Insight Report: Mapping the Donor Journey

Mapping the Donor Journey

A step-by-step guide to creating donor journey maps

Imagine you’ve discovered an organization that aligns with your values. You visit their website, feel inspired by their work, and make a small first-time gift on their webpage. What do you expect to happen next?

Expectations:

• You immediately receive a receipt by email confirming your gift. The details are correct.
• The next day, you receive a personal thank you email that sounds exactly like what you read on their website.
• Over the following weeks, you’re engaged with updates and impact stories. One of them includes an invitation to visit in person.
• When you do receive an appeal, you make a second gift because you believe it matters and feel like the organization ”gets you.“

But often this is not the experience for supporters. The reality of becoming a new donor can bring frustration, confusion, and unmet expectations. When that happens, the journey may look like this.

Reality:

• The email receipt looks and feels cold and transactional.
• You don’t hear anything at all and wonder if your gift made it to them and if it made a difference.
• A month later, you receive an appeal asking for a contribution without any update on the impact of your first gift.
• An invitation to their golf tournament arrives, and it feels like a separate organization. Sadly, you don’t play golf.

These contrasting experiences illustrate the importance of a well-crafted journey map. The charity meeting expectations is using a donor onboarding journey map to:

• Identify pain points they can address.
• Understand donor needs and emotions.
• Design a warm, responsive, and informative onboarding that promotes belonging.
• Send quick and accurate acknowledgments.
• Prioritize relevant updates while making thoughtful introductions to other programs.
• Remain consistent, clear, and unified.
• Create a natural connection that inspires pride, belonging, and meaning.
• Foster collaboration and alignment between internal business units.

Those experiences and results do not happen by chance or at random.

Without a map to guide donor experience, internal pressures can create a disjointed experience focused on organizational priorities instead of donor needs and goals.

This is a common pitfall of growing organizations. Soon, a donor can be overwhelmed by the communication, solicitation, and complexity. In reality, they want to do good and feel good. Our job is to make that as easy as possible for them to achieve.

In the following sections, we’ll explore the key components of a journey map, the principles that guide its creation, and the steps involved in developing an actionable donor journey map for your organization.

Soon, you will be well-equipped to transform your donor relationships and create a lasting impact on your mission.

Getting Started

Tips for Using This Resource Effectively

This guide is a simple overview and outline that any organization could use to:

• ◦ Rapidly create key donor journey maps.
• Better understand your donors’ experience.
• Develop strategies for improvement.

Everything contained here rests upon the belief that by improving donor experience, your nonprofit will see positive gains in your most important metrics.

Please use this resource however it best fits your needs. It can be used as:

• A general introduction to the concept of journey mapping.
• A discussion-starter for leaders interested in exploring these concepts further.
• A how-to guide with generalized steps you can customize to the needs of your organization.

It is not meant to be a definitive resource or an exhaustive treatment of the subject matter. 

Instead, it is designed to provoke new thinking, deep discussion, and donor-centric change.

Although journey mapping involves intentional collaboration and buy-in from various stakeholders, one passionate leader often sets the wheels in motion.

Whether it’s by initiating a pilot project, sharing successes from other organizations, or simply starting a conversation, one person can spark change that ripples throughout the organization.

As more people recognize the value of journey mapping and its impact on donor relationships, the momentum will grow, leading to a culture shift that prioritizes donor needs and emotions at every touchpoint.

If you find yourself inspired by the concepts here, know that you have the power to be that leader, no matter your role or position within your organization.

Ready to get started?

Journey Mapping Fundamentals

Key principles for effective design

Journey maps originated as a customer experience tool to help companies visualize how a customer thinks, feels, and acts when interacting with a specific brand.

According to Jim Tincher, author of How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer? Using Journey Mapping to Drive Customer-Focused Change:

”A great customer journey map must represent the experience as your customer sees it, not the way you think they see it.”

In the nonprofit context, a donor journey map is a visual tool that shows the steps a donor takes to reach a goal or get something done. Creating a journey map allows you to step into the donor’s shoes, seeing the experience through their eyes.

