Ideas in Action

Nonprofit Stakeholder Journey Mapping

Nonprofits face marketing challenges that are very similar to those of their for-profit counterparts. At the highest level, in both instances, the marketing goal of the organization is to have the “customer” choose “us” over other options. In nonprofits, this frequently splits into getting “clients/customers” and “donors/customers” to choose us. As we move into more tactical complexity, all organizations struggle with questions like: “What are the best channels to engage my customers?” “What is the most compelling thing to say?” “When is the right time to say X vs. Y?” And maybe the most important: “Where should my team focus their limited resources to have the greatest impact?”

Journey Mapping

To untangle these questions, marketers took a step back and broadened their view of the entire customer engagement. By understanding the different phases through which a given customer type would progress in a relationship with a product, service, medical condition or nonprofit, we as marketers better understand how to best meet their needs at each stage. And we can better understand where, how and why to meet them along the journey.

Each journey is built based on the specific path of a client/donor, but we can look at some more common use cases. To illustrate, let’s use the example of a private high school and their “potential student” segment. Traditionally we might think of that interaction as a singular “recruitment phase.” If we use the journey mapping model, we break it out into multiple phases.

• Pre-Need: Student in elementary school. While the student and parents could be building perceptions about education options down the road, they don’t “need” the school yet. This shapes how and where we message to “future customers.” Why is Pre-Need important? It shines a light on the important time when our potential clients/donors have not yet interacted with us and may not be ready to. However, they are becoming aware of and forming their opinions of the various players in any given category.
• Trigger: Student reaches middle school. Triggers are any event that moves someone from “not interested” in the category to “interested.” These can be customer prompted (e.g., child turns 4) or organization prompted (e.g., messaging that average lead time for enrollment is 18 months). Triggers are critical for two reasons. First, because this is when active involvement in the category begins. Nonprofits that show up first when the trigger is reached have an advantage. Second, most organizations only think about the top 3-5 triggers (friend is diagnosed, retirement, etc.), and these spaces can become crowded. The next 6-18 triggers are usually ignored and offer an advantage for organizations that leverage them. 
• Evaluation: Parents and students are information gathering. Now that the customer is in market, they begin shaping their criteria for choice and exploring the potential options. We intuitively know that this phase is important. Clients/donors spend a little or a long time establishing their criteria and then evaluating the options on the criteria. A missed opportunity is helping our potential clients/donors build out their criteria. Not in a misleading way; we honestly believe that the factors that make for a good school, food kitchen, community center are A, B, C, and D, and we have these in spades. It is OK to present that information.
• Enrollment: The “action,” but not the end of the journey. This is generally our focal part of the journey — the enrollment, the donation, the volunteer leadership role.
• Matriculation/Parent Involvement: Parents and the school likely have a mutual need for involvement, and it’s critical that the family has a successful experience with us. In every situation there is a phase of experiencing the organization, and arguably this is the most important. Aside from the benefits of their involvement, the experience we give them will influence all their future actions with us and what they share with others.
• Alumni Support: Post education, though needs have significantly changed, there is still value to be gained and perhaps provided by continuing a positive ongoing relationship. Post-involvement may not always be a phase, but for timebound experiences it’s a reality. It’s critical to not just let this pass but to take time to understand the value that can be created both ways. 

Creating the Journey Map in 7 Steps

This is how we make a usable customer journey quickly and efficiently in just seven steps without prolonged research. The reason we can accomplish this task quickly is because we are basing this on existing knowledge. That means the collective wisdom of our team, any relevant articles we’ve read online, feedback from our donors/users, and sometimes even from people we invite into our workshop. The trade-off in efficiency is 100% accuracy. We have to be OK that this is “roughly right.”

For an initial journey workshop, we need about three hours with around 6-10 people who can either provide insights into our donors/users and/or will be part of the team leveraging the output. Assign any existing research (articles, previous surveys) to different members of the team so they can “own” that data source in the workshop. Then we gather in front of a large whiteboard or blank wall with sticky notes.

