If you think digital marketing doesn’t apply to you because your organization focuses heavily on direct mail, think again. Dozens of touchpoints lead to a gift, and they’re all related — even if you can’t see the handoff.

That direct mail donation? The donor may have seen your social media ad, which reminded them to respond. An online gift? The postcard you sent may have inspired it.

Omni-channel strategies are the foundation of every nonprofit organization. Each channel is one link in the donor experience chain that drives the overall response. Unfortunately, as fundraisers, we don’t have control over every message that reaches our constituents. Even the different teams within your organization can affect what donors and prospects see and hear.

A touchpoint audit can help you untangle this web of mixed messages. This practice is part of a larger journey-mapping exercise that unpacks the various employee-donor relationships within your organization. It also lays out how your communications impact the overall donor experience.

Embarking on Your Journey (Mapping)

You can’t conduct a touchpoint audit or journey-mapping exercise in a silo. First, gathering at least one representative from each department is crucial. Every person in your organization — even your IT team — impacts the donor experience somehow. For this exercise to be successful, you need a complete look at every relationship and every communication.

• How old are they?
• Do they have a name?
• How long have they been supporting us?
• Why did they start supporting us?

Use data and insights from your CRM or database to build a profile for this individual donor. This foundation will turn into the constituent’s story, which can help you empathize with them. You can then begin to build out the touchpoints and overall journey they might take to a given action, such as volunteering or donating.

Weathering the Donor Vortex

Because relationships don’t develop linearly, a flat donor pyramid doesn’t accurately capture a donor’s experience with your nonprofit. A better visual is a hurricane, or what Claire Axelrod called the donor vortex. She describes it as an “energized circle” — everyone is on the same level, but some people have more energy at times than others. They move in and out.

This model makes sense, as the intensity with which people engage with your organization changes over time. Think of it like vacation planning. You have an intense interest in a location as you plan your trip, but that intensity fades once your trip is over. You still love the area, but your attention has shifted.

The donor vortex recognizes that relationships are dynamic and cyclical. As such, your messaging should be available as people swirl in and out of touch with your organization. You must ensure people have opportunities to engage when they’re ready. This makes the vortex an ideal framework for omni-channel engagement.

Ultimately, journey mapping helps you identify moments in the donor experience where you either delighted or disappointed your constituents. During a touchpoint audit, you’ll find what works and uncover new opportunities to improve.

Touchpoint Audit: New Lead vs New Donor

As you audit touchpoints and map out your constituents’ journeys, consider two core groups: new leads and new donors. Let’s look at each one to see how their experiences might differ.

New Lead

A new lead is a new name your organization has captured or identified. In the exercise, describe what engagement looks like around that individual. You might ask:

• How was the lead captured, and what was the source?
• What are the lead’s motivations? What were they seeking or interested in?
• How might we fulfill their needs and interests?

As you design the experience for a new lead, consider their potential. Say they were acquired digitally. Will follow-up engagement be digital alone, or does the engagement mechanism have an offline component? For example, perhaps the lead registered online to receive an offline resource about your organization. This gives you multiple touchpoints in their journey.

Also, look at your CRM or other marketing tools. Do they enable you to build touchpoints triggered by the lead’s behavior? If so, you can design a much more granular experience that guides the lead to your desired action, which is often some level of conversion.

New Donor

The new donor strategy gets more specific. New donors are fragile — the retention rate is about 20–25%. While the touchpoint audit and journey-mapping process are similar to those of a new lead, nonprofits are often willing to invest and engage more in a new donor through a multichannel strategy.

A donor’s initial gift usually tells you what led them to give. It’s often a response to an appeal or call to action for an event or program, so stewardship should include messaging and content that references the program area they supported. Then, use follow-up materials to showcase your impact in other ways.

In general, the new donor’s journey should end with a conversion and more engagement. However, you can customize them based on other factors, such as whether the new donor came in at the mid-level or as a recurring donor. In those cases, how can you create and elevate an experience that aligns with their giving experience?

Another example is a post-event cultivation strategy. If a new donor has participated in a peer-to-peer event for your nonprofit, consider what journey you want them to have with your organization after the event concludes.

The Result: Stronger Donor Relationships

We’ve led countless journey-mapping workshops, and the conclusion is always the same: We need to strengthen our relationships with our constituents. After all, this is what drives donor loyalty.

To do this, learn through every constituent interaction. If someone’s a new donor, use a profiling survey to ask why they gave. Append that information to your CRM so others in your organization will have all the information they need to have a more meaningful conversation with this donor.

In addition, delight your new donors by acknowledging their gifts quickly and meaningfully. All donors want to be recognized, appreciated, and valued. This is an essential touchpoint that, when done well, keeps donors coming back again and again.

If you’d like to conduct a touchpoint audit and journey-mapping workshop, reach out to our team today. Our experts will gladly walk you through this critical process.

You can also watch the Touchpoint Audit and Journey Mapping on-demand webinar and download a free copy of Journey Mapping Workbook: A Guide for Deepening Relationships with Your Constituents to help your team succeed.

This blog post is based on an episode of the Go Beyond Fundraising podcast. Listen to the entire conversation now.