Donor Motivations Survey, 2023 Open Cohort

Welcome to the Donor Motivations Survey, 2023 Open Cohort!

Please bookmark this page, as it is not publicly accessible.

This page contains key information about the study for participating organizations. Here you’ll be able to access an archive of recorded cohort sessions and other survey resources as they become available.

Cohort Membership

The following organizations have opted into this cohort:

Alley Theatre
Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum
Arizona Science Center
Ballet Arizona
Children's Museum of Phoenix
Children's Theatre Company
Childsplay
Desert Botanical Garden
Long Wharf Theatre
Mesa Arts Center
Midland Center for the Arts & Alden B. Dow Museum
Museum of Northern Arizona
New 42
New World Symphony
Oakland Museum of California
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
Tucson Symphony
UMS
VocalEssence

Key Dates

All organizations send emails requesting cooperation with the survey on Tuesday, November 14 at 12 pm noon.
All organizations send reminder emails on Friday, November 17; the precise time of deployment is up to you. The survey closes at 11:59 pm PST on Monday, November 20.

First Steps

If you haven’t already, please immediately fill out the participation form, which identifies the individuals in your organization with whom WolfBrown will liaise on all matters related to the study. You can also use this form to let us know if you’d like us to give additional people access to the dashboard and/or invite them to the online sessions.
Look at the Customizations tab on this webpage for instructions about customizations and survey incentives.
Please make sure you've added our domain to your email's allowlist and added alan.kline@wolfbrown.com's email to your contact list, as sometimes emails end up in your spam folder otherwise.
If you'd like to meet with Alan Kline, Director of Audience Research Programs, please visit his Calendly to set up a free 30 minute consultation.

Customization

The protocol is standardized for all organizations. If you see any errors or have any concerns, please reach out to Alan Kline at alan.kline@wolfbrown.com.

Incentives

You can include an incentive for the survey if you’d like to increase response rates. You’ll need to choose the incentive and create a form to collect email addresses from respondents at the end of the survey. Email Alan Kline at alan.kline@wolfbrown.com for more details and to get it added to the survey.

Deployment Logistics

Email List Selection (Sampling Plan)

Given the goal of obtaining an accurate profile of your donors, you’ll want the results to be as representative as possible of your pool of recent donors. We’ve seen response rates averaging 5% and ranging from 2% to 10% for ticket buyers, but expect a much higher rate for donors because of their loyalty.
Considering this, there’s no minimum quantity of emails to send out – we suggest sending the survey email to all donors (any amount) from the past three seasons. If you can, please purge the list of board members and any very high level donors who you’d prefer not to survey for one reason or another. In the end, you want to be looking at a respondent pool of 150, at minimum, and preferably 400 or more.
Once you’ve assessed your counts, complete the sampling form to report your counts to WolfBrown. We need this information to calculate response rates.

Suggested Email Language

Suggested language for the two outbound email messages may be found here. Use your own branding and design. Feel free to adapt the language to fit your voice and to what you’ve found best engages your audience or visitors.
Before Monday, October 30, WolfBrown will provide the liaisons from your organization with the survey hyperlink to be included in your outbound email message. The liaisons should first test the survey themselves.

Review the Protocol & Test the Survey

Familiarize your team with the survey protocol.
We strongly encourage staff of participating organizations to take the online survey (test version) as part of your preparatory efforts.
A test version of the survey (formatted for Tucson Symphony) is available here.
The protocol was designed by the WolfBrown team with extensive input from arts administrators. We are indebted to the staff of Tucson Symphony for their cooperation with validity testing and pilot testing the protocol.
Questions marked “Optional” may be included in the survey, at your discretion. We recommend including as few optional questions as possible, to minimize length.

Download and review the protocol

Visitor-based:

Performing Arts:

National Panel

All survey respondents, after completing the survey, will be invited to opt-in to Audience Outlook Monitor’s National Panel.

Exit Dashboard

Upon completing the survey, survey takers will be redirected to an “Exit Dashboard” – an abbreviated, static dashboard page that provides results for a small number of survey questions for your organization (only), so that respondents can see how their answers compared to the answers of others.
No open-ended questions are included in the Exit Dashboard.
We feel that providing instant access to selected results will add an element of transparency to the process and help to maintain the goodwill of survey takers.

