Insight Report: Constituent Experience: Encouraging Your Donors' Journeys

Is CXM worth doing?

The argument in favor of CXM is that nonprofits, already burdened with higher expenses and shrinking donor les, will be able to create value and growth across their existing program through greater constituent satisfaction resulting from a far more personal, authentic, and relevant experience.

FAQs

Q: What is Constituent Experience Management (CXM)?

Constituent Experience Management is the practice of designing and optimizing constituent interaction points with your organization to enhance overall satisfaction and build loyalty. CXM is the overarching umbrella term encompassing all activities aimed at creating intentional positive experiences that drive brand evangelism, retention, and value in a results-oriented manner. (These activities may include journeys, trigger-based marketing, and other contextual dynamic interactions.)

Q: What challenges facing nonprofits can Constituent Experience Management address?

Even with the best intentions, many nonprofit organizations get stuck in siloed communication patterns: by channel, through inconsistencies in message from business unit to business unit, or by a lack of data continuity. Integrating communication across channels, employing a unified messaging strategy, tapping into the constituent data to drive more intentional personalization for relevance, and using omnichannel platforms to coordinate it all is rapidly becoming the new normal for overcoming these challenges.

Q: Will creating more deliberate donor journeys improve my fundraising?

Not necessarily. Any new advancement in marketing is accompanied by rising interest from nonprofits and often goes hand in hand with overhype. While it is true that customized donor journeys may produce positive impact on performance for some organizations and audiences, as with any new technique, it is not universally guaranteed to produce that same result for every organization.

To be worthwhile, any audience journey created or altered must have clear entrance and exit criteria and measurements that demonstrate that the new journey is driving a superior outcome to the former experience.

Q: Where should we begin if we are new to Constituent Experience Management and audience journeys?

The pages that follow in this document will provide you with a macro-level perspective on Constituent Experience Management, arming you with a greater understanding of the topic and highlighting howTrueSense Marketing can meet your organization where it is to begin to deliver on these concepts from the most basic to the more sophisticated.

The Experience Economy

While the focus being placed on constituent experience, along with efforts to intentionally unify audience journeys, may seem new and trendy, the truth is that the underlying principles and techniques of CXM have been leveraged in other industries for the better part of the last decade.

Perhaps sharing a few relatable examples will help align our collective thinking.

While this would hold true for most electronics nowadays, Apple’s iPhone is a great use case given they have an entire internal team focused on out-of-box experience (OOBE). This begins with the package design the phone arrives in, but more critically focuses on the initial setup of the device, inclusive of being pre-charged (an OOBE enhancement as devices used to come uncharged); the accessibility and ease of setup prompts; the seamless assimilation of the old iPhone’s preferences and data into the new device; and the immediacy of using the new phone, just to name a few OOBE-crafted experiences.

Another example is game designers thinking through the first-time user experience (FTUE) on games for consoles, PCs, or mobile devices. This begins by placing players on ”rails“ where they are taken through several scripted events that force them to learn gameplay basics.This is as much functional as it is to reduce new player friction, with a goal of preventing abandonment borne of frustration. Sounds similar to donation form UI/UX experiences aimed at preventing abandonment, right?

CXM isn’t just a shift in marketing but a broader shift related to how we interact with our world.

How We Deliver CXM at Scale

TrueSense Marketing aims not just to improve the existing experience but to expand upon it.

CXM has varying levels of sophistication and impact, and each level is gated by data and technology requirements.There are four key capabilities that act as the interconnected building blocks unlocking progressively more complex CXM solutions:

1. Proactive Personalization
2. Creating Varied Journeys
3. Contextual Interactions
4. Marketing Automation

Each of these capabilities has the potential of making the constituent experience stickier: more likely to repeatedly draw in and capture loyal support. At a glance, this may seem like a pure technology play, but CXM depends equally on creativity and novel design thinking to truly deliver breakthrough improvements.

Our collaborative CXM framework works to consolidate and coordinate omnichannel marketing initiatives to improve the constituent experience based on the unique situation and resources of each organization we serve.

It all starts with the data. As such, we require access to your consistently reliable data assets, which we pass into our proprietary COMPASS donor-intelligence platform to centralize the constituent behavioral and experience data, deploy cutting-edge tools to continuously monitor and analyze performance, and make recommendations on the next best moves informed by advanced predictive analytics.

Proactive Personalization

Increasingly, individuals control the way they are consuming content.They now dictate the channels they prefer and curate the brands they let into their lives. Nonprofits can no longer rely solely on a one-size-fits-all campaign approach, or even a few primary campaign themes or channels, to reach their audiences effectively. Rather, nonprofits need to meet their audiences where they are and determine the most relevant message or experience to deliver in that moment.

It is not a secret to fundraisers that the power of storytelling drives performance, and personalization has long been seen as a necessary component in that narrative.

In the past, this may have been addressing the recipient by name or referencing their regional location. But today, with the variety of donor intel that exists within zero- and first-party data, so much more is possible and expected.

This means your creative needs to be data driven and dynamically delivered, intelligently weaving everything you know about your constituents into their experiences. Are they new or existing? Have they given recently or not, and to what offer? Have they been on your website or any of your digital properties? Participated in an event? Have they supported you for a decade or a day?

Growing in adoption is a concept of Performance Creative, an approach to campaign development that blends data prowess and storytelling to design messages and content that inspire, resonate, and perform by bringing far more of the constituents’ unique data markers into consideration and into the experience itself.

This is the first key capability that must be activated if nonprofits are going to begin to further establish their brand’s core identity while delivering data-driven communications in the moments that matter the most.

