Your nonprofit brand is so much more than your logo or your marketing materials. Your brand is an idea that lives in the mind of your audience, and that idea is defined by how your members experience, engage with, and remember your organization.
For membership nonprofits, understanding your members’ experience can both serve as a bellwether and a blueprint for the direction of your nonprofit brand.
Membership surveys, whether they’re conducted annually, ahead of rebrand, or following an initiative, play a critical role in providing nonprofit communicators with the insights they need to guide their brand and amplify their impact. We’ve compiled a list of resources and tips you can use to build a nonprofit member survey to gain meaningful insights into the experience of the people who make up your organization.
List of Resources and Tips for Your Nonprofit Membership Survey
1. Set Survey Goals and Objectives
A strong nonprofit member survey starts with clearly defined goals and objectives. You can begin by defining the scope of your survey: Do you want general member feedback (an annual survey) or input on something specific, like a new initiative? From there, you can set your primary goal: What do you hope to learn from a member survey? Next, you can set some more specific objectives. For example, a primary goal could be to understand why volunteering is low and an objective could be to understand why a volunteer’s onboarding experience made them volunteer again. Learn more about setting survey goals and objectives here.
2. Engage Your Community in the Survey Creation
Inviting feedback and ideas from stakeholders, select members, and teams across your nonprofit will help make sure your survey includes all the critical questions necessary for understanding your members’ experience. A brand built democratically—with inclusive communications—is a brand built to last. And surveys are no exception. A diverse range of perspectives and ideas can strengthen any survey, and in turn, the survey can strengthen the strategic decisions regarding your nonprofit brand. This can be as simple as sending your survey around in a google doc, but it could also be a brainstorm with your team, which we have tips for here.
3. Use Ethical Nonprofit Member Survey Best Practices
To build an ethical nonprofit member survey, you can open by communicating to your base: the purpose of your survey; the voluntary nature of the survey; the efforts you and your team are taking to maintain member privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity; and how you intend to use the survey results or share any findings with members. You can even leave room for your survey participants to express how they feel about the survey itself. Check out some best practices for writing unbiased questions as well as other considerations you can make to build a survey that reflects your organization’s commitment to its members.
4. Research New Questions to Include
Finding inspiration for new questions that will help you better understand your members’ experience is especially useful if you’re sending out an annual survey. While you’ll likely already review last year’s questions and search for new ones (and we’ve found a helpful list for new ones here), your research can also come from the members themselves. Think about member trends that you’ve noticed and consider whether or not they’re worth exploring in your survey. For example, did your base love one campaign but not really respond to another? You can use your member survey to better understand their motivations for these and any other noteworthy trends.
5. Write Questions Concisely and Aim for Clarity
When we make nonprofit member surveys accessible, palatable, and comprehensible to all of our members, we can elevate the voices that might otherwise get lost on the margins. Clear, concise questions that avoid jargon or technical terms can mitigate the confusion that leads to drop offs mid-survey. Limiting the number of questions to around 10-30 questions will also help prevent survey fatigue. You can try putting yourself in the shoes of a brand new member who’s opening this survey between childcare or meetings—where would you close the browser when it’s crunch time? Maximizing nonprofit member survey participation leads to a more accurate, holistic picture of your members’ experience.
6. Pick a Survey Tool that Works for You
From Google Forms to Survey Monkey, there are plenty of survey tools out there. You can check out a list of options here, but it will all depend on your nonprofit’s needs, budget, and survey size. Some other considerations you could weigh are: the platform’s security, the user interface, customization, and the granularity of analytics provided. Even if you have a platform that works for you, it might be worth periodically exploring other options to see if there are any features that might improve your nonprofit member survey. Of course, as the saying goes: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If your nonprofit has been using a platform that works for you, then there’s no need to switch.
7. Try Segmenting Members
Member segmentation is especially useful for larger nonprofits with diverse programming and several channels for engagement. Tailoring questions leads to targeted feedback. When you’re building your member survey, you can consider segmenting based on how they’ve engaged with your nonprofit—did they volunteer, donate, phone bank, or sign a petition? You can also segment based on things like location, length of membership, and more. Segmenting will help you identify and understand whether or not a trend is isolated to a certain group of members, it lets you address members’ unique needs and interests, and it can ultimately help inform strategic decisions for your nonprofit brand.
8. Make an Action Plan for Results
Once the hard work of building your nonprofit member survey is over, you get to move onto the fun part: Making a plan based on your members’ experience! Of course, you’ll probably do the basics: analyzing results and identifying challenges, opportunities, and trends. And from there, you can share findings with staff, members, volunteers, and other stakeholders to be true to your team’s transparency commitments. Then, you get to the heart of it all: How can your survey findings help shape your nonprofit brand? A brand, after all, is shaped by your members’ experience and defined by how they remember your nonprofit. You can check out some resources for strengthening your members’ experience here.
Closing Thoughts:
Member surveys are vital windows into the everyday experience of your nonprofit’s base. With a clear, concise, ethical and unbiased survey, you can open up your (metaphorical) office door to hear the thoughts, ideas, and feelings from everyone who identifies with your nonprofit’s mission. And a member survey doesn’t need to be one-and-done; strong brands start conversations—they don’t just ask questions. If you continue being curious about your members’ experience, you’re on the road to building a meaningful member experience that lets you amplify your impact together.