Suggested Email Language

We provide suggested language for the two outbound email messages. Use your own branding and design. Feel free to adapt the language to fit your voice and to what you’ve found best engages your audience or visitors.
Before Thursday, August 3, WolfBrown will provide the liaisons from your organization with the survey hyperlink to be included in your outbound email message. The liaisons should first test the survey themselves.
Download a Word Document with suggested language for outbound emails here.

Dashboard Access and Cohort Sessions

Schedule

Your participation in the various cohort learning activities will greatly enhance the value you get from your investment in the survey cohort. Calendar invites with a Zoom link will be sent to all liaisons and contacts who requested them. All activities are optional. Recordings will be posted here on the cohort webpage within several days of each event, and they may be shared with anyone within your organization.

Would you find captions, visual descriptions, or other accommodations helpful during the session? If so, please write to Alan Kline at alan.kline@wolfbrown.com, so we can do our best to make necessary arrangements to ensure your full participation. If you need transcripts or closed captioning after the recording is published in the archive section of this page, you can find options on the Vimeo recordings.

Cohort Learning Session 1: Opening the Conversation

Topic: Meet and great your fellow cohort members and discuss how you plan to use the results.
Date: Monday, November 6 at 2:00-3:00 pm EST | 11:00 am-12:00 pm PST (60 minutes)

Cohort Learning Session 2: Small Group Study Session

Topic: After a short orientation, attendees will break out into pre-assigned small groups to discuss a specific module of survey questions and generate takeaway observations, followed by report-outs. Takeaways will be compiled in a shared Google Doc for all to see.
Date: Wednesday, November 29, 2:00 – 3:30 pm EST | 11:00 am-12:30 pm PST (90 minutes)

Cohort Learning Session 3: Culminating Session: What have we learned?

Topic: WolfBrown staff will synthesize the takeaways from the small group work, and invite cohort members to reflect on next steps for their organizations.
Date: Wednesday, December 6, 2:00 – 3:00 pm EST | 11:00 am-12:00 pm PST (60 minutes)

Dashboard Access

You’ll have access to Donor Motivations Survey results in your dashboard as they come in on the deployment day. This will be your first chance to see the number of fully completed survey responses from your own patrons and everyone else’s.
To access the dashboard tool, please create a password using your email as your username. If your email is not set up as a login, fill out our contact form to be added as a user. Once you’ve created a password, we recommend you bookmark our login page, so you can easily log into the dashboard directly.
We highly recommend the Dashboard Orientation Session for anyone in your organization who is new to the dashboard or needs a refresher. Calendar appointments with a Zoom link will be sent to all liaisons and contacts who requested them using the contact form. The recording of this session will be posted on this page.
A successful learning experience depends on cohort members’ efforts to make sense of the results. This is not a typical process where the consultant conducts a statistical analysis and prepares a lengthy report several months after data collection. Instead, results are available through the dashboard, and the sense-making process is crowdsourced by the cohort over a period of several weeks after data collection. The time you spend in the dashboard will reap benefits for your organization and for the cohort.

Tagging Your Data

In order to identify trends in the survey's qualitative data, quantify the frequency of certain responses, and find notable responses in the future, we encourage all organizations to add tags to their respondents’ verbatim responses in the dashboard. Responses can be tagged by clicking on the response in the dashboard and typing the tag in the box below the response. We will guide you through the tagging process during the Dashboard Orientation Session.

View the tagging scheme here, or visit the page to download a Word Document.

Questions?

Please reach out to Alan Kline, Director of Audience Research Programs at WolfBrown, with any questions related to the cohort.

Email: alan.kline@wolfbrown.com
Phone: 415.796.3060 ext. 701

Email Language

Tagging Scheme

Donor Motivations Survey, 2023 Open Cohort

Welcome to the Donor Motivations Survey, 2023 Open Cohort!

Cohort Membership

Key Dates

First Steps

Customization

Incentives

Deployment Logistics

Email List Selection (Sampling Plan)

Suggested Email Language

Review the Protocol & Test the Survey

Download and review the protocol

National Panel

Exit Dashboard

Suggested Email Language

Dashboard Access and Cohort Sessions

Schedule

Cohort Learning Session 1: Opening the Conversation

Cohort Learning Session 2: Small Group Study Session

Cohort Learning Session 3: Culminating Session: What have we learned?

Archive

Deployment Logistics Session

Opening the Conversation

Dashboard Orientation

Study Session

Culminating Session

Report Template

(PowerPoint)

(PDF)

Dashboard Access

Tagging Your Data

Questions?