Dear Causes: Please Share Your Cause Exit Survey Data With Nonprofits

I get a lot of email and I'm looking for ways to cut back.  One of the ways is to stop getting email alerts or "announcements" from many, many causes that I'm a member of.     

So, yesterday, after getting two announcements in a row from the same organization that should know better, I went to change my preferences but by mistake ended up leaving the Cause.  Clicked the wrong button.    I was surprised to see the above exit survey pop up.  This would be valuable data to share with nonprofits - especially the data set for the specific cause as well as the aggregate.   And, if they were a little bit more transparent - they could get some feedback about to shape this exit poll more effectively.

The data would  certainly help fine tune nonprofit's strategy using Causes and figure out whether email announcement blasts turn people off or encourage a closer connection.    Geez, it might even help us start to look figure out some benchmarks.

So I asked them on Twitter.

At least they are thinking about it. 

And hopefully, I might get the ear of some folks at Causes, I'll also put in this feature request:

Causes should create a feature where when a user donates to a cause, Causes puts something up on the screen that says, do you want to become a fan of this Cause’s facebook page? And links to it.   The integration between Facebook Fan Page and Causes isn't quite there yet.    I had to jump through a few geeky hoops to get a customized Tab for the Sharing Foundation on my Fan Page.

Comments

[Will Hull - United Cerebral Palsy eCommunications/eDevelopment Specialist]

I agree. Providing performance metrics, even if they are exit metrics would help refine and improve the learning curve that so many of us are already on. Also, it would be great to have a way to verify fan pages as the official fan page versus one that you might be competing with that was set up by a fan rather than the actual organization. Something like Twitter has with a verified seal or wording that you can only get with verification. We don't want to stop fans and supporters from setting up their own, but we do want to make sure that fans and supporters join the right pages to get the official scoop on what is going on with that organization and organization representatives are officially thanking the supporter for their support.

Thanks for mentioning this. I'm with you.

[Grace Kennedy - The Wellness Community Valley/Ventura]

Thank you for sharing your idea for automatically giving Cause members the option to become fans. I hope Causes can do something to make the connection more...existent.

[Melinda Lewis]

Absolutely important--I'd add a response about whether some particular request/activity offended/repelled someone, I think--that's what nonprofits are often worried about, but I wonder how often that really happens. Thanks for your advocacy on this!

[Beth Kanter]

I think it would be really great to let folks customized their own survey too ..

[Dylan Conn]

I am a cause admin and I do get the data from this exit survey, along with other stats about how many members join and donate each day. Maybe Causes is only testing it with a small number of causes and that's what "we're playing around with it" means.

[Beth]

That's great to know! The information in aggregate would be useful a lot of
folks - a good way towards establishing some benchmarks. Also, would you be
interested in doing an interview about how you're using that information and
how it helped you improve your strategy? B

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 3:46 PM, wrote:

[Garth Moore]

Thanks for asking, I think a lot of groups wanted to know this info and didn't have the clout to get a response.

[Ryan Quiel]

I am also getting this information, which is very helpful when you are a non-profit and purchasing banner ads. Here is what we have so far in the last week or two:

61 people say
* "I was never that interested."
49 people say
* "I get too many announcements."
39 people say
* "There isn't enough activity or content."
24 people say
* "This cause is no longer relevant."

Very few wrote their own opt-out comment. It is hard to decide to email more or less with the two middle bullets conflicting. In my mind, I might go with more notifications, rather than emails from now on.

Coming from the email marketing world though, the opt-out rate to opt-in rate is well below 1%, so no drastic measures need to be made in the near future.

[Beth]

Thanks for sharing your insights. What do you think your opt out rate is
for your cause? I wonder if you get more people leaving after you email
them?

Beth

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 10:29 PM, wrote: