The new rules for audience engagement in the non-profit sector
I’ve sensed it for a while, but now I can see it unfolding: Gen Z is changing audience engagement and expectations for all generations.
Two studies released this year cover this topic in detail, offering advice on how to adopt this new mindset to better engage our audiences:
Mind the Engagement Gap is a white paper from Manifesto that uses market research and interviews with charity leaders to reflect on engagement practices in non-profits, providing short, medium and long-term recommendations.
An Effortless Future by Great State, a customer experience agency, builds on previous research into Gen Z, this time offering practical advice on the mindset shifts brands need to make to adapt to this new audience behaviour.
So how do non-profits respond?
You won’t be surprised to hear me say that this is not just a change of technology, it’s also a change for people and process. To meet these new expectations, we will need to review the ways we work together to deliver user experiences, our products, processes and our tech. Where ‘frictionless experience’ used to be the gold standard (and many in the sector feel that we still haven’t totally nailed that, according to interviews held by my colleagues at the Charity Change Collective), we’re now looking to achieve ‘effortless experience’, according to Great State.
What is an effortless experience? It’s when users come to you for a reason and complete that task in the shortest amount of time. In a world where we’re all worried about the amount of time we spend online, the less time a task takes, the better for the digital detox.
But both brands and non-profits are still designing for their own needs, rather than those of the client/audience/user. Often, organisations resist simplifying a user journey due to clashes with internal processes or strategy. Well, we won’t be able to get away with it much longer!
86% of Gen Z value a great online experience. 91% agree that an ideal digital experience is one that lets them get in, get what they need and get out quickly, according to Great State’s report. And before you say, “They’re too young, they won’t engage with us until they’re older,” note this from the report: “And this isn't a generational quirk…What Gen Z demands today, everyone will demand tomorrow.”
So, what can we as non-profits do to operate in this new world?
Effortless for whom?
The first question to ask is who you’re optimising your digital experience for. We’re used to optimising for things like time spent on page: the longer they spend with us, the more likely they will digest the information or engage with something new. But with ‘effortless’ as the benchmark, the best journey is now the shortest one. It’s a mindset shift from optimising for our goals to optimising for the goals of our supporters.
Similarly, we used to believe that making it deliberately difficult for people to cancel or unsubscribe would reduce attrition. But “60% of Gen Z have switched off a brand permanently after a bad online experience,” according to the Great State report. And we’ve all had to delve into some lengthy small print to find out how to get off a telemarketing or direct mail list. Manifesto advises that charities need to give supporters agency to manage their relationship. The logic of making someone phone up to be taken off a telemarketing list is beginning to crumble.
In the same report, Manifesto found that 26% of supporters now opt for no communication to protect themselves from too much messaging. “Over a quarter of supporters opting for no communication is a strong signal current approaches are driving people away. Phone, one of the most popular channels in the charity sector, is preferred by just 1% of supporters.”
Indeed, Manifesto highlighted that 61% of supporters disengage because charities ask too often, driven by their internal priorities (income targets, campaign calendars) rather than the supporter’s needs.
The best way to retain supporters right now is to make it as easy as possible for them to complete their ‘transaction’, whether that’s donating, signing a petition, unsubscribing from email notifications, or registering as a volunteer. “Design for completion, not consumption. Make the fastest path the default path. Reduce the work customers must do to understand, decide and act,” says Great State.
So, what are our new KPIs? Task completion time, navigation efficiency (the lowest possible number of clicks and screens) and repeat task efficiency: does the task get faster for returning users?
And, of course, this will cause non-negotiable change to our backend setup; how we capture data, where we save it, how we use it, as well as internal ways of working and skills.
Privacy and trust
For Gen Z, and therefore increasingly for your whole audience, trust and privacy are a major concern. 56% of 18+ respondents felt “high security and trust signals are the single biggest driver of an effortless experience.” (Great State)
We used to be able to harvest data, pop the details in the small print and see no impact on engagement. But today’s supporter is more privacy savvy. They want to know you’re asking for the bare minimum of data for them to get the job done. You’ll see success when “the value exchange is clear” (Great State), i.e., “We need this limited amount of data for this reason or to help you complete this task”.
Today’s supporters won’t waste time looking for your small print; they’ll just click away if the ‘why’ is unclear or if they can’t opt out. So your security and privacy notices shouldn’t be hidden like they used to be. But choose their position in your user journey with care. Ask for too much too soon or go into too much detail and you’re likely to lose people.
“Our research shows that high security and trust signals are the single biggest driver of an effortless experience (56% of 18+). This is why privacy and security can't live in legal copy at the bottom of the page. They have to show up contextually, as visible reassurance at the moments people hesitate.” (Great State)
This reminds me of a TED talk I saw in 2016 about how Airbnb applied this logic to their user experience. They help people get over the fear of having strangers in their home while they’re away by optimising journeys with reassurance at exactly the right points. Give it a watch: it really brings to life the notion of trust as part of the digital experience.
Personalisation
Personalisation has been a topic of conversation for years now, seen as the gold standard of marketing. The more personal, the better.
But again, things have shifted. 44% of supporters reject personalisation, fearing it leads to an “avalanche of asks” (Manifesto). There’s still a place for personalisation, but it’s about using it with your user in mind. Manifesto suggests that you use it to close the loop: show what happens to a supporter’s money, as so often they claim they don’t know. Find out their primary motivator for giving and go from there. “If someone gives because of personal connection, show them stories. If they give to see impact, show them data. If they give because of values alignment, demonstrate how you're living those values.”
What it boils down to is, again, that “Personalisation must drive value for the supporter, not just the charity.” (Manifesto)
AI
It’s impossible to have a conversation about engagement without talking about AI. So, I really enjoyed reading Great State’s take on it.
Like any new technology, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Ask yourself, does it add value (speed and efficiency) to the supporter journey? “AI only earns its place when it reduces effort without introducing new uncertainty. That means it must be accurate, predictable and easy to override when it gets things wrong.” (Great State)
Instead of another pointless chatbot, look at where AI can fix internal time drains within your processes so that your people can focus on bettering your engagement journey. “Treat AI like an assistant with a defined job, not a magic feature you bolt on.” (Great State)
Having an AI element on your website isn’t a golden ticket to looking modern and appealing to this audience. Your use of AI may be in the background, invisible to the audience, creating better insights, improving journey design. Manifesto describes their work with RNIB, using AI tools to improve journey design by testing their hypotheses about the communication needs of each audience segment.
The myth: effortless on the outside is effortless on the inside
In all likelihood, that Gen Z-friendly seamless journey isn’t going to feel seamless to your teams internally, at least not at first. But if delivering a good journey requires three spreadsheets, a manual upload and a meeting to agree who sends what, the experience will never be effortless for the user. Internal friction leaks out.
And that’s why change to people and process as well is so important. Whatever you change for the user will, for most non-profits, change backend operations too. How you capture, save and move data and how you use it to trigger personalised journeys is all dependent on internal planning and collaboration and the right skillset.
“Engagement these days is hard to build, easy to break”, says Manifesto. Make sure your digital experience feels effortless and protect your non-profit from the quiet quitting (disengaging) of today’s supporters. As always, start small, look at one journey and see how it works. It’s likely to test your internal processes, ways of working, data and tech too, moving you beyond theoretical discussions to the specifics of the internal problems you need to solve.
