Over a decade ago, the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) created the Donor Perception Report (DPR) in response to requests from community foundations for help to better understand and support their donors, recognizing that they play an essential role in generating impact in their fields and communities. Since then, CEP has surveyed more than ten thousand donors from nearly 90 community foundations and published research about drivers of donor satisfaction and likelihood to continue giving.

In recent years, one of the most common requests from community foundations we’ve worked with has been the opportunity to connect with peers about their practices, especially in areas of great success or meaningful change over time. While we always brokered these connections in response to individual asks, we decided in 2020 that it was time to transform this into a more standard part of our work. We began hosting annual “Community Conversations” with recent Donor Perception Report users with the goal of providing dedicated time and space to speak candidly about their experiences, generate ideas and share learnings across the field, and foster camaraderie by the connections made.

Over the past few years, community foundations have gathered to discuss building donor relationships in a virtual or hybrid environment, communicating about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and working with professional advisors.

Learnings from Our 2023 Donor Perception Report Users Community Conversation

The 2023 Community Conversation was focused on findings that have held true since CEP’s original 2014 research report on the importance of donor satisfaction, What Donors Value. Specifically, the goal of the time together was to unpack the two strongest drivers of donor satisfaction — staff responsiveness and donors’ perceptions of community impact — guided by light CEP facilitation and followed up with summaries of learnings.

Power in Diverse Perspectives: Donor Perception Report users from the past two years are invited to join each year’s conversation, which means there’s a lot of diversity in the group in terms of size, donors and communities served, geographic location and focus, and role of participant. This model contrasts with what we sometimes hear from funders who prefer to talk to other funders who are most like them.

Power in Preparedness: What struck me most immediately as we began our time together was participants’ willingness to share candidly about their work, contexts, and experiences. Participants did not shy away from what’s worked well and what’s been more difficult, including barriers to responsiveness to their donors related to organizational challenges in workload or changes in leadership or strategy.

Power in Peer-to-Peer Learning: Despite differences in their context or structure, similarities across funders were bountiful. For example, when discussing responsiveness, multiple funders used their DPR data as a starting point to gauge their current practice, implemented a 24-hour response time to donor inquiries, and sent holiday or anniversary cards to donors.

Read the full article about acting on donor feedback by Alice Mei at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.