0:00  
Bam, I'll let her talk. I will trim all the lizard talk out of the final version. Florida lizards are like Southern lightning bugs. It's very true. And God helped me if I ever find myself in a position where there are lizards and lightning bugs in the same place, it will just be a nostalgic overload. I don't pick a country as

0:20  
a whole, right

0:22  
for those of you who are tuning in, we are talking about where we are tuning in from. And a lot of us are getting really nostalgic about the various critters that we have in our our parts of the world. So if you would like to share with us, those fond memories do feel free. We have we do have a lot of critters in in Florida.

0:48  
Ah, hello, Nancy

0:49  
from Connecticut. So many. Vancouver, Canada, home of countless charge pandas. We do raccoons. They're weird little hands. They're so cute.

1:00  
I love them.

1:04  
I'm really happy to see a couple of Vancouver and Vancouver Islands here. Showing up? Absolutely.

1:12  
Okay,

1:13  
it is time to get started. I am so excited for you all to join this session, I have gotten a chance to listen to Mina speak in other places. I've spent a weird amount of time on her website. She's wonderful. Before we get started, I just want to do a couple of really quick housekeeping items. If you're not familiar with me, my name is Abby, I am part of the team at NEON one. And I am going to be hanging out with you today answering your questions, monitoring the chat, and genuinely just trying to set you up for a great webinar experience. If you're not familiar with neon, wondering what we do, we're a software platform that provides fundraising tools and services and resources to nonprofits. We have lots of different products that are all aimed at helping you be a better more efficient and fundraiser. So as we are kind of walking through this presentation today, keep in the back of your mind that everything here is applicable to you whether or not you use me on one, if you use me on one wonderful. A lot of what you're going to learn today applies to you and you can make it happen in your in your account. But if you don't work with me on one, don't worry, everything here is going to be applicable to you as well. couple little things, do feel free to ask questions. We really want this to be useful for you. But I would ask that you ask your questions that you want me to ask later, at the end of the session in the q&a box. The chat can move really fast, especially because we do want you to talk with us. So if you have questions, drop them in that q&a box, and we will try to get them answered. And then the perennial question, yes, we are recording this webinar, and you are going to get a link to the session, you'll get a link to the slides. And we'll give you some extra resources. That email will go out tomorrow at 10am. Eastern time. So keep an eye on your inbox. And then feel free to share the recording with anybody you think might find it useful. There are no gates on it, you don't have to pay for it. Just share as you as you see fit. With that, I'm going to turn it over to our beautiful speaker who has so much wonderful information to share with us about donor surveys and how you can create one that really just stuns your donors and gives you really useful information.

3:30  
Amazing, thanks so much, Abby. If you stop share, do I can I share my screen directly?

For my, my screen here.

Perfect. All right. So and before I start talking more and look at Abby, can you all hear me? Okay? I want to see it look at the chat just to make sure if I can, okay, all right. Wonderful. If I go too fast, please feel free to drop a chat to me or Abby, most likely Abby is going to be the one telling me Nina go slow. That is okay. I have a tendency to speak faster, especially when I love the topics I'm about to speak. So surveys on a topic I really love why I'll be sharing that. But one reason is that we tend to really use it way less than we can be and I want to talk to you about why you should be using surveys how you should be using surveys. And one of the reasons I'm really glad that next one hour I'll be talking to you is because I this is usually the talk that if my clients are not hearing if I'm not in a conference and a session in my workshop, it's my partner who gets to hear everything about my love for the survey. So I'm really glad it's you. I'm sharing this love it today. So I'm Nina Hi, my pronouns are she, her and hers. And I will be walking you through a amazing 40 to 45 minute presentation leaving ample time for you to talk about donor engagement surveys. But before I start, I usually like to start with the land acknowledgement. So I'll start there. And I'll read it. I respectfully acknowledge that I am fortunate to live, learn and provide my services on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the territories of Madison Square, Squamish and slaver two nations. I'm joining from beautiful Vancouver, here in BC, Canada, I moved here from Seattle, and I am very grateful for the land where I am on. All right, two slides for me one a little bit personal information, and the other one where you can find me and about my work. So I am a consultant, and a trainer. I work with nonprofits. And I will say a lot of for profits in the social impact space. The question that I achieve, every single day through everything that I do is how can we do good with data? How can we bring equity and inclusion to all the data that we work with surveys is one of the place one of the tools that brings a lot of data back to us. So it automatically becomes my passion topic. I'm a first generation immigrant, I moved from India and I had a wonderful childhood and I moved to North America about six or seven years now. I moved to Florida. And that's why we had all the wonderful lizard talk at the start. And from there to Seattle and Seattle to Vancouver here. I'm I volunteer and advocate for a lot of Immigrant and Refugee Rights causes and organizations in my time, but I'm not consulting or workshopping. And I always include what's my current self mantra here, self care mantra right now. And my mantra right now is no self projections. So if you are about to do something, which is making you stop, do a quick gut check, listen to yourself, what is it that's making your body feel like you don't want to do something. And if you feel like it's just self rejection, it's kind of you know, making you not do it. Go ahead and do it and see how that goes. And finally, I am here with you in this next one hour as your core learner with you, I I never claim to be an expert on fundraising, or everything that nonprofits we do in the industry, because it is a work of love and labor and continuous learning. So I am here with you as your co learner. And that means if at any point you have your own experience, lived on learn to share, please don't hesitate to use the chat box. Alright, so about my work. When I say chasing the question, how do we do good with data? What does that look like? This is kind of my universe, that blue bubble in the middle, the data plus social equity. That's my why, and everything around it, are the spaces that I'm creating through my work. So for the sake of accessibility, I add images, and I'll show you a couple as they come up on the slide. On the very left side, you will see namaste data, which is my consulting practice, through which I work with nonprofits on their surveys and their fundraising plans. Again, chasing the question, how can we do good with data? On the right hand side, you will see a little image pop up of a school virtual school called data is for everyone because I truly believe it is for each of us, all 86 of us who are here right now and all who were planning to join. And the kinds of workshops that I offer are how do you advance equity in data collection? How do you advance equity in visualizations? How can you center humans in a wallet terms, which is so essential, especially in the times we live? And when I'm not consulting, and not workshopping. I love to write and speak. So you would see me in conferences and spaces who would be willing to listen about data and data equity, you would be seeing me in the community writing through my online magazine data and collected about articles, AI and data collection, how can we do it better? This is kind of my entire universe here. Okay, so that's about me. Let's talk about the plan that we have for this next, what do we have one hour, we will be talking about outcomes, we'll first setup, why we are here, I always like to start with the outcomes. That's like the promise that you and I are making to each other, that we would be doing those three or four things, then I will be talking to you about some strategies and best practices of creating beautiful donor surveys. And we'll keep space at the end to talk to each other. And throughout this plan of outcomes and best practices, and let's stop, I'm going to put a few polls and tips from my experience, I do a lot of surveys. And I want to pull some of the tips that can be universally applied, regardless of which sub sector you are in which organization you are in which location you own. These are some things that you can you know, make your own contextualize for yourself, and they will still be relevant and still be useful.  All right, let's move forward.

