Don't let the communications department hijack your survey!

Fundraising surveys are easy to get wrong. 

There is one rule - above all others - that you should know and commit to memory before you begin.

Rule No. 1:

NEVER let your communications or brand teams know that you are developing a survey.

They will get involved, they will get excited and they will hijack your survey.

Should you need to defend the integrity of your survey, consider these discussion points which might rationalise why your fundraising survey shouldn't include market research questions:

1. "I'm sorry, [Insert name of communications person here], there are only 12 to 15 questions in my survey and there is no room for your brand learnings"
• By mail, the audience is likely to be older and your fonts will need to be 14pt. So there won't be enough room for questions about supporters' income, or which newspapers they read
• If sending email, the survey must be short to ensure you keep them engaged. You should assume that the online attention span of your supporters is far too short to be asking them questions about how much time they spend online.
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2. "Do we have enough supporters for the results to be statistically significant?"
• Whether the response volumes within key segments are large enough to accurately compare or not is irrelevant. Your communications and brand colleagues probably don't know enough about your the donor base to have an answer to this question.
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3. "How will you make sure that the responses aren't biased to the most responsive donors?"
• Research by direct marketing is fundamentally flawed because the people who respond are already your best supporters
• As a fundraiser, you already know how to contact the most responsive prospects. What you don't know is how to exclude all the people who won't donate
• What would be far more interesting for communications and brand marketing is a survey of the people who don't reply to emails or direct mail. These people could tell you what the rest of the country thinks about your cause and that might influence their marketing and communications strategies.

Marketing and communications surveys can be very valuable to not-for-profits and the insights might support brand design, engage board members and help drive awareness strategies. But there is no room for marketing questions in fundraising surveys.