A ministry leader asked me a great question on a call recently. They were thinking about adding fields to their forms to learn more about their donors, and they wanted to know where the line is. How much can you ask before the donor says, you know what, this is way too much, I'm going to pass? You want my age? My birth date? What I do for a living? How many people live in my house? Where does it stop?
That kind of form does feel like somebody's peering in. It gets a little too personal and private.
My answer was that we don't ask the donor for demographic data at the gift at all.
What does the donor get out of it?
Put yourself on the other side of that form. You're about to give, and the ministry wants to know where you live, how many people are in your house, what your income level is. You're thinking, what do I get out of this? And the answer is absolutely nothing. It's completely one-sided.
The ministry gets all this data so it can enrich your record and then know, well, Brad makes X amount, so let's push him a little harder for that bigger gift. And these folks over here, we'll just ask them for prayers.
People can feel that. They don't like it, and it's not going to work. You'll burn through your list and make people angry.
Learn who they are before the ask
What we do instead is learn the audience.
If you've got a list of people who get emails from you, like a weekly newsletter with real value in it (resources, book recommendations, here's what's new, here's how we can help you this week), that's the audience we learn. We do it two ways: a short, smart survey, and their behavior on your emails and website. So we know they keep reading these articles, and they gave these three answers on the survey.
And the survey isn't "tell me about your demographic data." It's "how can we serve you?" What's difficult for you right now?
Say your ministry serves families. The first question might be, what best matches you? Are you a parent, a grandparent, an educator? Someone says they're a parent. The next question is, as a parent, what's the most challenging conversation you're having with your teenager right now? And we give them four or five options, which are the main subjects your ministry actually talks about.
They pick screen time. So now you know screen time with their teenager is a big problem, and it feels hard.
Nobody asked their income or how many people live in the house. You asked what they need, and they told you, because the answer gets them something.
Then make it their version
The promise to that person is that what they get from you from now on is their version. The website experience, what we email them, what we suggest they read next. It's for them.
Then we match that with what's already in your CRM. Have they given before? Do they keep coming back? If the person who told us screen time is the issue is back every week and opening every newsletter, we flag them internally as someone who's ready to be asked to support the work.
And the ask fits. In the next newsletter there's a nice little box that says, hey, we hope we've helped you and your kid with the screen time stuff. Could you help us do the same for other parents?
By the time the ask comes, you're just asking for the gift. Maybe there's one or two extra fields, and none of them feel like you're peering into their life. The person feels served, and when you ask, they're more likely to give, because it's for them.
So it's less about asking for demographic data at donation, and more about learning who they are before.
The same thing happens on your signup form
This shows up even earlier than the donation form.
I went to join a ministry's newsletter recently. Name and email, sure, those are expected. But then my full address was required, city, state, zip. A phone number was required. Then it asked if I wanted email, text or mail.
I bet that's stopping a lot of people. And there was no real reason to join in the first place. The promise of why I'd sign up should be compelling. That's the first question. The second is, are we making it hard for someone to give us their email, so we can keep a connection with them that matters?
If you are, you're tanking it.
The reason to join matters as much as the fields do. On a signup page we built for Spark Discipleship, visitors from Facebook ads who saw a headline matched to where they came from signed up at 68 percent, against 40 percent for the generic headline. That's a 70.8 percent lift, at 100 percent confidence across 3,484 visitors. The headline was the only difference.
You don't need everyone
You're not trying to get every email address you can. If most of the people who sign up aren't a fit, those emails are useless. They just fill up space in your email platform, and some of those people will unsubscribe or mark you as spam.
I'd rather see fewer people join each month, if they're the ones you actually need. Ask for the email, give them a real reason to join, ask how you can serve them, and then actually do it.
If you want to see what this looks like for your ministry
If you're looking at your own forms and wondering what you're asking for and why, that's a good conversation to have. On a free intro call we'll look at how people join your list today, what you're asking them for, and where the ask could fit them better.
You can book a time here. No pressure, and no obligation to go further than the conversation.