So first things first, why surveys, right? Why are we talking about surveys when, at a time when we all know what they can do? Well, surveys, by the mean itself makes you feel it's some sort of a tool where you would be asking a few questions and getting your responses. Well, that's true. Yes, that will be happening. But I'm going to show you five reasons I have come to and I found really useful and way under less utilized in our industry. Number one is it's the most efficient data collection tool for gathering your community data points. What does that mean? I have send out surveys that goes out to as few as 50 people to as many as 50,000 people. It's the one same tool, and we will be talking in the strategy, how does that work when you use the same tool for sending out to so many people, but you can use the same tool to get the data from different segments of your community. And when I say segments, it could be your volunteers, your past board members, your Meetup group attendees, or your alumni groups, the excellent nine groups who are no longer engaged are different ways they are talking about you they know you they are aware, they are aware about you. They are aware about you, yes. aware about you. And you can still use the same tool and collect all that information through the same tool. So you can do a better analysis when you get it back. So it's very efficient. You don't need five different surveys at different points in time. Unless the context requires students. Then surveys can collect information on your donors motivation, their interests, their engagement preferences. Again, it's so important, right? We all went through this traumatic experience of last three years of pandemic, which led to a lot of behavioral changes on us, right. Just imagine how much time you spend in front of the screens, we have entertainment in front of the screens, we have our work in front of the screens. And just because of that little change our motivation and emotional availability for causes that interests us, that's also changing and shifting and updating. And we want to be listening to those. We want to listen to what our donors are feeling, what's motivating them, what's engaging them, how do they want to co create that change with us. And for that to happen, we need to be create spaces where we ask those questions and series can offer you that space where you can ask those questions to your donors. What motivated your first game, what motivated your last gift during the pandemic? All those kinds of questions, surveys can offer you that space. Third one is that surveys are not just a tool for you to listen to your community. But it's also a place where you can share and this is something that often gets missed. In my experience with the surveys, what most organizations think about surveys and tell me if you think the same way is it's your chance to listen to the people who would be responding to you ask a few questions, you get a few responses. And that's your way to listen to the people who responded to the survey. Right? But that's not all that the survey can do. If it is going, let's say in front of 10,000 donors of your organization, it's also a chance for you to share what you are working on because not everybody would be engaged exactly the same way. They are exactly the way you want them to be right? So you can use the survey to share. Are you aware about this publication that we send out, I do you know about the newsletter that we send out. And you can link, the most recent newsletter, or you can make the most recent campaign plans if it's a campaign related survey or survey that you are doing as a proxy of your feasibility in a community feasibility study, you can link stuff on things that you are working on as a way to share that with your community and share that, you know, that's a little way for to create some awareness about something that you're working on. Another benefit of doing surveys is that it allows you to connect with donors, members and volunteers, post pandemic. Now, here's something interesting thing that I have observed. And this is not an observation just through the pandemic. But before as well. A lot of amazing nonprofits among us have systems. That's not one system capturing all data, right? It could be one of your organization still, or you may have heard of an organization in the past, where not everything was being collected in the same database or seen system. So for example, volunteers data would fall into some other system that wouldn't be talking necessarily to the donor data system. And even if it falls in the same CRM, there are situations when the volunteer data just doesn't talk to the donor data. But in reality, your donors can be your volunteers, right. And your volunteers, could be your donors. And I have had the experience of when I'm setting up the surveys for my clients than I am sending out the surveys, I have seen at least five instances of large surveys seeing how there is an overlap, how their donors who are also volunteers, and volunteers are also donors. And they just keep getting two different kinds of surveys asking similar questions when you know, they are one the same people. And, again, something for the first point that I said, most efficient data collection tool, you can use the same survey, and we'll talk about how, but you can use the same survey to these different little pockets, different little segments, and send them the questions that are relevant to them through the same tool. It's not just it doesn't just make it easy. From the point of view of analysis. It also makes it relevant from the point of view of equity, you don't want them to feel alienated, excluded by asking the same questions through different channels through different surveys to make them feel, hey, they are not listening to me. They keep asking me the same questions through different surveys, what we instead one is ask them the most relevant questions in the most effective way. So we are not duplicating our efforts or their time in having them respond to those questions. So surveys can really do that. And final one, which really is my personal favorite as the data person is surveys can allow you to assess, do some sort of belt screening of your donors have your entire database on it see, without having to run them through different software's. Now, this is not a suggestion to you that don't do traditional birth screening, if you can absolutely go ahead. But just in case, if you are not at a place where you can invest into that your service can offer you that option. You can ask transparent questions around what would they be willing to financially offer, you know, financially offer and share their wealth in for your mission for your work to create change with you. And you can ask those questions and use that in a very human way back and bring it back into your work. So for all these good reasons, I am very passionate about surveys. And I keep talking about them in different ways through consulting and workshopping. And today I want you to feel the same passion and love for this amazing tool that we don't often use if so much. I promised I would be sharing tips from my experience and tools. So here's the first tip. See, if you need data. On the left side, you can see how do you turn questions from your intentions when you're talking about surveys. So this is just a quick tip kind of an example. We are going to talk about strategy. But here's an example. Say you are a librarian organization or in the fundraising team of a library and you know you need data on developing your library survey. He's in line with your donors usage and needs, right? So you can ask some questions. Well, how do you turn that intention into questions you can ask questions? How are you using the space currently? What would you want from this space? What are the topic inquiries relating to the library spaces? On average? Do you use the libraries? I'm sorry? On average, do you use the library service in person more seem less than district like services? These are all examples of the kinds of questions how you can turn your intention into questions. And then when you have the data, you can segment them you can crosstab them, you can dig deeper to know and align it back with knowing whether or not how to develop the spaces in line with your donors needs.

