Case Study: Annual Donor Loyalty Survey

For 166 million children in the US and 120 countries around the world, Save the Children means a healthy start, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm.  Campbell Rinker is pleased to have partnered with Save the Children for years to measure retention dynamics.

In 2011, Save the Children began fielding a standardized series of Campbell Rinker donor loyalty and satisfaction questions among its sponsors.  The survey segments have grown year over year to include regular and mid-level donors as well.  The international relief and development agency reports seeing strategic benefits from this annual research beyond the actual response percentages and benchmarks.

Pursuing an annual survey by e-mail and sometimes by phone has allowed Save the Children to track results on a consistent, year-over-year basis.  The data also allows the group to identify areas of ongoing strength or weakness in sponsor and donor contact.  This context has led to more informed decisions regarding strategic sponsor and donor communications, fundraising methods, expenditures and outreach channels.

Beyond this, Save the Children finds that the data on satisfaction, loyalty, and giving propensity provides an independent, unbiased voice at the strategy table to advocate for or warn against certain actions, and permits managers to more easily seek and obtain internal investment and buy-in from other departments toward new initiatives.  In this way, the findings help open doors for using comparative data internally between different departments, e.g. between the sponsor group, the single gift group and the special gifts group, using consistent language and metrics.

In the US, the data also helps to position and gauge Save the Children performance at quarterly meetings of an inter-agency peer group of similar child sponsorship organizations.

Globally, using these questions and the data they generate permits Save the Children US to discuss sponsor and donor behavior with other international Save the Children Members, leading efforts by the entire network toward synergistic data points that promote positive donor attitudes and support stronger fulfillment and retention.

Save the Children is pleased to advocate for ongoing donor insight discovery and leveraging these data points toward stronger fundraising and engagement.  Methodology: Online Survey