To fully realize the potential of proactive personalization at scale, you must be able to pass through these requirement gates:

1. Data: Meaningful constituent-level data, with high coverage rates on target audiences, and the ability to pass this information at the constituent level.
2. Technology: A production partner with variable digital printing capabilities; a creative team that can design touchpoints inclusive of this data.

Creating Varied Journeys

When we have discussions with the hundreds of nonprofit organizations we serve, there’s often a steady drumbeat of inquiries around donor journeys and journey mapping.

Given the growing imperative around this topic, we are never surprised by these questions, though we are sometimes surprised by the lack of a clear objective as rationale for pursuing journeys.

The first step in the creation of unique and varied journeys should be answering these questions: ”Where are they?” , ”What can they do?“ , ”Where can they go?“ , and ”What is the feeling or experience we want them to have?“ as well as which metric we are trying to move and what success looks like.

To begin, start small. A single audience and a single journey allow for open-ended testing to compare the results produced from this new prototype journey, which may include alternative versions of message copy/editorial, design elements, imagery, timing, channel, number of touchpoints, and all the other experiential aspects we hypothesize will make it superior to the existing journey.

A journey innovation, in some cases, may be as simple as establishing a sequential set of touchpoints, perhaps for a Grateful Family as one example, where we know from analysis that grateful tears dry quickly, and those interactions closest to discharge date have statistically the greatest odds to convert. Therefore, we might consider building a journey that spans the first six months following the patient’s discharge date.

We always test within a grateful patient journey aspects like varied language or creative, how quickly we ask for a donation, what channels and when to communicate, and how satisfaction with their treatment experience impacts their willingness to give, all of which can shape a meaningful, performance-based journey when well-tuned.

We’ve used our CXM framework to create bespoke audience journeys for high-value donors, event participants, supporters from episodic interactions like annual radiothons or P2P events, and subpopulations within your donor file.

To fully realize the potential of Varied Journeys at scale requires organizations to pass these gates successfully.

1. Data: Consistent and timely constituent-level data that clearly identifies the entrance and exit criteria for each journey.
2. Technology: The ability to orchestrate journeys across channels and platforms and to establish journey hierarchies for donors that qualify for multiple journeys.

Example Varied Journeys

Planning personalized and automated experiences requires understanding of media consumption, content interactions, audiences, preferences, and transactional channels.

Not every journey is applicable to all audiences or even all members of each audience. Communication channels may be singular or varied within a journey, and each tailored plan must be appropriately deployed based on relevance and where that constituent is in their journey.

Here are a few example paths a donor can take depending on their interests and actions.

Donor Journey

New Donor Sustainer Upsell

Video Ad Donor Journey

Sequential Messaging Flow

Donor Journey

Event or Grateful Patient

Contextual Interactions

While journeys can exist without contextual interactions, contextual interactions cannot exist without a journey. In that way, this capability is dependent as much on the existence of journeys in your program as it is on technology and data to enable it.

We listed the critical questions that underpin any worthwhile journey in the prior section, and the answer to Where are they? can further shape the journeys we create.This is where contextual interactions come into play, which involve using knowledge about where a constituent is in their own unique journey to enhance the relevance of their experience.

What are contextual interactions?They span a wide range of categories, including (but not limited to) changing the look of a landing page or altering an email version (perhaps with tools like Movable Ink) to serve up a more relevant message that was triggered by a constituent’s recent engagement on one of your digital properties or behavioral data, or specific activities like volunteering or participating in an event, or a recent interaction with a relationship manager at your nonprofit, or giving their 24th consecutive monthly recurring gift installment.

In the end, these adjustments are based on each constituent’s contextual situation.They are often trigger-based in nature, leading to a more authentic and relevant relationship built upon stronger loyalty and bonding. Below is a simplified example of two constituents on the same journey having unique contextual interactions.

1. Data: Unify data markers across platforms to react to engagement or behavior changes that create contextual journey changes.
2. Technology: Integrate CRM, website, and other digital platforms with an automation engine.

Marketing Automation

The final capability that not only builds upon but scales the other capabilities described in this document is automation.

The highest data and technology barrier to clear is the one that gates successfully using marketing automation at scale.The reason for this, simply put, is that automation involves the digitization and streamlining of all the steps in a journey that were formerly done manually or pseudo-manually.

Building this capability out will typically mean a sizable investment in your data and technology ecosystem to include a Constituent Data Platform (CDP) to collect and unify all first-party data for both existing constituents as well as prospects. It should include ofifine and online engagement and behavioral data, which can equate to billions of data points for many organizations; a Marketing Automation Platform to enable the dynamic near-time orchestration of touchpoints (this includes products like Eloqua, Marketo, Braze, Adobe Campaign, and others); and an AI-powered Decision Engine (likeTrueSense Marketing’s Giving Potential Scores or other advanced predictive models) to inform targeting decisions across campaigns and channels.

At this point, when your organization has all four of these key capabilities unlocked, the holy grail of one-to-one marketing is nearly within reach.

For context, above is a screenshot from the Eloqua platform, showing the granularity and detail that can be organized and executed across audiences and channels in a highly automated fashion. While many nonprofit organizations, and frankly an overwhelming majority of for-profit companies, may not arrive at this capability in the short term, it remains the gold standard aspirational destination all marketers pursue.

Conclusion

These are exciting capabilities that will lead to the advancement of constituent experience and overall donor satisfaction. However, they are a complex and ongoing commitment once pursued and should not be undertaken lightly.

Regardless of how sophisticated your constituent experience or journey aspirations are, stay focused on the objective: to create for as many of your supporters as possible the experience with the greatest chance of turning your transactional donors into transformational donors for your organization.