Okay, so we established why are we talking about service? So now, what are the promise promises that we are making to each other. So we want to design a survey framework that vivo in this hour, which will define inclusivity in design and build lay some foundation some good work for consistent and intentional data collection, when I talk about bringing, making equitable surveys, equitable surveys doesn't mean a checklist of 10 something very new things to on the survey, it really means to be more human to center, the people who will be responding to those surveys in our data collection. It's not a whole new, another level of rocket science kind of thing. It's all the things that may or may not for no malicious reason, sometimes just gets missed. And how do we bring that back? How do we bring the humans back being human, or the human back into our data collection? That's all being equitable and intentional in data collection is about and I want to talk to you all of that in the strategy section in a second. All right. So I'm going to pull up two polls in front of you, and Abby will help me to do that. And I have two questions for you. You can take them into two former your clients. How many times have you conducted any form of engagement surveys in the last one to three years?

22:29  
We've got some answers coming in, you guys are really kind of diverse in this. So right, and the numbers are still shifting around or an estimate. But around 40% of people haven't done a survey, and around 32% 30 32% have done them two or three times. The maybe once and they haven't done any surveys since COVID are split, they are shared. They're about 14%. And then three of you are sending your 3% of you are sending them almost every week or month, which is really interesting. And I love the KT called out that they are sending surveys twice a year for volunteers and clients. But they haven't done a donor survey yet, which I think is a really interesting approach. I love that. So yeah, it looks like things have kind of tapered off. I'm going to end this one. But one final counts. 41% of you haven't done a survey 14 and 15% of you have done it once or haven't done it since COVID, 27% of you have done it two to three times and then 3% of you do them very regularly.

