Before we get going, a question: Do you feel your charity is on top of contactless payments? I’ve yet to meet anyone who does. The problem is that technology is changing our supporters’ expectations so fast faster than ever before. Where we used to sign for our purchases, we then just used a pin number, now we just tap or use our phone or watch. There’s a KFC in China where you can pay for your fried chicken with your face!

How do we enable ourselves to keep up with our supporters ever increasing expectations? NOT by creating a plan - it’ll go out of date before it’s even written.   Instead you need to get clear about what success looks like in supporter experience so you can be agile in how you get there. Instead, you need a vision.

Here I’m going to give you techniques to create a kick-ass vision for your supporter experience with principles for how to make it work hard for you plus ideas to get you started.

So, ditch your plan and set a vision for supporter experience. Easy right?!…. I know from experience that doing this sort of thing in a charity feels painful. The key here is to do it differently. Below are the 3 things I’ve learned that will make your vision meaningful and also efficient and fun to create:

1. Prioritise

2. Co-create

3. Iterate

1. Prioritise

Now more than ever, you can’t be everything to everyone so keep things lean and work on one thing first. Which one set of supporters do you want to delight first? Which single interaction would add most value if you improved it first?  What one emotion do you want supporters to feel most of all?

This is all about creating meaningful change quickly around one thing before you move on to the next once it’s finished. In agile we call this ‘maximising the amount of work not done’. 

List the options for things you could focus your vision on then prioritise by:

• Set one criteria (eg how quickly you could make progress) and score them using that

• Plot them quickly onto an ease and impact matrix

• Have staff and supporters vote on which they’d prefer you to start with

2. Co-create

Now you know what your vision will start by focusing on, develop your vision with the people who are going to implement it and be affected by it. This is likely to include other people who have a hand in supporter experience, decision makers and, most importantly, the supporters themselves!

By doing this you’ll vastly increase the chances of success because by, involving supporters, your vision will be based on real insight not your assumptions. This doesn’t need to be a big job - just ask the next 6 supporters you speak to for their feedback. Also by involving staff they’ll  understand what you’re doing and why. 

Some tools you can use to do this have key people:

• Add things to a Product vision board for supporter experience at your organisation

• Answer the What, How and Why of your organisations supporter experience

• Use our worksheet to have everyone write what the front pages of a newspaper would say if your supporter experience vision became a reality

3. Iterate

Now, most importantly of all, iterate.  By this I mean keep updating your vision based on what you learn from using it. This is the joy of it - it’s never finished and it never needs to be.

Don’t spend time refining and perfecting your vision.  Instead, put it somewhere it can constantly be updated (a Googledoc, Mural board, whiteboard in the office on the wall with Post Its..). Then, before it feels ready, start using it then update it based on what you learn. 

Ways you could iterate your vision as you use it:

• Use your vision to prioritise every piece of work that comes into your team then update your vision based on whether that’s helpful

• Use your vision with your stakeholders to show why you’re making certain decisions, then update it based on what they say

• Use your vision to guide conversations with supporters. Update it based on what you learn from them.

So there you have it. How to set yourself up to create supporter experience that will keep up with your supporters rapidly changing expectations. Trying to predict and plan won’t cut it anymore. Instead, set a first draft vision then sense and respond as you use it . I promise you it’ll be more fun than how you’ve been doing it before, too. 

Let me know how you get on…

Eleanor Gibson