Helping Nonprofits Connect with Their Donors (and vice versa)
This project feels like the culmination of about 20 years of creative, business, and technical work. This concept all came out of an experience I had serving on the board of a local nonprofit.
Over one weekend, I offered to rebuild the online donation pages/process on the site, mostly because I felt the way online donations were being handled was overly complicated and just didn’t have the ‘zing’ of a great customer experience. So, I spent about four hours one Sunday rebuilding the donation page(s), links, and the undergirding credit card processing plumbing of the site. What came out of this work really shocked me. Over the next four months, online donations were up 600%. I was shocked.
This led me to look at the nonprofits I was dealing with both personally and professionally with a more critical eye. It seemed to me that the things the ecommerce and commercial web has known for a while (lessons from enhancing User Experience (UX), Usability, Customer Experience (CX), etc.) didn’t seem to have reached nonprofits. I also noticed that many nonprofits have a common communication quirk, that is they were passive. As a donor myself, it was hard to glean exactly what the organization needed, what opportunities there were for me to give, and how their mission could be specifically enhanced through additional donations.
DXLabs aims to put all of this together. I work with nonprofits to whip their communication into shape, to change the tone of their sites from passively asking for a donation to actively sharing the opportunity to give. I work with nonprofits to treat their donors like partners and like customers. I show nonprofits how they could make changes to their communication, and their websites, to better present the opportunity to give and to inspire potential donors to give to them. I do this through offering site reviews, which aim to call out opportunities the organization has to communicate better and better present their gift to the donor of giving. I also provide in-depth Donor Experience (DX) consulting to help organizations unify and enhance every interaction they have with donors, creating experiences that delight and inspire.
This may be a little overly bold to say, but I believe nonprofits need a paradigm shift in how they think about and talk about donations, and by orienting around more empowered and direct communication, around treating their donors like wonderful potential teammates they want to work with, they can not only increase their donations but they can create donor relationships which give back much more to everyone involved.