1. Choose a specific segment (a group of similar people). . The power of the tool lies in its ability to help you prioritize actions. Almost every individual customer journey is slightly different, which means our journey maps are going to be a generalized best approximation of the most common route. The least helpful maps will be those that try to capture the paths of many kinds of segments; conversely, the more specific we are about the people whose path we are tracing, the more helpful the map will be. You have two important segments? Do two journeys.
2. Map the stages. What defines a stage? In each stage, the individual will typically have a unique set of needs, attitudes and behaviors.
3. Identify the triggers. What are the triggers that would make a potential donor interested in giving to an organization like yours? Why did someone feel the need to “get involved?”
4. What do they need? At each phase, consider what the individual hopes to achieve. “They want to help,” sure, but if we can be more specific about how that broad need changes and become more specific through the process, then we can better meet the needs of our donors. Think about what they “need” in Pre-Need: not much from you. In Evaluation they need information. In Experience they need to feel like they are making a difference. Are they?
5. What do they think? This is where I want to understand their most relevant attitudes and beliefs about the charitable space, our specific nonprofit and other nonprofits like us that compete for their time and resources. Are they aware of us? What level of understanding do they have about all we offer? What mental associations do they have about our organization that are the same or different than our peer organizations? How does this shift as they progress through phases? I’m most curious about their perceptions of us Pre-Need and Evaluation, and I want to ensure that nothing falls apart later. 
6. What do they do? Should we be on YouTube? It depends on where this person is going. You want to meet them where they are and also where they are likely to be most receptive. So maybe in Pre-Need it’s social media, and in Meaningful Gift it’s an in-person meeting.
7. What are your goals? In each phase, your definition of success will be different. No one is donating to you in Pre-Need, but you might have the goal of achieving awareness amongst this group.

Perhaps you’ve done this on a large whiteboard, and you now take a step back. One thing you might notice is that, for some stages, you had no idea how to fill in the blank or you made an assumption without much confidence. That’s OK. Look at those blank spaces and decide if the value of the answer is worth more effort — and potentially research. Now, how do you use this?

Leveraging the Journey Map

The value of the journey mapping process may have started to emerge as it was created, but let’s use another example. Working with a nonprofit focused on increasing the number of foster families, the challenge seemed immense. Breaking it into stages — Uninvolved > Trigger > Internal Research > Agency Contact > Qualification > Foster — we can do several things:

1. Prioritize the phase where we see greatest potential for impact. Are we losing most because the Qualification stage is cumbersome? Do potential foster parents have difficulty conducting their own research before contacting us? Where are we doing well and less well so the team can focus on the right specific area?
2. Track success over time. How many people are searching for foster information in our area? How many contact us? How many move on to Qualification? We can think about how many people are entering this “funnel” and our success rate at moving them from phase to phase.
3. Tactical prioritization. What should we say in the email? Let’s see what phase they are in, what need they are trying to fulfil, and our goal. We can be more strategic about what to say, when to say it and where to say it (or do it).

Idea in Action

The Greater Chicago Food Depository put this idea into action and found that the central starting point for almost all involvement was a site visit. Frequently it was a corporate outing to pack food for the various food pantries. While there are other outreach vehicles, this pathing both highlighted the criticality of a successful intervention at the initial visit and defined the multiple paths to engagement.

Now the team is testing ideas for the site visit and starting to think about how different groups might be more likely to choose different involvement paths. School groups will be different from corporate groups and will be perhaps different from church groups. By tracking where they are today, trying new things, and monitoring the impact, they are on the path to increasing their success and, in doing so, helping to solve food insecurity in Chicago and beyond. 

Marketers across for-profit and nonprofit struggle to understand how, where, and when to best connect with their constituents to drive the most value. A simple mapping exercise like this can get us to a 70% understanding quickly and start immediately generating better, more focused actions. Remember that your goal in marketing is simply to have the right people choose you, and the path to doing this well is seeing the world through their eyes.

Kevin McTigue is a Clinical Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management teaching multiple classes for the MBA, Global EMBA, and executive education programs. His career spans more than twenty-five years in teaching, consulting, brand management, and advertising. Before his full-time appointment at Kellogg, Kevin led a strategy consulting practice for global digital agency SapientRazorfish.