Substance and Style

    Market Research Surveys for Nonprofits

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    Like for profit businesses, nonprofits need to periodically conduct market research. Unfortunately, they usually don’t have the same budget for it. Here’s how you can create a simple survey that will help you learn what you need to know and adjust your processes accordingly. 

    1. Know your goal before you start. Everything you do should be supporting your overall marketing plan, your development plan, and the strategic plan of your organization. How will the information you collect help you to meet your objectives? Knowing this will help you craft questions that will elicit the specific information you need. Common goals include: learning the motivation of your supporters in order to attract more assistance, assessing donor and sponsor needs to improve retention, assessing marketing activities to improve your ROI, and comparing yourself to other organizations, etc.
    2. Check your bias. Early on, think about your own expectations. Whether you know it or not, you already have assumptions about how this will turn out. You think you know what you’re doing well and what you need to improve. Surprise answers could catch you off guard and you might find yourself uncomfortable or resistant. You need to expect this, and consciously remind yourself to be open to whatever you may learn.
    3. Pick an audience. Depending on what you want to learn, you may want to engage with all your stakeholders, your staff, the people you serve, your social media audience, your donors, your volunteers, corporate sponsors, etc. There is no wrong answer; it truly depends on what you’re hoping to learn. Make sure your audience is narrow enough to get the focused answers you need, yet large enough to get a wide range of respondents.
    4. Get good information about the respondents. Ask how they know about you and how they interact with you. Collect demographic information (age, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, income, geographic location, etc.). This will help you in step 7 when you’re analyzing your data.
    5. Write your questions carefully. You want the answers to give you hard data as well as insight into why people are answering the way they are. You can achieve this by mixing open ended questions with scales (for example: On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to donate? + Why is our mission important to you?). Go back to your goals at this step and make sure you’re writing questions that will get you the answers you need. Make the survey long enough to be meaningful, but not so long as to discourage participation. No one has the attention span to answer 50 questions about your organization. You will only irritate your supporters with a long survey. Make every question count.
    6. Get it out there. There are many free and low-cost ways to distribute your survey. Sending it through your existing Constant Contact or Mailchimp account, using Survey Monkey, and posting it on your website and social media accounts are all free and easy. You may also schedule interviews, distribute paper copies, or hold a focus group. Whatever you decide, make sure to market the survey so people know about it. You may also choose to incentivize participation with a drawing for a small giveaway like fundraising event tickets.
    7. Analyze and course correct. Once you get your responses back, it’s time to analyze the data and examine it through various lenses. This is where the data collected in step 4 can really help you. Gather all your results and then separate those results to get more insight. Patterns will inevitably emerge (for example, people who receive your services feel different than people who just follow you on social media, people in their sixties feel different than people in their thirties, and people making $20,000 a year feel different than people making $200,000 a year, etc.). Next, figure out where to go from here. If people don’t fully understand your mission, revamp your messaging. If donors feel unappreciated, ramp up your stewardship. If you find one group is more likely to donate or volunteer, focus on that key demographic when crafting those requests. Whatever you find, make sure you learn from it, adjust your strategy, and follow up in six months to a year to see if things have changed.