The map below, developed by Tincher and Heart of the Customer, provides an illustration of what the end product of a well-researched and documented journey map could look like. We’re using a robust, for-profit example as an ideal to emulate. Journey maps can be very detailed or more simplified. By mapping the journey from the donor’s perspective, you can better see where things might be going wrong or causing frustration. It’s a radical shift away from “We’re just doing what leadership wants” or “We are just trying to hit our fundraising goal this month.” Instead, you’re saying: “We’re designing this appeal in a way we know resonates with ‘Passionate Patty’ so that she feels more connected and we hit our fundraising goals.”

That’s just one reason why a good journey map will help teams within an organization work together better. They ensure everyone’s on the same page and working toward the same goal.

Strong journey maps share key attributes, all seen on the sample journey map on the previous page:

• Defined customer persona
• Clear phases of activity and actions
• Thoughts and emotions of the customer
• Relevant metrics

When thinking about your journey maps, consider the resources you already have. It is not necessary to go to the depth of the example map. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of what’s possible!

 

Journeys solve problems

Find and remove friction

The primary goal of a journey map is to discover and solve a specific problem faced by your donors. Before starting work on the map, it’s important to define what the problem is.

This is usually informed by data you can observe: declining response rate to an appeal, a drop in donor renewal rates, or a change in average gift size. Approach the journey map with a specific problem in mind to help better find the underlying causes and drivers.

With a defined problem in hand, you can begin the process of mapping out the actions leading up to and following it.

You are not your donor

The curse of knowledge

One of the biggest mistakes in journey mapping is assuming your view is the same as your donor’s.

It isn’t.

You are plagued with the curse of knowledge: a cognitive bias that blinds us to how others experience something we know uniquely. You know the people, processes, intentions, and systems as an insider. No donor would ever possess that information or know it as intimately as you do. Donors don’t read minds. They come to an organization with a set of needs and expectations and begin taking actions and making decisions that they think will result in reaching their goal.

Remember that your journey map is made for the donor, not for the organization itself. One way to set aside prior assumptions is to rely upon wellphrased hypotheses you can test. For example, ”Donors may be abandoning the donation process because there are too many elds to ll out on our form.“

This allows for more direct inquiry and discovery. You may find out that it’s not the number of fields but that they are uncertain about how their information will be used by your organization. And that creates just enough friction to stop the donation process altogether.

All donors have goals

Driving personalization

Every donor has a set of specific needs and goals that drive their choices and actions. It is rare that a donor would articulate that need in your organization’s terms. For example, their goal is not to help you hit a donation total for the year.

It’s more likely that their goals would focus on deeper issues like creating a legacy for their family, being perceived as doing good for the community, or feeling appreciated and needed.

Understanding these goals is critical for journey mapping. And given the variety and number of donors, this is where aggregating into specific personas is helpful. Personas contain important demographic and psychographic information.

Each persona represents a specific cohort of donors who share similar goals. This can assist you in segmentation and tailored personalization of communication. Match up the elements of your program that are most resonant to the goals of each persona, and tailor strategies and interactions to provide a more personalized and relevant experience.

Emotions drive decisions

Aiming for the heart

Emotions play an enormous role in shaping the donor experience. Your journey map should focus not only on what observable actions a donor takes but also how they feel about each stage. Refer back to the sample map for examples of how this can be visualized.

A strong journey map will identify the key emotions donors feel. Frustration. Delight. Joy. Confusion. Satisfaction. Understanding. Contempt. Fulfillment.

Understanding how their emotions influence their perceptions and actions gives you a powerful set of clues about where to target improvements. If a donor is already delighted at a specic stage, you can confidently continue running it and testing new improvements.

If a donor is confused or frustrated at a different step, you can design new approaches to alleviate those negative emotions.

Sometimes these interventions are simple. If a donor is confused about how their information will be used by your organization, a small paragraph of explainer copy may be sufficient.

On the other hand, if the donor’s frustration stems from feeling unappreciated and overwhelmed by too many asks for too many things, you would need a larger improvement strategy.

Look for areas within the journey where the emotional reaction is strong and the impact on your metrics is high. The intersection creates a point-in-time moment for you to focus on.

Because both emotions and impact are heightened, these are the critical areas to focus on getting right.

A holistic experience

Context is king

A donor’s journey doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Their interactions with you are part of a much larger picture that includes all the interactions and influences that shape their emotions, thinking, and experience.

Your donor likely does not wake up thinking about your organization at all. Instead, they may have a busy day at work, a carpool to drive, an important meeting to attend, or a medical situation to process. This individualized donor context is incredibly influential and very hard to know or predict. The journey map is a tool to help capture as much of that helpful context as you can. It can include all the ways donors interact with you across channels and devices — and what they think about when they are actually thinking about you. Their journey with you is just a thread in a much larger tapestry.

When you can pull back and look more intentionally at the donor’s entire experience of living in a complex and changing world, you can create even more focus within your map. You may not be able to change a donor’s daily schedule, but you can influence how they think about you when they are choosing to think about you. In that moment, you have the highest chance of influencing their actions because to think about something is to make it important.

Journey Mapping 101

Where and how to start

The goal of this section is to empower any organization to rapidly create key donor journey maps. The steps contained here do not require special software, outside consultants, or a large budget.

What you will need is a small team of leaders committed to developing the work.

This guide includes the following sections:

• Defining your key personas
• Gathering available donor research
• Creating hypotheses about the experience
• Validating your conclusions
• Socializing the map
• Activating change

Let’s get started!

Step 1: Defining Key Personas

• Identify the fully empowered and accountable leader who will run the project team.
• Select a cross-functional group of leaders to head the various workstreams.
• Meet together to make an exhaustive list of donor types that are critical to your success.
• Narrow the list to one or two potential personas for deeper understanding and research.
• Validate the donor personas with key stakeholders to ensure alignment.
• Document the rationale for selecting those persona types.
• Write a short summary of who you think that donor is and what motivates them to give.

These donor types will be your focus for the remainder of the mapping process. You can repeat this step for as many donor persona types as you want to create.

Sample donor types could be:

• Tenured mid-level donors
• New donors to the organization
• Volunteers who have never given
• Donors over 70 with no estate plan

The personas should be specific enough to infer what kind of journey you’re interested in creating.

Keys to this step:

• Don’t pick too many personas. Trying to do too much will mire your project in details.
• Do pick ones with high value and impact. Know that you’ve selected a donor group with clear mission impact.
• The persona needs to be broad enough to have enough volume and specific enough to create personalized plans.

Plan for three, one-hour meetings on the following topics: Brainstorm, Selection, Validation.

By the end of this step, you should have selected one or two personas and obtained the necessary alignment.

Persona Samples

As you can see from the samples on this page, the persona is meant as a thumbnail sketch, not a multi-volume biography. In less than a minute, you can clearly grasp who the donor is and what he cares about most. It’s just enough information to feel like you know the person.

Molly the Mom

About Molly:

Molly has a child who is treated for chronic condition at Lurie Children's. Her giving is based on emotion and not tied to any specific board, appeal, or event. She gives multiple small gifts a year and is close to being a leadership-level giver. Her family walked at Movie for Kids in 2019, and her oldest daughter hosted a lemonade stand through Circle of Friends. 

Motivations:

• Gratitude for the care her child received.
• Having a real impact in her community.
• Getting her kids involved in philanthropy.
  *Molly the Mom is used with permission from Lurie Children's Hospital.

Entrepreneurial Eric

About Eric:

• 39-49 years old, married, kids at home.
• Business founder and co-owner
• High income: $500,000-999,000/year.
• Giving Level: $5,000-$10,000/year.

Passions:

• Travel with his spouse.
• Watching his kids play soccer.
• Books, self-improvement, novels.

Support us because:

• He was economically unstable when he first started the business; personally benefited from our services.
• Strong sense of generosity and high morality. He sees positively impacting the community as a responsibility of the wealthy.

Step 2: Gathering Research

• Designate research leads to review as much available research as possible.
• Depending on your organization’s size, this could be anywhere from one to three people.
• Gather all existing research, data, surveys, and reports from within your organization.
• Cast a wide net, and pull in anything relevant to the donor’s experience — especially if it is direct feedback from the donor.
• Compile and organize the research in a centralized location.
• Analyze all data and develop a short summary of the essential findings of research (2–4 pages).
• Distribute the summary to the relevant stakeholders and other individuals who will participate in Step 3.
• Encourage discussion, collaboration, and debate about the findings between groups.
• Ensure teams have at least three to ve working days to review and process the findings.
• At this stage, the research summary document will serve as your foundation for hypothesis mapping and future stages of the journey mapping process.

This is an important foundational step for the future as you are driving cross-functional stakeholders toward a common understanding of the available donor research you have.

This is also an important area to be on guard for the ”curse of knowledge“ as discussed previously.

There is a pitfall in the temptation to override what the data is telling you with other lived experience, perception, or encounters with a limited group of donors.

Encourage team members to let the research speak for itself and stand on its own without need for further amendment. Remind them that this step is necessary to forming good hypotheses about your donor journey. The time to challenge the research comes in the next step.

Here are a few areas where you can look for donor research:

• Survey and direct research (e.g. focus groups)
• Call center interactions, logs, and recorded calls
• Online reviews
• Donor reporting and trends

Look anywhere your donors have left clues about their experience.

Some pitfalls to avoid:

• Overriding research with opinion or relying too heavily on internal opinions.
• Collecting irrelevant or excessive data such that the analysis is impossible to complete or too inconclusive.

Step 3: Hypothesis Mapping

• Choose two facilitators who will prepare the hypothesis mapping session and guide your team through it.
• Depending on the complexity, this should take between two and four days to prepare adequately.
• Schedule a three-hour ”Hypothesis Mapping” session and invite the project team along with representatives from operations, nance, fundraising, and programs.
• Your group can include team leaders, individual contributors, and volunteers. The more holistic, the better.
• Begin the session by creating a donor persona from the prioritized donor types. This should take one hour per persona.
• Then, guide the team through building out the key steps in donor experience from initial discovery, to first gift, cultivation, upgrade, engagement, and exit.
• Use a large whiteboard or wall and begin labeling the steps. As team members discuss what the donor is thinking, feeling, and doing at each step, hypotheses will begin to form.
• Each participant can document their hypothesis on a sticky note, and stick it on or near the step it applies to. The end result should be a white board filled with steps and covered with hypotheses.
• At the end of the exercise, the facilitators should collect the insights and hypotheses, creating a hypothesis map of aggregated input.

The purpose of a hypothesis map is to join together data you know (e.g. the donor type) with data you want to know (e.g. how does the donor type experience our organization). It is a shared brain of educated guesses and looks similar to the chart below.

At the top of the board, include the chosen donor type and what their goals are. List the stages relevant to the journey and your organization at the bottom (e.g. awareness, research, engagement, lapse, reactivation, etc.).

Create four rows for your hypotheses: Thinking, Feeling. Doing, and Backstage. The rst three contain your team’s hypotheses about the donor. The final row contains any information about systems or processes the donor cannot see but may influence the donor. For example, this is where you could note system limitations, internal processes, organizational policies, etc.

There are no right answers at this stage. The goal is aggregation of the various perspectives about your donor type from a cross-functional group of stakeholders.

It’s natural at this stage to begin thinking through the relevant steps and stages. Follow any steps that would be natural for the donor while avoiding the pitfall of mapping everything a donor could do. Once assembled, you can begin the process of validation.

Step 4: Hypothesis Map Validation

• Assign teammates to take ownership of the validation process. This stage will involve donor interviews and survey development.
• This could take two weeks or more, depending on the complexity of your map and organization.
• Using the hypothesis map as a guide, create a survey to send to all relevant donors and a discussion guide for donor interviews.
• Send the survey to all relevant donors by email. Be sure to include one or two reminders and a clear statement of how the information will be used.
• Schedule a minimum of 10 donor interviews (per map/persona). This is an active listening exercise designed to get donors sharing openly.
• Create questions for the survey and interviews around what donors are thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage.
• Invite them to tell their story of how they became a donor, why they remain a donor, and what they hope to accomplish in the future.
• Compile all of the data from the quantitative survey and the interviews. Analyze for common themes and patterns in the data.

This stage is made easier if you have staff with research expertise in survey creation and analysis.

There are many freely available resources to guide you in the creation of a good survey and discussion guide for your interviews. There are also free tools in Jim Tincher’s book How Hard Is It To Be Your Customer?

To get you started, here are a few sample themes to explore in your question development:

• Demographic questions and questions about prior donor behavior will validate you have the right person.
• Thoughts and feelings about your organization. Probe for how you are viewed.
• A description of their current vs. preferred experience as a donor.

These themes will help you validate which hypotheses are valid and which are not. If possible, record and transcribe all donor interviews for easier analysis. The recordings can be compiled into shorter clips to share with other team members within the process. There is no substitute for hearing donors speak about their experience directly.

The analysis of your quantitative and qualitative data will allow you to simplify your map with validated descriptions of steps, key thoughts and feelings, and the necessary actions. In the map below, each step is assigned an emotional rating and connected to the other steps. Quotes and information from the research can be included here to validate. Pay attention to the highs and lows of the process and what may be driving them from the donor’s perspective. These will form your greatest opportunities for improvement.

Step 5: Socializing the Donor Journey Map

Congratulations! You’ve just completed the most time-consuming stage, and you have completed your first journey map!

The entirety of this next stage is about socialization and initial strategy brainstorming for what comes next.

• The project lead should schedule a two-hour presentation for relevant stakeholders. Invite individuals whose buy-in is critical to success.
• Present the results of the mapping process, making sure to include as much direct donor input as possible.
• Drive toward consensus on pain points, opportunities, and next steps.
• Guide the discussion through an idea generation exercise using a 90-day timeframe for immediate improvements and a 180-day timeframe for mid- and long-range concerns.

Use this time to build consensus around the donor experience map and to remain focused on the results you will measure for success.

Getting started with journey mapping starts with a shift in mindset. Success is found when key organizational leaders can see the donor experience with new eyes and then link that experience to results.

A map that doesn’t focus on the improvement of key metrics falls short of its potential. It may look good on a wall or drive a spirited debate.

However, you’ll get the most value from your journey map when you measure the impact well.

Step 6: Activating Change

By this point, you know what to change, who to change it for, and how to measure it. The final step is to assemble the team of leaders who will give life to the solutions identified in the prior steps.

• Schedule a strategy and activation meeting for a select group of leaders to create alignment and decide on solutions. Ensure all solutions are linked to organizational KPI improvement.
• Using the map, select specic touchpoints you want to impact, and gather all the ideas generated throughout the process.
• Organize the ideas into an impact vs. effort matrix and work through your decision-making processes to determine the changes to prioritize.

• Select the solutions you’d like to pursue, and assign accountability to the appropriate leaders. Ensure they have the appropriate empowerment to drive this change and that they know the measurement of success.
• Regularly review progress and measurement tracking. Make any necessary adjustments.
• Set periodic reviews to ensure the changes are having their desired impact upon your donors.

Conclusion

As you begin your own journey mapping initiative, every step brings you closer to closer to meaningful improvements in experience and results. The insights and principles from this guide can help you better understand the most important touchpoints in your donors’ journey.

Every interaction with your supporters is an opportunity to show them how much you value their giving. Keep listening, learning, and testing.

Please reach out if TrueSense Marketing can help you take the next steps in journey mapping.