23:34  
Awesome. Okay. All right. I'm seeing a thank you so much, Abby, for sharing that. And thanks for those who responded. Okay, I'm seeing. Um, all right. So we'll talk about all of this. We will talk about, I'll have some tips and how can you please I mentioned you place your surveys. But this is good information. We'll talk about that in a second. I have one more poll for you. If you must pick the current top priority of fundraising. Now, if you are not in fundraising, make your best guess, for your organization for your nonprofit. What would be what would that be bringing your donors retaining pandemic donors going back to pre pandemic giving levels and all those other good options? If there is something that you want to share in the chat? I'm going to keep an eye on the chat

24:26  
And yeah, it looks like so many of you are really focused on bringing in new donors, which is wonderful. And I love that so many of you around 20% of you are focusing on retaining pandemic donors, which is a big deal. A few of you are focusing on going back to pre pandemic levels and just a handful are looking to increase board giving. And a couple of you are interested in setting up online fundraising. That I love all of the comments about retention and In the chat, but by and large, the number one thing that you all are working toward is bringing in new donors to us that

25:09  
are affecting you so much, Abby, and thank you to everyone who engage them, looking at the numbers, bringing your donors and I'm also looking at the chat window. Um, thanks to everybody, that all the comments that I'm seeing when the surveys were done, and what is the priority right now? Well, let me tell you why I asked this question. Because this is an interesting question. And I asked us almost six to seven times every basically every conference that I do throughout the year, or every workshop that I do every 15 days, I asked this question. And usually the answers are somewhere between a B or ne, or sometimes C. But why do I ask this question? I the reason I asked this question is because again, surveys can true and how you set up those surveys can truly help you to answer your points for A, B, C, D, E, and I'm going to go back to the chat to see all the other responses. But you can really bring new donors of let's talk about bringing new donors. How can you do that quick one strategy I'll share now, but we can talk more about it. Maybe during this hour or after this, but I have used surveys to bring new donors. It's not always you have to do prospect research, which is important. I'm not saying you have to know how to research it is. But how do you pair that up with surveys? Well, one of the things when we are looking for new donors, most often the mind, our minds go into oh, we need new people to you know, fresh new people into our database. But here's the thing I always enable, or I always encourage my clients to first do a survey a survey, not just of their existing donors, because while they are looking for new donors, but a survey that goes out to that entire realm, that entire universe, entire set of audience to exist in that database, because most likely, your new donors would be easiest to come from the people who already know you who already understand your mission, who already are, in some ways, if not the most engaged, but in some ways your allies out there, and you want to talk to them you want to bring in for the for them to be your donors. And how do you do that you send out a survey to your entire audience, and then crosstab it with some of the data that already exists in your database around sad and stuff like that. And you pull those lists of people there you have it a list of people who are ready to become your donors. I have done this many times. And I've seen actually working it out pretty well. And then of course, you can pick it up an intentional prospect research. And I want to quickly also acknowledge something from the chat gets Maddie mentioned gaining larger donors and record recurring donors. It's also very interesting and a good question. And if you remember in the why I just mentioned that you could use melt screening, while we have used a question like your intentions to be our continuous donors. And where would you this is not a commitment you are making right now. But if you were to make a gift, what kind of range would you choose? And I promise you all I have come across surveys where the data brings back at least six to seven to 10. People who would say we are ready to make those big, larger gifts larger than the largest largest gifts are larger than the major gift thresholds. And we are ready to talk to the fundraisers or the representatives of the organization. So service can truly really help you. And let's talk about the strategies. How do you make all that happen? But before I jump into that section, let me share this that you need to have a frequency around your engagement surveys. Now I know some of you mentioned how you survey your respondents, and how you are how you survey your audience, but it's donors or volunteers. And I want to tell you that you really need to have a frequency around it. Because if you have, again, let's say volunteers or donors donors or volunteers, if that's happening, you want to be asking questions in a thoughtful way not multiple times, not having duplicate C's not having redundancy. So creating a frequency around the engagement surveys really helps. We can talk about what that engage free Oops, it should be because it really depends on your context. But we can talk about it when we get to the q&a part. Okay, so how does an inclusive survey look like? So survey competence, there are four major survey components, there are questions, right that we ask that we send out to our audience just to fill it up. Then there are surveys settings, how you set up that survey, right, whether it's a phone survey, or online survey or paper survey. Now I majority of the time work with online surveys, but regardless settings is a is a very important piece of the survey, where inclusion can happen. The third part is marketing and distribution, what channels you use, how you distributed, who gets the survey directly affects what you hear back and from whom you hear back on those surveys. And that creates a sense of inclusion or exclusion, depending on how we have set up and worked in our marketing and distribution. So it's a key piece when we are talking about inclusion. And then there is analysis. Now, we are not going to be talking about analysis, marketing, distribution and survey settings, because I really want to create more space for you to talk. And we will be only looking at some examples I have pulled for you from my past surveys for the questions. Sorry. But when you are doing a survey, I really want you to remember that questions, settings, marketing, distribution analysis, all contribute to for you to be making good, outstanding, amazing, inclusive, equitable surveys for your audience. So if you have questions around settings, marketing and analysis, please don't hesitate to reach out after the webinar, or maybe ask your questions in the q&a section. All right. So let's talk some strategies and best practices. But before I jump to that, two more polls for you. And I promise, these are fun, fun polls. So which is a better way of asking the same question about the new product offering, right. So I'm going to hold on, I'm going to show you two options here. One is a text box option of the same question. And the other one is a Likert scale rating, kind of a question of the new product offering. Now, which one do you think is a better way to ask is it question one? Is it question to both work? Neither words, and it's totally okay. If you say I'm not sure.

