Survey for donors post donation

Hi ​@Dalila 

In my experience, donor surveys are super useful, as long as you keep them short and plan to use the answers.

Are donor surveys worth it?

Yes, if you’re clear on what you want to learn. I’ve seen them help orgs figure out things like:

• Why people give

• How they first heard about you

• What they want to hear more about (stories, programs, policy, events, etc.)

You won’t get answers from everyone, and that’s totally fine. Even a small slice of recent donors can show helpful patterns.

Survey in the thank-you email?

I like using the “thank you” moment, but I try not to overload the receipt email.

Things I’ve seen work:

• A very small survey link in the receipt:
  “If you have 2 minutes, tell us what inspired your gift today.”

• Or a separate email a day or two later:
  Subject like “Thanks again. Can I ask 3 quick questions?”

Either way, keep it to 3–5 questions. For what you’re trying to learn, I’d include:

• “What inspired your gift today?” (open text)

• “How did you first hear about [Org]?” (multiple choice + Other)

• “What do you most want to hear about from us?”

The big thing is to close the loop later: share back a quick “Here’s what we heard from donors and what we’re doing with it.” That builds a lot of trust.

Does it help with new/retained donors?

On its own, the survey doesn’t magically boost numbers. The value comes from what you do with the info:

• Targeting channels that donors actually name (social, events, word of mouth, etc.)

• Tailoring follow ups based on what people care about

• Spotting “super engaged” folks you might want to invite to events, deeper updates, or 1:1 outreach

When orgs actually use the survey data in their segmentation and messaging, I’ve seen it help with both retention and smarter acquisition.

Can EveryAction help with this?

Yes. In EA you can:

• Build a short survey as an Online Action / form and link it from your thank-you or follow-up email. (Smartlink would be great here to help streamline the submission process!)

• Store the answers on the donor’s record (custom fields, activism data, etc.).

• Use Targeted Email to send a follow-up survey just to recent donors, first-time donors, sustainers, etc.

• Segment later by “how they heard about you” or “what they care about most” and send more targeted campaigns.

We regularly use them. In addition to what Torvic mentioned, it has also helped us with making sure gifts are designated correctly and are respecting donor intent. Our team has also used it to help with identification and cultivation. 

We’ve tried the same, and we’re looking at bringing it back. We’d set it up through EA’s Automations tool, but it gave us several issues. Every Action tends to be very, very particular in deciding what donations create a new profile - if someone uses a different email address than normal, credits a nickname vs a full name, adds more than one first name in the box (“Peggy & Jane” “Smith” vs “Peggy” “Smith”), or makes any other sort of major change, EA will create a new profile.

The issue there is that EA may flag “new” donors and quickly send a survey through the automation… even if they’ve been giving for 30 years and just changed their address. After a couple of very awkward “oops” moments with longtime donors, we abandoned the automated new donor email until we could iron out those sorts of issues.

If you’re just looking at every donation in a short period (ex: everybody who gives between January - March), consider people who make monthly gifts, etc. 

TLDR: They’re great in theory if you can set them up correctly! EA Automations will probably be your best bet (and you could set up a “wait X days” feature like ​@torvic vardamis mentioned), but you’ll want to really make sure that it’s working exactly as you want it to, or risk some awkward interactions.