Supporter experience is everyone’s business: here’s how we can raise it together
- Natasha (Tash) Evans
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
There’s a well‑known African proverb that you will no doubt have heard: ‘It takes a village to raise a child’.
My father was from North Africa, and I grew up with stories of his life in a large family – raised by his sister, guided by his community, and kept (in) trouble by his elder brother. As a parent of two, I now also know this proverb to be true. While my partner and I are ultimately (of course) responsible for our children’s upbringing, their world is shaped by their school, their friends, the area we live in, and the adults who guide them along the way.
Raising a child is a shared effort — and so is delivering an excellent supporter experience.
The experience belongs to everyone
In any organisation, every decision and every action has a ripple effect that ultimately reaches the supporter. And as the pressure on fundraisers continues to mount, with the decline in giving being felt by charities across the UK[1], those ripples have never been more important in shaping how people feel about your cause.
Even if you never pick up the phone or interact directly with a supporter, you are rarely more than one or two 'ripples' away from influencing their experience. Responsibility for supporter experience lies with everyone. And this means that no single team can deliver excellence on its own.
But what if you are the person coordinating supporter experience - the one with the 'S' word in your job title, the sole advocate across your organisation?
The question(s) you probably want answered is: what can I do to raise the profile of supporter experience across the organisation? And how can I do this effectively?
"Responsibility for supporter experience lies with everyone. And this means that no single team can deliver excellence on its own."
What can I do to raise the profile of supporter experience across the organisation?
Being responsible for supporter experience can feel like assembling a giant jigsaw puzzle when you don’t own every piece. You can see the full picture taking shape - but you can’t directly control every part of it. Some pieces are fitted into the wrong holes, lost under the table, or even chewed up until they’re totally unrecognisable (Ruby the cavapoo, I’m looking at you…).
But that’s okay.
As a supporter experience professional, your job isn’t to fix everything all by yourself. Most organisations care deeply about their supporters, and your role is to channel this feeling into decisive action:
When supporters tell you why they give, consider how you could share their answers more widely across the organisation. How can you amplify their authentic voice, and bring more teams closer to the people that make their work possible?
When your annual report is published, review it from the supporter’s perspective. Does it focus solely on statistics, or does it tell a story about the emotional impact their gift has made?
When you show your gratitude with a thank you, think about who is on the receiving end. How can you use that moment to inspire their vision for a better world, reassure them that they’ve done a good thing, and instil pride in what you can achieve together?
Focusing your efforts on the actions that make the biggest impact will help to guide your village on the path to better supporter experience. There are many tools that can help you here: for example, our SIMPLE model has been designed with charities in mind, and can be used to audit where the gaps are in your organisation’s approach.
How to create a culture where supporter experience thrives
Just as raising a child requires support, influence, and shared responsibility, delivering an exceptional supporter experience requires commitment from every corner of your organisation.
Not sure where to start? Here are my three top tips:
Find your fellow SX advocates – don’t wait for the village to come to you, create the village! Find the people who you can share your challenges, ambitions and ideas with. They might be scattered across your organisation, they might be lurking in the comments on LinkedIn – wherever they are, you’ll be stronger together.
Define what supporter experience actually means for your supporters - how would they define what 'excellent' looks like, and what does this look like for different teams? Taking time to build this definition creates a single source of truth that you can all work towards.
Set up your measurement – many charities make the mistake of neglecting to take a benchmark before they start making change. But, to quote our Roger: “what we measure shapes what we do”. Starting with a measure of your supporter experience[2] will help you to track where you are now, and shape where you need to go.
This is where the ripple effect comes back into play - because our research has proven that more positive experiences, and more loyal supporters, is directly connected to more long-term income and more legacy giving.
When everyone understands their part and feels empowered to take action, you can create a thoughtful approach to supporter experience: one that keeps your supporters loving you and supporting you, however they can, long into the future.
Ps. As you can tell, I love nothing more than galvanising supporter experience within an organisation and seeing those ripples appear. If you'd like to chat more about how to create a culture where supporter experience thrives (one of my favourite topics), just drop me an email: Natasha@About-Loyalty.com
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