The question that changes everything

“What is the simplest thing we can do to learn something about our supporters?”

I’ve asked this question in a lot of rooms. Strategy sessions. Campaign planning meetings. Leadership offsites where the whiteboard is covered and nobody agrees on anything.

The room usually goes quiet.

Not because it’s a hard question. Because it’s an honest one. And honest questions are surprisingly rare in NFP digital fundraising.

Most rooms are asking a different question. What should we do? Or its cousins: What are other organisations doing? What did we do last year? What does the board want to see?

These aren’t bad questions. But they have something in common — they’re all answered by looking inward. At opinion. At assumption. At what feels right to the people in the room.

The supporter — the actual human who donates, who signs petitions, who opens emails at 9pm because they care about the mission — is not in the room. And in most NFP digital programmes, they never really are.

I’ve spent 15 years working in the gap between technology, fundraising, and communications in the NFP sector. Never fully sitting in one department. Always in the space between.

What I’ve watched, over and over, is organisations making expensive decisions about what to say to supporters based almost entirely on what they think supporters want to hear.

Email length. Ask amounts. Subject lines. Campaign themes. Decided by committee. Defended by whoever shouts loudest or has the most institutional authority. Tested by nobody.

And when results are disappointing — and they often are — the answer is more of the same. A bigger campaign. A longer email. A more urgent subject line. More pressure applied to the same assumptions.

The sector also has a structural problem that compounds this.

Ways of working that haven’t changed in a decade, defended by people who haven’t seen what’s possible outside it. Technology platforms that are years behind the commercial world, creating dependency and bottlenecks and giving everyone a convenient excuse for why change is hard.

And when the C-suite finally decides something has to give, they bring in the brand-name consultancy. Millions of dollars. Benchmarks, frameworks, recommendations. A document. A presentation. Then they leave.

The people who were actually building something — the cross-functional team that was starting to work, the digital manager who knew where the bodies were buried, the fundraising lead who was finally getting meaningful data — those people look at the recommendations and know they’re wrong. Or they get restructured out. Either way, they leave.

I’ve watched it happen. I know what it costs. Not just in dollars.

So. Back to the question.

What is the simplest thing we can do to learn something about our supporters?

Here’s what it does that the other questions don’t.

It makes the supporter the authority — not the committee. It shifts the next action from a decision to a test. It makes the cost of being wrong almost nothing, because you’re not committing to a strategy, you’re committing to finding out.

And it gives everyone in the room — the IT person, the fundraising director, the comms lead who’s worried about the brand — a question they can all answer from where they sit. The answers are different. But they’re all pointing at the same thing: we don’t actually know. Let’s find out.

There’s another thing it does that I didn’t fully understand until recently.

It’s the start of honesty.

Most rooms carry a layer of managed reality. People say what they’re supposed to say. The politics of who said what last time shapes what gets said this time. Assumptions become sacred because someone senior made them once and nobody challenged them since.

The question cuts through all of that. Not aggressively. Just cleanly. What’s the simplest thing? implies that we don’t know yet. That we need to find out. That the answer isn’t in the room — it’s in the behaviour of real people.

That’s the crack. That small shift in who the authority is.

The reason NFPs don’t run more experiments isn’t that they don’t want to. It’s that failure feels catastrophic. Charitable funds. Donor trust. Board scrutiny. Every decision weighted with mission significance.

And it’s ok if it fails.

A small test that doesn’t work is information. Worth more than three months of internal debate. You write the card. You document what you tried, what happened, and what you’ll do next. You try the other thing.

Politically it’s bulletproof too. We ran a small experiment to learn something is a much safer thing to say to a board than we changed our strategy. You weren’t reckless. You were deliberate. You have something written down from the start: here’s what we tested, here’s what we found, here’s what we’re doing next.

The knives have nothing to cut.

I’m building a framework called Nimble for this. It’s designed for NFP digital and fundraising teams who are stuck between what they know is possible and what they’re allowed to do.

It’s built on one core belief: small experiments compound. Baby steps produce big impact. You don’t need to transform the organisation first. You don’t need a new CRM, a bigger budget, or the committee’s permission to try something small.

You just need to ask the right question.

What is the simplest thing we can do to learn something about our supporters?

That’s where it starts.