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.

“The supporter is not in the room. And in most NFP digital programmes, they never really are.”

I’ve spent 15 years in the gap between technology, fundraising, and communications. 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. Decided by committee. Defended by whoever shouts loudest. Tested by nobody.

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. It assumes we don’t know yet — and that not knowing is fine. 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.”

The framework I’m building — Nimble — starts here. Designed for NFP digital and fundraising teams who know what’s possible and aren’t sure they’re allowed to try it.

Small experiments compound. One question. One test. That’s enough.

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