Your customers (donors, patients, congregation, clients, etc.) have more power today than ever. There's been a saying that "the deer have guns." Meaning we may think we're the ones in control but in reality, with online reviews, ratings, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc. the customer is holding many more cards than they ever have. (sorry to mix all those metaphors into one paragraph!)
Today we as marketers and ministers have to do a much better job of "thinking like them." We have to sit on the other side of the table or listen from the other end of the phone call to actually see our ministry or business or fund raising opportunity through their eyes. We no longer have the luxury of making our customers jump through all our hoops just in order to do business with us and answer our questions.
Case in point. Rhinebeck High School where my boys go to school. From what I can tell, it's a very fine school filled with a committed and dedicated staff and teaching staff. However, as a student parent, I got a letter to participate in an online survey. In this survey they included this web URL to go find the survey.
(not the actual web address) http://survey.com/survey.aspx?s=lsi45klai889ieo8isoi0wet5o987=5499879
Are you kidding me? Remember…this is a snail-mail letter! They expect me to sit down and take the time to fill out a survey where they are going to ask me all kinds of information about myself and my family and they give me this address to manually type into the browser?
They could have just as easily created a dummy URL like www.rhinebeckhighschoolsurvey.com and had it point to the real address above. Expecting me to type in all those letters and numbers was enough for me to decide NOT to take the survey. So even though my impression of the school would have led to a positive survey response they won't see it.
Of course they could have just emailed the letter to me. Then all I'd need to do is click on the link. In the multiple forms I filled out in the enrollment process they certainly asked for my email address enough times. They have it on file. Someone in charge at RHS was not thinking like the customer. I wonder if they were thinking beyond their own needs and desires at all.
Take a look at your own communication tools. Are you guilty of the same thing?
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