Fundraising / supporter studies

How do people choose which causes and organisations to support? How satisfied are our current supporters? What motivates our current supporters and how can we develop this relationship? How effective are our communications? What are the main reasons that donors lapse from supporting our charity? How do attitudes in supporters in the UK compare to those in Europe, Australia etc.? These are some of the questions our research can help to answer. A combination of qualitative and quantitative research often delivers the most powerful results on research of this kind.

Key case study: ActionAid International – Global strategic review

It’s all too easy for organisations to act in a vacuum, to feel they intuitively know who their supporters are, why they support and the future vision these supporters have for the organisation, without much actual empirical evidence to back up these beliefs. At nfpSynergy, we view stakeholder insight as a core part of the service we offer to our clients. . Facing a vital phase of strategic planning across the globe, ActionAid International commissioned us to conduct a vital stakeholder audit which was used to give a voice to staff within the organisation and to ensure their opinions and perspectives were an important part of the review process. This work for ActionAid International represented our first major international project.

Specifically, ActionAid International wanted to gauge the perspectives and recommendations of staff, partners and other key stakeholder groups across the globe. In order to achieve this, nfpSynergy designed an original quantitative research programme involving online and postal surveys (15 variants were produced in 5 different languages – French, Spanish, Portuguese and English). We received over 1,000 completed surveys from key stakeholders in over 20 countries (including more than 20 surveys in Vietnamese – a language which we did not translate the survey into) which represented the opinions of more than 1,000 key stakeholders of ActionAid International.

This research covered a wide range of topics including:

- how successful the organisation has been meeting its objectives
- to what extent its performance had improved in the past 5 years
- specific contributions ActionAid International had made to local environments and whether the organisation had the necessary skills to address local market issues
- whether the organisation was perceived to be transparent and accountable, cost-effective and innovative
- how effectively partnerships between ActionAid International and other organisations had been working
- recommendations for future directions and areas of work

The results of this project were presented to ActionAid International and provided vital information and analysis for their global strategic review.