Customer research is important for all sorts of reasons. It offers validation, uncovers new insights, maintains a dialogue with your customers, and provides a strategic direction for your organisation to follow. It is all too easy for us to roll up our sleeves and exclaim, “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go and do some research!”
Research can and does inform our strategic direction for weeks, months, years after the fact - this gives it a lot of power and clout in informing the direction an organisation goes in. And this is cause to be very careful of falling into the trap of Ticking Your Own Box.
Ticking Your Own Box is a term that means unwittingly constructing your research to look for only the evidence that proves your point or assumption, and not looking for anything that proves it wrong.
The challenge
The Life Flight Trust survives on donations. Retaining the amazing people who donate regularly was identified as the number one priority.
The solution
We worked with the Life Flight team to understand the values and motivations of their donors to enable more personalised communications and improve the experience of being a donor.
Our understanding of the different types of donors was captured in ‘values-based’ personas that honed in on the meaningful differences between individuals, in what is a very geographically and demographically similar donor base.
Every six hours, Life Flight takes off to provide free emergency air services to someone who urgently needs their help.
As it turns out, saving lives is expensive! It costs about $2,500 every time they collect a sick patient, or rescue a tramper lost in the bush. Life Flight is a charity, and 85% of their donation revenue comes from individual donors. The organisation is especially reliant on its regular givers, called “Red Angels”, to provide a reliable stream of income to keep things up and running from month to month. Life Flight came to Diagram with a goal; to solidify their donation revenue and keep a reliable cash flow coming in to keep up with the need for their emergency air services.
Who we worked with
Terri Rosenstock (Communications manager) and Sebastian Grodd (Marketing & fundraising manager) kicked off the project by outlining the challenge, then expertly combining our digital thinking with their deep knowledge of the sector and their generous donors. Not only did they bring their teams along on the journey, they brought great passion, humility and humour to the project!
Our approach
Our aim for the discovery phase was to better understand Life Flight’s donors, the way they were communicated to, and figure out how we could improve their relationship through Life Flight’s donor communication strategy.
By analysing Life Flight’s current donor data and running discovery workshops together, we discovered that Life Flight’s donor base is quite demographically similar, and so traditional personas that focused on things like age, gender, and location weren’t going to cut it.
Traditional personas that focused on age, gender, and location weren't going to cut it. Instead, we focused on the donors' values and motivations for donating.
Instead, we decided to focus on the donors’ values and motivations for donating, in order to build our donor personas.
We then conducted insight interviews with 6 randomly selected donors, one on one. We needed to validate our assumptions, and make sure our hypothetical “straw man” donor personas were based in reality, not pulled from thin air.
We also needed to be on the lookout for anything that we had initially missed about Life Flight donors, or anything that disproved our assumptions. We needed to make sure our hypothetical “straw man” donor personas were based in reality, and not pulled from thin air.
Our interviews enabled us to compare responses, and the data began to highlight some very important and fundamental differences between the donors and their values.
The sorting machine
After our qualitative research, it was time to gather quantitative data to enlarge our sample size, and truly validate our personas. We worked with Life Flight on an online survey that asked a range of questions for regular data collection, and at the same time ‘sorted’ respondents into the different persona groups.
The most critical response that determined a donor’s persona group was whether a donor thought more about Life Flight’s services in the context of themselves, or more in the context of other people. This meant that ultimately, one multiple-choice question with carefully considered answers determined their persona: “What is the main reason you donate to Life Flight?”
Ultimately, one multiple-choice question with carefully considered answers determined their persona.
We had created a “sorting machine” —a single, simple question that enables Life Flight to more effectively communicate with new donors from the moment they sign up.
Project outcomes
Life Flight are able to segment their communications by persona group, for more personalised, tailored communication with their donors that appeals to an individual’s base motivation for donating.
Using a digital channel for the donor survey increased the volume of responses received to almost double that of the 2015 survey and reached a younger audience.
The digital channel also enabled Life Flight to associate survey responses back to the individual donor for the first time, which builds more detailed data profiles for their donors.
If you want to examine the way you communicate with your customers, let us know and we can help. The first step might be a casual coffee to talk through your options, or a discovery workshop to map out your customers’ journey & draw out insights from your team.
Drop us a line and let’s talk
about how you can get started.