32:44  
Whew, I don't want to share their results out loud, because I don't want to impact your answers. But you guys are really good at this game. I'm gonna give you guys a few more seconds to think about it, and the

I'll close it out. All right. One more second. All right. So here are the results. Most of you it shows question to a few of you were torn. And then a couple of you weren't

33:16  
quite sure. Okay. Interesting. Thank you so much, Abby. All right. I'm going to remember that result because they'll talk about it. When we get to the strategy part. I have one more poll for you. And I don't know my screen froze. Oh, no, it didn't. Okay, so is this an effective survey? Question, one that's going to come in front of you, when you drink Diet Coke. Do you like it with ice?

Do you think it's an effective question or not? And it's totally okay. If you are not sure. Make your best guess. And we'll talk about it in a second.

33:55  
I'm not sure about this one.

33:58  
Okay, so we have one response.

34:04  
I love how many of you are participating in this. So we have a pretty even split. I'm gonna go ahead and close this out and share the results. You guys are pretty split between yes and no the maybes in that I'm not sure is for we're definitely outstripped by those two.

34:20  
Oh, interesting. Okay. All right. We have We are slipping those two. Okay, so let's talk in the strategy and then we'll come back to these questions.

All right. So when you are looking at strategies, right when you are at a place where you decide, okay, now I'm ready to do survey. Let's assume you don't have set of questions already before, right if you even if they apply, even if you have questions, some of them from the past and race. I want you to start here. I want you to start fine with defining the scope of the survey, I want you to start defining with the clarity of who designs the survey? And who gets the survey and why it's really important to also think about who is designing the survey? Because well, that also affects the equity part of the survey, right? Whose voice gets embedded in that data collection? If it's just, let's say me as an analyst? Is it just me? Am I designing the questions? Because chances are, I would be designing more maybe a little bit more, I will be tilted towards questions that will help me in the analysis? Or is it just the leadership or asking high level open ended questions, we want a mix of healthy questions that really truly centers the people who would be responding to the survey? So define your scope, define who designs the survey, define who gets the survey? And why are you doing the survey, and then design consent and confidentiality in those surveys when you are starting with those, and then extend it out to different segments. So I've talked to you about segments, and I'll show you an example. You can use logic when you are sending it out to multiple segments, and you can group them the questions for those segments. So here is an example. Now I'm going to be pulling examples from questions. From surveys that I have done in the past, and this one is coming from a project that I did for an organization based out of Chicago, the purpose of the organization is to support black female entrepreneurs. And the purpose of this survey was to send out this to the entire community, their audience, to find out how and where and what they feel about the organization so that the results could be taken to new investors, and bring them in for the support of the black female entrepreneurs in the community. So we sent it this survey out through the steam tool, instead of creating separate surveys for board members and community members and committee members, we created same one single survey. So we created these found out the segment's staff board committee volunteer, there could be people from the community who are not part of the Advisory Council, we created those. And we started using logic in our survey tool, it was an online survey to create grouping and created questions around it. You can have typically, you can have questions more than 25. That's okay, I have written here you do not have more than 2025. What I mean, really is that 20 to 25 questions for segments. So our survey in this case, the one example that I'm showing you had questions about I would say maybe 35, to 40. But every segment was not getting more than 20 questions at maximum. So 10 to 12 minutes, max. So that truly helps you to analyze the data when you bring it back and also help you if someone has two different kinds of affiliations with you. They don't need to answer questions and click on two different things for two different days. They could all do it through the same service. A wide double battle questions and include neutral wording. So let me give you some examples here. We talked about when you drink dipo Do you like it with ice? Now? It's not my client survey question. I didn't ask it in a client survey or any of the nonprofit actual surveys. But I wanted to show you here why it is not neutral wording. When you drink Diet Coke, do you like to practise it? Or it just assumes that you drink Diet Coke? What if you don't, right? And just doing an assumption and placing it in the question like that can really bias your data. double barreled questions are those when you ask two questions in the same questions and that can impact again the data that you get back so your question could be in here is an actual question that I found in one of the survey assessments I was doing for my clients. The purpose of the organization is to support bipoc entrepreneurs they are based out of here in Calgary, Canada. It's a Innovation Incubator kind of like a pink down kind of an organization. And they have heard this question What would help you try in building a business and or in a waiting? The problem with that question, and they used to ask this question to every bipoc entrepreneur to find out if they need financial assistance and how can they support this organization can support the problem then with this question, is that it is assuming that the bipoc entrepreneur knows what they need to try in building their business and innovating the answers to be different. I'm a bipoc entrepreneur. And I can tell you my answers are different if I have to talk about building my business, and innovating in my business, and if we have doubled our questions that's going to impact the data that you bring back in your database. A while leading questions and use simple words. So here are a few more examples is the same surveys question that I just talked to you about supporting Viper entrepreneurs. So one of the other questions were, what do you think the competitive advantages bipoc entrepreneurs or innovators have? Now? There are two problems with this question. It's not using simple word. And it's a leading question. It's assuming that the bipoc entrepreneurs have some sort of competitive advantage. So what do you think those advantages are? It's asking in that way, right? It can quickly alienate your respondents, if I would be reading this question, I would instantly think Well, I don't think I have competitive advantage for being bipoc entrepreneurs. So what is this question mean? We don't want that. So avoid those leading questions. And use simple words competitive advantage. What does that mean? If I again, if I would be putting in? I don't know if they want to know about my connections, the people I know the network financial advantage. Any other resources? What does that mean? So we want to be sure the words that we are saying is understandable to our audience, right. And when we do all of that, when we use simple words, and we avoid leading questions, when we are using neutral wording, avoiding double vowel questions, what we are truly doing is we are managing biases, right in the data that comes back. Right. And we are removing the burden from providing the most correct most accurate responses from our respondents, we are not putting pressure on other respondents to understand somehow, magically our intentions and give us the best responses, so we can act on those responses. So we are doing two things by doing the most simplest things, nothing here may be new to you, you may have come across all of these before. And it's really important, right? One more last question. How do we need to change or educate the system or sector our companies to leverage advantages of bipoc? Entrepreneur? This is another example of the same survey, right? And I'm going to say that out loud again, so I can show you how we could improve it. How do we need to change or educate the system or sector, our companies to leverage the advantages of bipoc entrepreneurs and innovators? Now? It's quite complicated questions. That's the first problem is quite complicated, right, too. It's putting burden on the respondents to think on the broader picture on what's missing and what needs to change. Here, we need a little bit more strengths based approach. Instead of having complicated questions to ask about gaps from your audience. What do you think is missing? And what do you think is the gap? Ask the ask your audience, what makes them feel accomplished, what makes them feel successful, so you can pull those themes later on to work on them and, you know, act on them. One of the examples that I've seen in most, a lot of donor engagement or alumni engagement surveys is when you get back responses, you can create appropriate affinity groups that will that your audience can relate to can participate in can engage in and then they can feel the you know, they can move towards their successful cells. Okay, let me keep moving forward. If you're asking demographic based questions, definitely, you need to share, not just you need to share, you need to start with the clarity you why you are collecting that information, make sure that you're only asking for permissible information like some provinces, some states and in the US, they do not allow for some social identity questions to be asked. And you need to make sure you are asking him only permissible information. Make sure to offer options like prefer not to respond identity not listed, it's really important to offer prefer not to respond because it's a very

