The Agitator tipped me off to an interesting free tool from Donor Voice.

This feedback widget allows you to place a customizable survey on your site. We built a similar tool at Masterworks, but with a different purpose.

The Donor Voice tool is designed to ask someone about their experience once it is complete. The Masterworks tool was designed to gather visitor intent.

Caveat emptor: there is no such thing as a free lunch, and you should expect a sales call from Donor Voice as the cost of using this free service. You are also giving them access to your satisfaction data, certainly helpful in the sales process.

The setup is short and you can be online in a matter of minutes. Partially it is so easy to setup because you don’t get to choose any of the questions that are part of the survey. The four questions the survey does ask are general enough to work for any organization:

This content is owned by Donor Voice so don’t steal the questions. Also don’t worry about the red and black background, those are the customizable parts of the survey.

The automated email was also fairly general, but was responsive to how I filled out the survey. You can only fill out the survey once per IP address, so I had to use a Web Proxy service to see the other responses.

If you fill out the survey with good marks, the response suggests that the constituent donates, without a link to do so.

I think the lack of choices here is a great thing. Constructing surveys is harder than most people think and the constraints mean that organizations won’t create something bogus.

I believe two simple improvements would make this tool even more effective. The first is to ask the donor if they donated today.

The second is to add one more field to the setup process: donation URL. The last line of the email when someone responds with good marks says:

Will you please consider donating today in support of our continuing efforts to…

If the text “please consider donating today” was linked, the email would make that donation a one-click action.

And with that, you can see why asking if the individual donated matters. If I had just given a gift, and it wasn’t acknowledged by this email, it would most likely diminish donor loyalty. The very thing the survey is trying to measure and increase. By asking if I have donated, the last line could be changed to something like:

Thank you so much for donating to support our efforts to…. Your continued support is vital to your success.

However, these small things don’t preclude me from recommending that nonprofits who accept donations on their website (and if you don’t let’s talk) experiment with this tool. One way to ease into it would be to show it not to every user on your site but it a subset of users.

If you are thinking about implementing this tool and need any technical help, just let me know