Suppose that your organization is a small historical society that organizes exhibits and panel discussions at three libraries in your town, publishes a quarterly newsletter, and maintains a website featuring news and information about its collection. Your current constituents (or stakeholders, if you want to use a common nonprofit term), working from the core to the outer boundaries, include the following:
- Your board and staff (and their friends and relations)
- Your docents and volunteers
- Families and organizations that donate materials to your collection
- Local library staff and board members
- People attending your panel discussions
- Schools and other groups visiting your exhibits
- Scholars and other archivists writing to ask about your holdings
- Patrons of the three libraries
- Subscribers to your quarterly newsletter
- People visiting your organization’s website
- Creating a database of your supporters by gathering names and addresses from every possible source within your organization — items like checks from donors, subscription forms from online newsletter subscribers, sign-up sheets from volunteers, and email messages sent to the “contact us” address on your website.
Enter these names and addresses in a database that can sort them by last name, type of contact, and date of entry; if you’re planning to send traditional mail to them, sort them by zip code. Articles at Idealware can help you choose a database software program.
Review the zip codes appearing most frequently on your list. If you’re in the United States, you can visit the U.S. Census Bureau website and get demographic information about residents in those zip code areas.
- Asking a few standard questions of schools or other groups when they call to sign up for a tour. Don’t engage in a lengthy interview, but find out how they heard about your program, why they want to visit it, and whether they have other needs you may be able to address. You can gather similar information when collecting registrations online.
- Inserting brief, clearly worded and inviting surveys in the programs at your public events. At the beginning and end of an event, make a public pitch explaining why it’s so important for people to respond to the surveys. Make pencils or pens available. Create incentives for completing the form, such as a free museum membership for a person whose survey is drawn at random.
Make it easy for visitors to your website to subscribe to announcements or services, and send a brief survey to them by email. The higher your response rate, the more accurate and useful the survey information will be.
Your surveying may be quantitative (measuring the degree to which people do something or believe something) or qualitative (going deeper into understanding their beliefs and behaviors). Generally quantitative surveys are distributed and collected — either as paper documents or online — and qualitative surveys are presented by an interviewer in a guided conversation.
Be aware that there’s an art and a science to writing an effective survey: The way questions are worded can influence the answers you get, and you want to receive clear, candid responses. If you want help developing your survey, check with local colleges and universities for faculty members or graduate students who understand survey techniques and who may be willing to give you some guidance.
You can also find survey subscription services and sample surveys on the web that give you ideas about wording questions. Three such services are SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, and SurveyGizmo. Each offers somewhat different features and pricing models. All of them will distribute your surveys by email and tally the results for you.At the Nonprofit Kit page at Dummies.com, you can find two sample surveys that may suggest wording for your survey questions.
