We’re big fans of individual supporter interviews to help you gain insight on your supporters. Over the years we’ve conducted hundreds on behalf of our clients. I’ll never forget the stunned looks on a management teams face when I played multiple recordings of supporters completely contradicting what they were convinced people thought about their cause and reasons for supporting them. Fortunately they heeded the advice and avoided a very expensive (and public) campaign mistake.

We know not everyone always has the budget to employ consultants to do such interviews (do get in touch if you would like help with this), so we’ve prepared this free guide so you can have a go at doing them yourself. Do let us know how you get on!

A word on focus groups (and why we don’t like them)

We prefer supporter interviews to focus groups, in fact, we’d recommend not using such groups at all. Not only are they hideously expensive and time consuming, there are also lots of other reasons why they just don’t deliver meaningful insight. Here is a good summary on why we’re not fans.

Choosing your questions for your interview

The first thing you need to establish is why are you doing these interviews. What purpose and insight are you looking for?

You can then start to think about what questions you will need to ask to achieve this. We recommend you ask open questions that encourage a conversation.

If you must use closed questions (we’ve included one in the example) then make sure you have a good follow-up question.

Always start with an easy opening question that builds rapport and a chance for the person to talk. You’ll be amazed how long a person can talk for given the freedom to do so! Similarly, the more comfortable someone feels the more chance they’ll open up and share information that they might not otherwise.

You can download our sample interview pdf now. This is for a charity who wants to understand what motivates someone to support them.  

Qualities of a great interviewer

You can do supporter interviews in-house, but make sure that the person interviewing isn’t too close to the supporter. For example, if you met them once at an event that would be fine, but an account manager would not.

If you have the following qualities, then you’re hired for the job!

• Innate sense of curiosity

• Intrinsic interest in learning how things work

• Understand the dynamics that determine how decisions are made

• Open minded to possibilities not known or considered

• A journalist’s sense of inquisitivity and ability to ask probing follow-up questions

Do your preparation

Make sure you do your preparation before undertaking your interview. Here’s a checklist of things you may find useful to know in advance:

Date of first gift:

Reason for gift:

Number of gifts:

Amount of gifts:

Any particular areas of interest?

Any social information? Check their Linked In profile etc in advance of the interview.

Practice

We always recommend you practice interviewing a colleague before speaking with a supporter. This will help you test your questions and your active listening skills. You could base it on a charity your colleague supports, so you get real answers to the questions.

We recommend doing this with a minimum of three people so there is one interviewer, one donor, and one observer.

This is not a role play, but the person will be conducting an actual interview with a colleague.

One person will observe and give feedback at the end.

People will then switch roles so everyone gets a turn.

This will give people the chance to see the importance of active listening and experience what it is liked to be interviewed.

Hints and tips for conducting your interviews

We always recommend you record your interview (you can do this easily on Zoom for example) and then use a service such as Rev to transcribe the interviews. This means you can concentrate on listening and not taking notes, which should just be used to jot down potential follow up questions to ask.

Here are some other tried and tested tips to help you conduct your supporter interview:

• Use the person’s name when asking some of the questions to build rapport.

• Use empathy appropriately – “Yes, it seems like every trust/corporate is inundated with requests. What impact does that have on your work?”

• Take notes on potential follow-up questions and use the supporter’s own words to ask those follow-up questions.

• Don’t interrupt. If you want to ask a follow-up, make a note and take the person back to that. i.e. “NAME, you told me a few minutes ago about x, what was important about that?”

• People will naturally stray – let them! Use the above techniques to bring people back to the topic you are interested in.

• This is all about active listening. Avoid all distractions.

• Go slowly. Clarify. Ask follow-ups. Deviate when you judge it necessary.

• Use phrases such as ‘Tell me more about…”, “What was important about….”, “How did you decide…” “What consequences might result if Teach First do/don’t x, y, z”

• Avoid jargon and phrases that supporter won’t use i.e. journeys, personas etc

• Don’t fill silences. They may feel awkward, but often supporter might take up the slack and give you additional detail. A little “uh-huh” or “That’s interesting…” might provoke a further response.

• You don’t have to stay on script – go with the flow and see where it takes you. You can always return later to specific sections that we need to cover and use supporter’s own words to clarify. “You told me a few minutes ago….tell me more about that.”

• Ask follow-ups. Why, why, why! Even if you’ve heard the answer from other supporter’s before.

We hope you find this guide useful. Supporter interviews are just one of the research techniques we recommend to uncover the insight you need to deliver great fundraising.

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