Audience-First: Your Donors STILL Don’t Care About Your Org Chart

Why Audience-First Organizations Still Align People Before They Connect Channels

A couple of months ago, I wrote that your donors don’t care about your org chart. I’m pleased to report that nothing has changed.

Your donors still don’t care who owns email, whether stewardship sits with annual giving or major gifts, which team manages the campaign calendar, or which system generated the message they just received. They experience one organization, and all the structures we’ve created to divide responsibilities and get the work done are largely invisible. Or at least they should be.

I’ve been thinking about that idea again because on October 22, I’ll be in Washington, DC, at the DMAW Multi-Channel Innovation Summit, presenting with Michelle Jiles and Kacey Crawford from WETA on this very topic. Our session, appropriately enough, is called Your Donor Doesn’t Care About Your Org Chart, and we’ll be talking about what it actually takes to move toward an audience-first approach when fundraising, digital, data, analytics, and the other people involved in a constituent relationship don’t all live neatly in the same place. Keep scrolling to get a sneak preview of the presentation at the end of this post.

I’m particularly looking forward to the conversation because “be more audience-first” is incredibly easy advice to give. The interesting part is what happens when you try to put it into practice inside a real organization, where different teams have legitimate responsibilities, different expertise, and different measures of success. As I’ve thought about what I want to explore with Michelle and Kacey, I’ve realized that several things I’ve written since the original article have brought me right back to the same premise, but with a broader understanding of what it means.

The Story I Still Can’t Shake

The original article began with a story a fundraising leader shared with me. A donor had made a transformational seven-figure gift and, shortly afterward, received a generic email appeal asking for $100. The donor didn’t simply delete it. They contacted the organization wondering what had happened. Had the gift been received? Did anyone know about it? Why was the organization talking to them as though nothing about the relationship had changed?

It’s tempting to diagnose that as a technology problem. Maybe the systems weren’t connected, the data hadn’t synchronized quickly enough, or the suppression rules weren’t right. But somewhere in that organization, people knew about the gift. Somewhere else, another group of people was executing a campaign exactly as they were supposed to. Nobody intended to create a bad experience. The problem emerged in the space between perfectly reasonable activities happening in different parts of the organization.

The donor didn’t experience any of those internal distinctions. They experienced one organization that suddenly didn’t seem to know them. That’s the part I still can’t shake.

We Know More About the Relationship Now

Nonprofits have gotten considerably better at connecting the technology behind experiences like that. We can bring together information from fundraising, marketing, digital, events, programs, advocacy, and other sources. Identity resolution can help us recognize that activity scattered across different systems belongs to the same person. Better analytics can help us see patterns across the relationship, and AI makes it easier to explore that information. But a unified view of a constituent doesn’t automatically create a unified understanding of that constituent.

That’s part of why I wrote about shared language as the foundation for audience-first organizations. If fundraising, marketing, and digital all mean something different when they say someone is engaged, connecting their data doesn’t resolve the disagreement. It just gives us a clearer view.

And the more of the relationship we can see, the more we have to question where that relationship actually begins. As I wrote in Maybe We Should Stop Calling It a Donor Journey, what fundraising calls acquisition may be year ten from the constituent’s perspective. A public media listener may have been listening or streaming for years before making a first gift. Someone else may have volunteered, attended events, advocated, or used programs long before appearing in the fundraising system. Our org chart determines where we manage those interactions internally. It doesn’t determine how the constituent experiences them.

Knowing More Isn’t the Same as Acting Like We Know Them

That distinction becomes even more important as our technology gets better. Imagine that fundraising knows someone is a strong prospect for another gift while marketing knows they’re deeply engaged with particular content. Constituent services knows they called yesterday because they’re frustrated, while a major gift officer knows they’re already in the middle of a completely different conversation.

Putting all that information in the same environment is an enormous step forward. It gives the organization the context to make a much better decision about the relationship, but it doesn’t make the decision for us. Someone still has to determine which part of that relationship matters most right now. Maybe the next interaction should be an ask. Or should it be stewardship? Maybe someone should call. Or maybe, as I wrote in Your Next Best Action Might Be No Action at All, the best thing we can do at that particular moment is nothing.

Better data and better technology give us more opportunities to act, but they also make judgment more important. The question isn’t simply whether we can trigger the next communication. It’s whether doing so makes sense in the context of the relationship we can now see.

The Org Chart Isn’t Going Anywhere

None of this means the answer is to eliminate specialization or launch another initiative to “break down the silos.” Organizations need people who understand digital fundraising, major gifts, membership, marketing, analytics, programs, constituent services, and technology. The org chart exists because work has to get done, and expertise matters.

The goal isn’t to eliminate the org chart. The goal is to keep the constituent from experiencing it. That requires shared data, but it also requires shared definitions and enough shared context to recognize when something happening elsewhere in the organization should change what we’re about to do. Technology can make that context available and help us act on decisions consistently across channels. It can’t decide what kind of relationship we’re trying to build.

Do You Know Who I Am?

Which brings me back to that donor and the $100 email. What makes the story stick with me isn’t really the email itself. It’s the question underneath the donor’s reaction: Do you know who I am?

Our ability to answer that question technologically has improved enormously. We can know more about a constituent than we ever could before. But knowing more about someone and acting like we know them are two very different things.

That’s the conversation I’m looking forward to having with Michelle and Kacey at the DMAW Multi-Channel Innovation Summit on October 22. Not how to eliminate the org chart or pretend the realities of running a complex organization don’t exist, but how we keep those realities from defining the experience of the people we’re trying to engage.

A couple of months and several articles later, I’m sticking with the original premise: your donors still don’t care about your org chart. They shouldn’t have to. Let’s Talk!