How do you solicit feedback and input from your donors and stakeholders on your stories and testimonials?

1 Identify your goals and audience

Before you ask for feedback and input, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your stories and testimonials, and who you want to reach. What is the main message or call to action of your story or testimonial? What is the emotional response or action you want to elicit from your audience? Who are your target donors and stakeholders, and what are their interests, needs, and preferences? Having a clear goal and audience will help you craft your stories and testimonials more effectively, and also help you tailor your feedback questions and methods.

2 Choose your feedback methods

There are various ways to solicit feedback and input from your donors and stakeholders on your stories and testimonials, depending on your resources, time, and objectives. Surveys, interviews, focus groups, and testimonials are all common methods. Surveys can be online or offline, and can help you collect quantitative and qualitative data from a large or diverse sample of your audience. Interviews can provide more in-depth and nuanced insights into reactions, opinions, and feedback on your stories. Focus groups allow you to observe interactions, comments, and questions about your stories and testimonials. And you can ask donors and stakeholders to share their own stories and testimonials about their experience with your non-profit. You can use tools like SurveyMonkey, Zoom, Skype, Google Forms, Typeform, email, social media, or video platforms to collect this data.

3 Design your feedback questions

The quality of your feedback and input is largely dependent on the quality of your feedback questions. To design effective questions, make sure they are clear, relevant, specific, and open-ended. Avoid leading, biased, vague, or closed-ended questions that could influence or limit responses. Some examples of good feedback questions are: inquiring about how a story or testimonial made someone feel, what was learned from it, what was liked or disliked about it, how it related to personal values, beliefs, or experiences, how it motivated someone to support a non-profit, what would be changed or improved about the story or testimonial, and what other stories or testimonials the audience would like to hear.

4 Analyze and apply your feedback

Once you have collected feedback and input from your donors and stakeholders, you should analyze it to improve your storytelling and fundraising. Look for patterns, themes, gaps, and opportunities in your data to inform decisions and actions. Summarize and categorize the feedback into strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) for storytelling and fundraising. Prioritize and address the most critical or urgent feedback and plan how to implement it. Communicate the feedback to donors and stakeholders, thanking them for their participation. Monitor and measure the impact of the feedback on storytelling and fundraising outcomes such as donor retention, engagement, loyalty, and conversion.

5 Keep the feedback loop open

Continuously soliciting feedback and input from your donors and stakeholders on stories and testimonials is key to successful fundraising. To keep the feedback loop open, you can invite your donors and stakeholders to join a storytelling community, ask them to co-create or co-curate stories, challenge them to take action or advocate for your cause, and solicit their feedback regularly. Additionally, rewarding them with recognition, incentives, or impact reports will show that their feedback matters.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?