By definition, response handling is the process by which you manage interactions with your charity supporters.
Responses from your supporters can come in a variety of formats, from a completed form to a cash or direct debit payment, a letter, survey, email, request, or even a question.
A well-executed response management strategy and strong donation experience can have an incredible impact on your charity’s overall success. Likewise, poorly handled response management can be a risk to your charity’s reputation.
Luckily, here at Woods Valldata, we’re experts in response handling services and have extensive experience of helping charities their response handling.
With that in mind, we’ve pooled our knowledge into the seven top tips below to help you ensure your response handling is the best it possibly can be.
7 of the best response handling tips for charities
1. Strike the right balance between speed and accuracy
First things first, speed is vital in any response handling scenario. In terms of processing donations and forms, this will ensure you remain in control and have the time you need to focus on your charity’s growth.
What’s more, the sooner you react to contact from a supporter, the greater the sense of value and importance to your charity they will feel.
This includes everything from picking up the phone quickly and answering emails within a short time frame, to sending thank you letters as soon as possible after receipt of a donation and processing returns in a timely manner.
However, it’s important that this speed doesn’t affect the quality of your response handling, as this will only lead to more time being lost trying to recover from any errors made.
Here at Woods Valldata, we have the best technology in place to support with this and our experienced client team are on hand to get things up and running quickly and accurately to ensure the best possible outcomes for your charity.
2. Keep data protection and compliance at the forefront
This may seem obvious, but the importance of data and donation security and the repercussions of this going wrong are not to be underestimated.
Ensure your team are trained up on all your security measures and know the steps they need to take and regulations they must abide by to ensure data and donations are kept tightly under lock and key.
If you’re undertaking a weekly lottery or raffle specifically, you’ll also need to ensure your charity and team remain compliant with Gambling Commission gambling regulations.
Woods Valldata own purpose-built, state-of-the-art facilities and processes that keep everything secure, from data to direct debit transfers and more. Compliance also lies at the heart of our work, and we have gained and maintain many certifications and accreditations over the years to reflect this.
3. Combine the powers of automation and human intervention
Automation is a truly useful tool to harness for response handling, saving you significant time, energy, and funds processing responses manually.
However, nothing beats human intervention for ensuring that your responses are processed with the ultimate care and consideration that they deserve.
Our blend of automation and human intervention at Woods Valldata ensures that our charity clients’ responses are processed quickly and efficiently, but with the care and consideration that only human oversight can bring.
4. Have a disaster recovery plan in place.
As the Covid-19 pandemic revealed, disaster can strike at any moment. In these situations, it’s essential that your charity can adapt as quickly as possible.
For example, if your servers go down or your direct debits do not process properly, it’s important to know that you have systems in place to keep your response handling processes on the go.
During the pandemic, we were able to keep working during lockdown while many of our clients had to close their office doors, which meant we could help them keep their vital services operating. We have robust disaster recovery plans in place to ensure any impact to response handling is minimal in any given circumstance.
5. Optimise the donor experience
Making the donation and contact process as easy as possible for your donors also plays a huge role in the success of your response handling.
From deploying quick and easy sign-up to your weekly lottery or raffle to ensuring your creatives are simultaneously engaging and easy to understand to providing personalised and timely thanking, there are numerous ways you can ensure your donors are satisfied with your processes and keep donating to your cause well into the future.
Our in-house studio designers, creatives and experts on form content here at Woods Valldata have an abundance of skill in this area, and with our proprietary platforms like SmartThank, we ensure your supporters are consistently informed and delighted with your communications.
6. Prepare for fluctuations in responses
Depending on your fundraising campaign, your response handling is likely to fluctuate between quiet and busy periods. Essentially, you need to be able to maximise your responses when something’s working well, or if an unexpected deliverable such as an emergency crisis needs funding.
If you’re struggling with your donor response management, we have processes in place that will enable us to quickly pick up where your team or others have left off, so that we can provide seamless response handling services for your supporters.
7. Remember to thank your donors!
Although there’s no direct way to measure the impact of thanking your supporters, there’s plenty of research out there to suggest its benefits!
Whatever format they present themselves in, every supporter response should be seen as an opportunity to engage your sponsors further. Keep your supporter personas in mind and use empathy to get the right messaging across and tap directly into their emotions.
You should also ensure that you reflect your brand tone and voice. This will help to make you instantly recognisable and put your supporters at ease.
Just some of the ways we help our charity clients to achieve this include supplying handwritten responses, and getting to know your charity’s branding inside out so that we can replicate it seamlessly.
We also make sure that our records are accurate, so that when we thank your respondents for their support on your behalf, we can do so quickly and with the right level of detail to make them feel truly valued.
Want to find out more about our response handling services?
To sum up, there are numerous things your charity will need to do to ensure your response handling is as successful as possible – and sometimes this can result in the need to reach out for additional support, particularly when responses start flooding in!
We know that moving your charity response handling to a third-party team can feel like a big step. However, rest assured that we have many years of experience in helping charities with their response handling.
From keeping the supporter experience at the forefront of everything and managing our communications with the same care and attention as your own team to taking every step to ensure your supporters feel valued, we’ll always go the extra mile to give you the peace of mind you need to focus on your charity’s growth.
Here at Woods Valldata, we work with our clients as a partnership, which means we are always on hand to talk through ideas or discuss problems you need to solve. In fact, you can always rely on us to listen, learn, and offer insightful advice and continuous improvement opportunities.
Sound like a service you’d benefit from? If so, connect with us today or find out more about our response handling services here.