subtle way to say to your audience that you are giving back the power to them, that if they choose not to share about the identity, which is the most personal information about them, they can so you want to bring that kind of inclusion in your data collection. You want to send that kind of message through your data collection that your choice is the most important factor in this data. And so You want to be able to give these options of prefer not to respond, identity not listed instead of using words like other. And most importantly, use open ended questions strategically I know it is tempting to have multiple, as many open ended questions as possible. But remember, it really puts more burden on your audience, especially if you are not going to be able to get through every open ended response and do something about it. Better not ask those questions and only ask if you know how you can tie it up with some action, for example, and I'll tell you that but the demographic base question, so you want to ask about preferred pronouns, right? Instead of asking, instead of asking an open ended way, you can offer an in our closed choice options, you can also leave it open ended, if you can act on it, if you can read it, if you can acknowledge those responses. If not, you need to be able to give that why just, you know, I'm writing that you need to share the White Sea above the question of personal pronouns, I want you to share that asking pronouns would allow the audience to get their badges for the event that's coming up or to be addressed appropriately in the newsletter when you personalize them. Give them a reason why they should be sharing something, information, some information with you with a why. And that can be possible if you are, you know, creating questions strategically.

All right. I so you have this tip. From my experience that I want to share with you is depending on the scenario, design your question, so here is an example. When did you scenario one, I'll quickly read it, but you will get the deck you will get the recording? To see it for yourself. So Scenario One is when did you make your last gift? That's a simple question, right? Answer option two, that question could be, I made a gift in the last five years and the last one to three years and all those with a with an option included there. I never made a gift, right? Scenario two, could be you first ask, have you made a gift to your organization? If the answer is yes. And then you follow up that better question there are two scenarios. Firstly, you're asking with tweaking something in the answer choice. Second one is you are first asking a question and then using logic to ask a follow up question. How you design your question. It depends on your context depends on how many people would be receiving the survey. Depends on how many other questions you have. So if you're coming across any situation like this it looks like

48:03  
as anyone, it looks like Mina may have frozen.

Do you also see that? Okay.

We'll give her a minute. That makes me feel better. It's not just me. Um,

48:17  
are you? Are you back? Can you hear me?

48:24  
I can. Now there's a little bit of a lag.

But there you go.

I think you're back. Okay.

