October 27, 2023
Your charity might be cool, but what do your supporters think? How do you know you are doing the right thing for donor retention? Startups and businesses do this with a Net Promoter Score (NPS), which works amazingly for charities and non-profits as well. Let's look at what a NPS Score is, why it's important and how you can calculate it yourself.
It's a customer loyalty metric that measures how likely customers are to recommend a company or organization to others. Respondents answer a single question on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being "not at all likely" and 10 being "extremely likely." Based on their responses, customers are divided into promoters (9-10), passives (7-8), and detractors (0-6). The NPS score is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
A recommendation is a leading indicator of a good service, product or cause. People mainly choose restaurants or movies based on how many others think it's good.
The same counts for your cause; that's why you have to talk to your donors. If you understand how a donor feels about your charity, you can move in the right direction.
To calculate your charity's NPS score, you will need to survey your donors and supporters using the NPS question:
"How likely are you to recommend our organization to a friend or colleague?"
This question is used in most NPS surveys.
You can use various survey tools to collect responses, including online, email, and phone surveys. A good tool for website NPS surveys is Survicate.
Once you have collected responses, you must calculate the percentage of promoters, passives, and detractors. To calculate the NPS score, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Your NPS score can range from -100 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater customer loyalty.
Here is an example of how to calculate it:
Szenario: You've sent an email survey to your most loyal donors, and 10 responded.
Out of 10 people asked, 5 are promoters, so 50%. On the other hand, 3 are Detractors, so 30%.
50-30 equals 20. That's your current NPS Score.
Btw, you don't need to know who gave feedback; this can also be anonymous.
It depends a lot on the industry you are in, but here is a good indicator for a good score:
< 0 → Bad score, you have to work on your fundraising.
0-30 → It's considered ok, but if you are like me, ok is not enough
30-50 → A pretty good score
50+ → This is considered outstanding. Not many NGOs achieve this.
The best place to put it is on your website. Why? Because you can time the interaction. The time for a NPS survey is after they have done something great, like donating.
You can also create an email survey. With emails, you can time your survey to send this email when you know someone is a donor for at least a month.
Or make a poll on social media.
The NPS Score is one of the best ways to track the impact of your fundraising. You can calculate it by asking, "How likely are you to recommend our cause to friends or colleagues? And then subtracting detractors from promoters. A good score to aim for is between 30-50.
The final hack:
Add a field for comments to the survey. This lets you better understand why donors love or hate your charity.
Cheers, Nik
Niklas loves simplicity and design. As a co-founder of Felloz he takes on design and marketing challenges and shares them with the community.
More like this