Pareto Customer Care Report Revealed - Advertorial
31 October 2005 at 12:10 pm
Pareto Fundraising’s Customer Care evaluation has found that Australian and New Zealand charities often fail to provide adequate service to their supporters.
Pareto set out to measure charities’ ability to handle donations and enquiries from their supporter base and the general public anonymously contacting a variety of organisations and monitoring the responses they received as “Mystery Shoppers”.
In May 2005, armed with real credit cards and bank accounts, the Pareto team of mystery shoppers approached 62 selected charities using email, telephone and mail.
They then attempted to do 4 things – make a single cash gift, make a regular cash gift, find out about leaving a bequest and make a general inquiry.
So how did the charities do as an industry? Response times were found to be slow and in many cases donors weren’t even thanked for their gift!
The complete findings were presented at Pareto’s October Masterclass, but here are some of the more noteworthy findings:
– 38% of charities did not respond to a request to set up a regular gift
– When setting up a regular gift, the mystery shoppers were thanked only 58% of the time when donating over the phone, 45% when donating by mail and just 37% by email.
– 19% (by email) and 16% (by mail) of charities didn’t respond to offers of a cash donation
– One charity took 70 days to confirm that the donation had been processed
– 34% of inquiry letters went unanswered
– One charity took over 2 months to respond to an enquiry
– 24% of charities did not respond to a request for information about leaving a bequest
This Customer Care project has been the first of its kind in Australia and New Zealand. Ultimately, Pareto’s aim is to raise the bar in fundraising, maximising the income that charities receive from their supporters.
Enhancing your ability to listen to your supporters and give excellent customer service will mean fantastic results not only for your charity but for the entire sector.
Mystery Shopping Results
To obtain a copy of the headline results from the Pareto mystery shopping exercise, please contact masterclass@paretofundraising.com
If you would like to find out whether your own organisation was mystery shopped, just contact wasimysteryshopped@paretofundraising.com
Personalised Reports for Organisations Involved
If you would like to find out how your organisation fared individually, Pareto Fundraising will present a custom-made report on the findings of our Customer Care & Benchmarking exercise.
The report will contain a detailed analysis of the overall results, analysis of your individual charity’s response to each of the 12 scenarios, industry comparisons and competitor analysis plus recommendations for improvement. For a full proposal (including price and timeline), please contact Project Manager Jonathon Grapsas at jonathon.grapsas@paretofundraising.com