48:32  
That's really fun. Okay. All right. Okay. Am I back? Alright,

okay, I'm back. Just so you know, I never left. I'm here. I'm wondering what's happening with the Internet. But I'm here. And I want us to have the space to talk to each other. So I'm going to wrap this with the promises. We talked about inclusion, we talked about intentional data collection. And what do I want you to do now, if you have never done a survey, start thinking of the kinds of tools that you can use to create your survey. So there are definitely Google Forms. There are definitely options like SOGO their options like Zoho Survey Monkey, I can do a competitive talk with you. Which one is better, um, immediate things that other things you can do right now is pick a past survey, if you have done a survey and find three to five opportunities to redesign it with inclusivity. Right. But inclusion, we went through couple examples, look at it with the same lens and then look at three to five pings. You could have derived from a past survey, you could have been brought out through a past survey to one or two data points that you have brought you could have brought out through the survey. It's not in a way for you to think oh, I missed an opportunity. It's more for you you to think? How can you apply all that you will learn today into a survey that you would maybe be doing in the next six to 12 months. So when you are going to do another survey in the coming months, with your other departments, that's the fundraising memberships all those kinds of good surveys. Pink, how can you combine the surveys paying? How can you bring your more audience into the survey? And pink? How can you apply all that we talked about today into those same surveys?

And I hope I'm not frozen this time.

All right, um, I have links for you that I will share with you. And we will be sending them out. But I want to talk to you about your experience. So if you have experience doing donor surveys, or if you have questions, please ask us your questions. I'm going to go and look at the chat window and see what are the questions and Abby, you can help me?

51:05  
Absolutely, we have a

couple of really interesting questions. And the first one has actually come up twice. So the question is, so people have the ability to do surveys, but they would like some recommendations on where and how to store the resulting data. So it's easily accessible when they want to use it, what would you suggest there?

51:27  
Okay, a couple of things that I would say there that can happen there. One is for you, so we never got to talk about the survey analysis here. Right. But when you do the analysis, I want you to go several different threads from the survey. It's not just the question wise analysis, but I want you to pull several threads starting with what are the IDS who responded, so you can map them back into your database with individual donors? Yes, we did a survey in 2023, they responded to it, yes, you can pull those that those data points would be really helpful to you later. Another thread that you can pull out of your analysis is who are the event attendees who want to volunteer with us and want to become donor because this is another example, you can pull that kind of an analysis, you can pull that kind of a list through your survey analysis and place those lists with the appropriate department. So if there, there is an interest for donors, and new donors, you can send that list to your philanthropy teams, and place that appropriately in the systems, marking them with the new members, whoever they are, that yes, they are ready to be donors, you really need to place your data. I'm sorry, I don't know what's happening with the internet and my voice. You need to place your data in you're not just in your survey tool, which you would have access to, but also pulling these different rates and placing them with the appropriate ideas in your database. And I can talk more off outside of this call and chat more of the technicalities of that. Perfect.

53:08  
We have one a couple questions that have come up. What is a good return rate for a survey?

53:15  
Great question, if it's an external survey, so two things I would say impacts here. One is how engaged with your audience already, if your audiences really engaged already, you know, you have been doing your work with talking to them, but connecting with them in different places, you will get a high response rate, regardless of whether it's an internal survey of just within your organization or external. But if it's, if you have been doing, I would say, a decent job, or you know, you have participants who are not as engaged, expect a response rate of something around three to 5%. If they're super engaged, external audience, your donors, your alumni, your members, and they are engaged, you can expect some paying close to 10 to 12%. On the contrary, the second factor that impacts is if it's an internal survey, you're surveying, let's say your volunteers who are more inner to your circle, they're more enter to your mother to your staff member if you can expect way higher percentage almost as high as I would say I've seen 50 plus percent to 60s at 65%. Because they are you have more chances to give them reminders and they're closer to your circle, as opposed to the external audience. That's really helpful.

54:33  
In John asked a question that kind of ties in with that answer. They asked how do you deal with a minimal amount of data? So if you don't get many returns, is there a way that you can use that data even if there's not a lot of it?

54:50  
Absolutely. That's a great question, John. So I would say look at it in two ways. One, what are the questions that the Is that where you are not getting enough responses? Well, let me actually take a step back, let me first tell you that there can be chances when you won't get enough responses. And that's okay. Please don't let that make you not do the surveys you if you're getting close to feeling you don't want to do the surveys again, come to me, I'll, you know, we pump you with good energy to do surveys again. But for this one, if you have gotten not as much data as you would have wanted to, there can be several things you can do with it. One is start with looking which questions did not have enough responses, let's say you did not get enough responses on the social identity questions, and it has happened. And I create a separate track to say how many respondents did not, you know, answer you on those social identity questions. It's kind of like saying, I did a survey in 20 2340 out of 100, people did not respond to it, or 60 out of 100, people did not respond to the social identity questions, track that, write it down somewhere, make a document and say, What was the response rate? Then when you do the same survey, again, in 2024, you may depending on all the things that happens between now and then your respondents may feel more comfortable to you, your audience may feel more, you know, aligning with your purpose, and they can respond much better, much more next year. So your response rate could improve on that question. Let's say the question is really low on some non social identity question. In that case, you can repurpose the same question and post it on social media. And ask those questions are posted on your newsletters and ask those questions or make it part of your email check in letter or part of your website? There are several things you can do, depending on the question, depending on the purpose of that question, to use, reuse and repurpose that survey. So if you have any specific question like that, I'm happy to take a look at it outside of this call.

57:07  
I love that you talked about repurposing and reusing your survey because someone did actually ask about how to do that they want to reissue a survey to the same cohort, but they don't want it to feel maybe repetitive. Would you take steps to update a survey that you had previously sent to a group of donors? Or if it's been a couple of years? Would you feel okay, just sending it as it was last time?

57:33  
Well, that's an amazing, amazing question. Because I do every few days, I would bring the audience you know, the grid, bring my community, like your subscribers and everybody and say, can you share your survey plan and then I would do a quick check of the survey plan. So I actually made a post on this. I don't have the link right now. But if you if you are available on LinkedIn, please find my post or from last week, I actually shared a full complete plan. If you're using your survey from the past and reusing it, what should you be doing? What should you be looking so I have like a checklist kind of a thing there. But I can share it here. Yes, you can use and reuse your survey that you have done in the past. You just need to create a good plan, you just need to make sure your audience will receive this updated, you might need to make sure your questions are updated in the terms of the language you're using in terms of who you are asking and what you're asking. And after revising some of those things, and I'll again, go for try to find where that link is. And I'll send it to Abby so she can include it tomorrow. But after you have those Yes, absolutely. You can use those. But don't simply take and send it out, have these things done in the middle, like doing a little bit of due diligence, doing a little bit of doing some homework in the middle and then you can absolutely use the questions that

58:58  
everyone I did just drop a link to Nina's LinkedIn profile in the chat. So you can go there and check out that post. We have went at the beginning of the of the presentation when you ask about people's priorities, a lot of folks reference wanting to use surveys to reengage lapsed donors. Do you have any specific recommendations for how to use a survey to kind of get that but group of people reengaged?

59:24  
Absolutely. So I do would take you back to that point of using the same survey and we have used this in some of my projects to the way we would do is send out a survey to your entire audience. Really the key starts there, send it out to your entire audience and then segmented and then logic logically divided and group itself. Say you include your past donors you know lapsed donors include your past board members include anybody who is not right now actively engaged with you, but have been in your database for some time. isn't, you know they exist in your database, send them out a survey. And let's talk about specifically lapsed donors, you can create questions for them understanding if they still want to offer their time and wisdom through volunteering, if they want to become your donor, again, if they're aware of the good work you have been doing since they lapse their donor donorship. And now that you have been doing new work, are they aware of that you can ask several questions. Especially you can ask if they are still interested to, or if they would need any specific support to become your donors. Again, maybe they just want to be asked again. Or maybe they just need more information about your mission or your work. So you can ask those very specific targeted questions to the people who maps and then you can take actions from better because believe me every time there are different threads and lists that can be pulled where you can add and do

something about it. That is beautiful.

1:01:05  
So we have time for one more question. I will acknowledge a couple of you have asked me about creating surveys in neon CRM, I'm gonna put my email address in the chat, please email me, I want to give you the best possible answers to your questions. The short answer is yes, you can create surveys in neon one, if you email me, I can send you some documentation on how to do that. I don't want you to think I'm ignoring you. But I want to make sure I get you the best possible answers to your questions. So email me and I'll get that there. We only have time for one more question.

1:01:37  
Oh, no, I have posted a link for they can find some of the questions as well. I know I'm going to send it to you too. So you can include it in the email as well. But if anybody we aren't I'm not answering any non CRM service related question is probably going to be that documented. I'm saying? Yeah,

1:01:55  
the last question I was going to ask me actually be answered in this link. A few people have asked if you have templates or formats, or something they can use to get started as they launch their surveys, or maybe even build their first ones.

1:02:10  
Yes, that's so the link that I just share with you has 52 most commonly asked questions around planning surveys and how you get started and what you do with the analysis, all those kinds of, you know, not the exact specific your donor questions, but everything that happens down, it's so you can have access to all of that. But if anything is not clear, or your questions are still there, which is not part of the document, you're always welcome to send me your questions. I know, we would be including my contact information. It's also here in this website. And I would be more than happy to answer all the questions.

1:02:48  
Wonderful. Everyone, check the chat again, I made sure to send that link. I had spent a fair amount of time in the last week exploring her site, and there's so much useful stuff there. All right, everyone, thank you so much for being so much fun today and for talking with us and for answering poll questions and for engaging and having conversations. It was a ton of fun. Mina, thank you so much. For this, I learned a ton. I built lots of surveys and I learned so many things today that will make my next surveys even better. Everyone I'm gonna leave the chat open for another minute so you can grab that link to her site and the link to her LinkedIn. Keep an eye out on your email inboxes the email with a link to the recording and slides and everything else will go out around 10am Eastern tomorrow morning. And then do of course feel free to share that with everyone. Thank you I know how busy you all are Mina, thank you for sharing your expertise with us. Everyone who attended thank you for spending time with us. I know your days are busy and you have a lot on your plate and I am so thankful for you being here today. Have a wonderful Wednesday and we will talk to you all soon.

1:04:01  
Thank you so much. Bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai