For almost thirty years I’ve been championing the importing from the commercial world of satisfaction, commitment, and trust as relationship measures that can help nonprofits manage loyalty. But it’s long past time to stop our reliance on our for-profit colleagues and begin to create new models and perspectives for ourselves.

At IFSP we are just beginning to see the results from our new two-year study of donor loyalty and retention focused on the factors that drive actual future behaviour.

I don’t see donor centricity as the dominant paradigm in fundraising. For that to be true, the majority of organizations in our sector would need to be able to identify donors needs and follow through on their satisfaction, and they do not. The metrics we use to assess our practice are almost exclusively financial and we care little for our supporters and how we make them feel. True donor centricity would require organizations to look to the wellbeing and growth of their supporters. And as a sector, we’re not there yet.

In the Spring of 2020, we were commissioned to conduct a survey on the topic of fundraising planning. The goal was to determine the extent to which nonprofits had adopted planning processes and how well supported these were across the organisation.