Over the course of the year, your organization develops hundreds of opportunities to connect with your supporters. These opportunities may include your website, e-newsletters, social media channels, live events, direct mail, and mentions your organization through media, family and friends.
The sum of all these parts and how your audience interacts with your organization at each stage creates the Customer Journey. A Customer Journey is a full lifecycle view that details all of the interactions a person has with your organization as well as the internal or external influences affecting the person’s behaviors.
The Customer Journey is a tool that can help your organization move your audiences to action by helping you:
- Increase consistency in messaging
- Identify opportunities to help your audience take the next step in the journey
- Identifying pain points or road blocks so you can remove them
- Build empathy for your audiences and consensus internally to support those audiences
Historically, customer journeys have mapped someone’s purchase behavior for a product in the marketplace. For example, a customer journey for a local coffee shop may include how people in the neighborhood learn about coffee shops, what motivates them to try the coffee shop, how the experience inside the store affects their behavior, and how some people are motivated to make it their daily coffee shop location.
The idea of the customer journey can easily be adapted to nonprofits and social causes. Occasionally called supporter journeys or donor journeys, they help look at critical points in your constituent lifecycle.
Creating Your First Customer Journey
It’s likely that your organization is already focused on the donor or advocacy funnels or lifecycles. These can be viewed as the internal goals to move a constituent from a casual contact to a regular donor or advocate.
Here are a few questions that will help you translate those internal goals into a customer journey:
- What do you already know about your audiences?
- Do you have the ability to perform any additional research on your audience?
- What are all of the touchpoints and communications these constituents receive?
- How do constituents learn about your organization?
- How do they become aware of more opportunities to donate or become an advocate?
- Who do they talk to if they call your organization?
- What are the factors, internal and external, that affect this constituent’s behavior related to your goals? Are there any roadblocks inhibiting the constituent from moving through the lifecycle? These can be technical roadblocks such as online tools that are not working properly. Or they may be informational roadblocks; people may not understand the need represented by your calls to action.
By asking some basic questions about how your audience is interacting with your organization, you can begin to build a map of contact points. Over time, you can analyze which contact points are most effective at leading people to become new donors or advocates, and which need improvement.
Map-Making 101
When you’re ready to turn your customer journey into a full-fledged map, there are plenty of additional resources online to help you get started.
- Check out Megan Grocki and UX Mastery’s great video and post detailing How to Create a Customer Journey
- BigDoor also has their own Quick Guide to Customer Journey Mapping
- Designing CX has compiled a full CX Journey Mapping Toolkit which includes templates and guides to facilitating internal sessions
- I also recommend searching Pinterest for Customer Journey Maps to see all types of examples and get your creative ideas going
