your organization.
Funding/Lack of Resources
Lack of resources has been named the leading challenge nonprofits faced in 2019. This is something they share even with for-profit businesses. An inadequate resource pool is a multifaceted problem that needs to be tackled from multiple fronts. The two main contributors to not having enough resources to effectively operate are difficulties with donor acquisition and retention and the high turnover of fundraising staff. So how can journey mapping help you address these challenges? Let’s have a look.
Donor acquisition and retention
A donor journey map helps your operational and executive teams understand the full donor experience across the lifecycle stages, channels, and touchpoints. Donor journey mapping is the process of designing, outlining, and charting the engagements, interactions, and activities a donor has with your organization. The journey map visualizes all the interactions a person has with your not-for-profit as well as the internal or external influences affecting his or her behaviors. Such a map can vary in detail and complexity, depending on what you want to chart on it, from a donor experience following an acknowledgment when they make a gift to a year-long onboarding plan for new donors.
Such a comprehensive blueprint allows your non-profit to identify opportunities to improve the donor’s experience and drive more value for the organization. In the current competitive environment, where the number of non-profits is increasing every year, more and more organizations are competing for donor money and resources. Without a clear understanding of how your organization creates value with and for donors, what their requirements and aspirations are as well as how you can optimize your donor experience, you are running at risk of being left behind. Research shows that brands that manage their customer journeys outperform those that don’t.
Donor-centered fundraising is about putting your donor first, looking at your organization through their eyes, nurturing positive relationships with them, and ultimately increasing their loyalty and exceeding your fundraising goals. By creating your donor journey map, you gain invaluable insight into who your donors are (donor persona), align your internal teams to optimize, and build a more meaningful connection with your donors, thus improve your donor acquisition and retention.
Talent Retention
Transitions in staff is another huge challenge non-profit organizations face. Here they compete with both commercial and other non-profits as well as the changing job market. This is why understanding your employee experience and making it more positive is imperative to help ensure stability in staff recruitment and retention. And here is where employee journey mapping comes to the rescue.
Employee journey mapping is a method to help ensure your employees have positive experiences with your company from their first moment forward. Much like a donor journey map, an employee journey map is a blueprint of end-to-end interactions that an employee has with your organization. Such a technique helps you evaluate employee experience and identify areas for improvement.
A more satisfied employee is a more engaged and loyal employee. According to research, staff with lower engagement are four times more likely to leave their jobs than those who are highly engaged. Such a high turnover rate comes at a high cost, amounting up to 199% of a salary cost. For non-profits, these numbers might be even higher, as they can lose donors and volunteers who work closely with those employees who decide to leave your organization. In order to ensure your employees are engaged and stay with you for a long time, you need to know what makes them happy. Creating your employee personas is another tool you can use to get to know your employees better.
An employee persona is a made-up person, who is created based on your real employees. By learning about your employees’ traits, values, experiences, aspirations, and pain points, you can work on matching their values with organizational values. By creating an employee journey map and acting on the insights you get from it, you can retain your organization’s most valuable assets and secure your future growth.
Improving client experience
Ultimately, the goal of any organization is to consistently satisfy its customers and increase its customer base. For a non-profit, this comes down to serving your service or product recipients the best way possible. In order to do that, you should know your customers’ needs and goals well and ensure that your organization meets them. And customer journey mapping is an invaluable tool in this process. A customer journey map helps your internal teams put the customer first, hence create a more relevant customer experience, increase your productivity and improve resource distribution. In turn, this will help you identify ways to increase your efficiency and accomplish more with less.
Conclusion
No doubt, non-profit organizations face a lot of challenges. Competitive landscape, external influences out of your control, new players in the market, bringing in new requests and standards, make donor retention and employee engagement increasingly harder. To thrive, non-profits need to shift to a more people-centered orientation, putting their donors, employees, and customers first.
Customer journey mapping is an invaluable tool that can help your company go through this transition faster and come out the other side with more value to offer to all your internal and external stakeholders.
