Becoming an Adaptive & Resilient Organization: 3 Lessons from Ernesto Peña, Ph.D (Charity, Technology)
This article is part of a series profiling innovative organisations from various industries. Find all of the articles here: Becoming an Adaptive & Resilient Organization: 3 Things We Learned During COVID-19.
This series is part of PH1 Research’s mandate to provide business leaders with free resources to improve their customer and employee strategies during this crisis.
Charitable Impact is a technology platform which enables you to manage your charitable giving and create the change you want to see in the world, all from one place. More than 100,000 Canadians have donated half-a-billion dollars using the platform, to 9,000+ charities. Charitable Impact is also a public foundation, meaning the organisation has the same governance and reporting model as charities. This is why the platform can provide donors with a tax receipt regardless of which charity they donate to from their account.
Ernesto Peña, Ph.D is the Director of Research at Charitable Impact where he leads a team which is trying to make the experience of giving easier. His academic work on the subjects of digital literacy and education technology gives him a unique perspective on the challenge of understanding how and why people donate. And since Charitable Impact cherishes its role as a hybrid technology firm and charity, he has the mandate to explore ways of disrupting the status-quo.
Our conversation was originally to gather his insights about the charitable giving space and how he believed this crisis was going to impact it. We spoke early in April at a time when charities were either not considering the impact of COVID-19, or inversely were in a state of panic. In our own donor experience mapping work at PH1 Research we were finding that charities were not prepared for a world where a crisis this large was going to be unleashed, particularly one where the public had no idea who to support or how to help.
3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Ernesto Peña, Ph.D (Charity, Technology)
Ernesto’s lessons have been informed through extensive primary and secondary research into how and why the public gives. As a technology platform which has the primary goal of making giving easy, he has had the privilege of being able to study topics such as why donors stop giving and what makes them comfortable to give to a charity for the first time.
#1 Adaptability comes from assuming your donors/customers are much more complex than you imagine
If your organisation has had any level of success, there’s no doubt that you understand your customers and know how to engage them. The challenge is that without ongoing research initiatives —to listen to their needs, evaluate why they are joining and leaving, and understand what you can do better— data makes customers look like a monolithic group.
Ernesto believes that to be adaptable enough to survive a time of crisis and to grow post-crisis will require charities to re-think their fundraising models and create strategies which assume their donors are a very diverse group. Charities typically dedicate the majority of their resources to marketing to their highest-value segment, major donors, and send very generalized marketing to the rest. With that ‘rest’ are segments and cohorts who will have a higher lifetime value and who are more deeply engaged to the organisation. Getting clarity on factors like these enables your marketing to be much more personalized and adaptive to their needs, thereby minimizing churn and maximizing revenue opportunities.
His insights are critical to help charities re-imagine marketing from the lens of one-to-on relationship-building, rather than bulk fundraising. And from our work consulting with clients across financial services, higher education, and tourism, this lesson is just as critical in any industry as they all need to find ways of engaging at scale, often due to reduced staff and budgets.
#2 To become more resilient you need to understand how people react to crisis
This crisis has led to millions losing their jobs and millions more going into debt. There is little doubt that they will be spending and donating less. But, do you understand what will continue to be important enough for them to donate to and support?
“Charities can’t sustain themselves on generosity alone. They need consistent income.” says Ernesto. “The fundraising scheme is designed for moments when people have money to give and when they have the peace of mind to give.”
To become more resilient charities must be more relevant than ever in the midst of a crisis and it has been especially difficult because the coronavirus impacted so many areas. When Australia was in a state of crisis due to fires, it was clear who to give to and support. In this crisis it took weeks for giving to orient itself towards primarily supporting food banks because COVID doesn’t nicely fit into the mandate of a handful of charities. Add to that every organisation you have ever subscribed to emailing you about what they are doing about COVID-19 and you feel more lost than connected.
Becoming a resilient charity or corporation will require understanding an authentic role where you can deliver impact in a way that is true to your brand and what your community needs. It requires constant listening and empathy.
#3 You need to understand the conveniences that the public wants and why
Just like every other industry, charities are being pushed to accelerate digital transformation projects. ‘Convenience’ is the term typically used as the rationale for these digital transformation projects. Amazon and the continuous improvements to the increasingly-digital financial services sector are referenced as examples, however he thinks it is important to understand what changes donors want and why.
In the case of charities he sees the public seeking a different type of convenience than what we’d expect; they want more control of their personal data and more ability to influence the governance of the charities they support. “You will find people that give you the money that you’re fundraising for, but they have conditions that they want met.” He also believes that the typical fundraising model of constantly sending asks is backfiring: “Donors who use giving platforms are often doing it because they don’t want the charities to have their information and so they can avoid being marketed to.”
In the private sector this lesson will be most important to consider when thinking about automating support, help, and sales services. The data will say people want frictionless and faster transactions, yet deeper research will find that consumers consider having someone to interact with vital at specific stages of their journey.Article by Arpy Dragffy, Principal at PH1. He leads customer experience, service design, and journey mapping projects for higher education, charity, health, and technology clients.
Register for the June 17 webinar How Organisations Become Adaptive & Resilient in a Time of Crisis to learn directly from some of the leaders profiled.
More lessons from this series:
- 3 Lessons from Zahra Ebrahim (Civic Engagement): Their solution required no technical background and it helps communities precisely because of its simplicity. They wanted to create a resource that made it extremely easy to connect people needing help to resources offering help.
- 3 Lessons from Young Enterprise (Education/Charity): This crisis forced the charity to quickly re-think their entire model. The needs of teachers, youth workers, students, and parents all changed and the charity had to adapt to deliver support in new ways.
- 3 Lessons from CityStudio (Education): CityStudio brings innovation, engagement, and experimentation to Vancouver’s City Hall by uniting city staff with post-secondary students, faculty, and community.
- 3 Lessons from Dr. Angèle Beausoleil (Education): The abrupt shift from in-person to online classes meant that Dr. Beausoleil had 2 days to take in-person lab-based business design, innovation, and design thinking classes and rethink how to offer the same learning outcomes digitally.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Ernesto Peña, Ph.D (Charity/ Technology): As a technology platform which has the primary goal of making giving easy, he has had the privilege of being able to study topics such as why donors stop giving and what makes them comfortable to give to a charity for the first time.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar (Innovation/Anthropology): Having a renewed sense of purpose in spite of this uncertainty can help teams move through these moments of change. We’re no longer what we used to be and we’re not sure what we will become.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Tyson Villeneuve (Events/Hospitality): Events as an industry effectively flatlined and we were the first to get hit: Large sports events, festivals, gatherings. The entire industry was shut down two weeks before restaurants.
- 3 Lessons About Adaptability & Resilience from Dianne Dredge, Ph.D (Tourism / Community Engagement): Her lens from the perspective of regions and tourism ecosystems that had to completely rebuild provide lessons on how industries can become adaptive and resilient.
This series is part of PH1 Research’s mandate to provide business leaders free resources to improve their customer and employee strategies during the COVID-19 crisis.
