Ultimate guide to non-profit surveys (with templates)
Discover how non-profit surveys can help to positively transform an organisation, streamlining donor relations, volunteer and funding management and more.
Non-profit organisations often juggle important administrative tasks such as managing relationships, planning events and maintaining internal operations. Online surveys are a cost-effective way to stay on top of these responsibilities, allowing non-profits to focus on gauging interest in events and achieving fundraising goals.
SurveyMonkey for non-profits offers a range of tools and templates that can help non-profits streamline their duties, enhance donor relationships and improve volunteer management. In this article, we’ll explore how non-profits can leverage SurveyMonkey to create better, more successful organisations.
Is SurveyMonkey free for non-profits?
SurveyMonkey offers a free plan to support operations and seamlessly collect feedback. The free plan offers a range of features that you can take advantage of, including:
- 10-question surveys: Create custom surveys or use a template with up to 10 questions.
- Expert templates: Leverage our many years of experience by using a pre-built survey template written by one of our experts.
- Build with AI: Simply type in a prompt for a survey and our AI tool rapidly generates a complete survey for you to use.
Non-profit businesses can also choose to upgrade to a paid SurveyMonkey account. With this premium account, you’ll have access to our full range of features, allowing you to gain deeper insight into how your volunteers, clients and donors feel.
SurveyMonkey discount for non-profits
SurveyMonkey offers significant discounts to non-profit organisations each year. Non-profits can review the discount application to discover whether or not they’re eligible for this lower-rate SurveyMonkey account. If you meet all the requirements, you can navigate to the Plans and Pricing page and submit your discount application.
Any non-profit organisation that currently has a free plan is more than welcome to apply for our discount.
Partner with SurveyMonkey to gain exposure and get donations
Another powerful way in which non-profit organisations can leverage SurveyMonkey is by signing up for our SurveyMonkey Contribute programme. With Contribute, users can complete surveys and earn money for their favourite charities and non-profit organisations.
Partnering with SurveyMonkey Contribute is a wonderful way to generate exposure for your organisation while gaining donations for your non-profit. To register for this programme, your non-profit must:
- Be registered as a non-profit.
- Have sufficient documentation providing charitable registration.
- Not be political or religious in purpose.
- Maintain a full non-discrimination policy.
What are the best surveys for non-profits to use
Non-profits can use surveys to improve every part of their organisation, soliciting feedback to help them take steps to enhance fundraising, marketing, the employee experience, donor relationships and more.
Let’s explore some of the best non-profit surveys templates to use:
Fundraising and donor feedback
Fundraising and donor feedback surveys allow businesses to check in with donors and collect feedback after recent fundraising events.
Here’s how to use a donor feedback survey:
- Improve donor relations: Sending out these surveys can help you collect information from donors and discover how to improve their experience with your non-profit.
- Enhance events: Sending out this survey after an event will help identify areas that you can improve on in the future.
- Scope understanding: Surveying donors can help you gain a better understanding of whether your donors understand your fundraising objectives.
Event planning and feedback
Event planning and feedback surveys are an excellent way to understand your donors better and discover what they’re looking for in an event.
Here’s how you can use an event feedback survey template:
- Identify the preferred event type: Should you be hosting galas, interactive evenings or a different kind of event entirely? Survey your donors to discover what events they’d like to attend.
- Solicit post-event feedback: After an event, you can use these surveys to determine how successful it was and what donors would like to see improved in the future.
- Logistics planning: Iron out the finer details by launching an event planning survey where you ask for more information, such as when donors are free, how long the event should last and other logistical details.
Improving non-profit operations and employee experience
Non-profits rely on networks of volunteers and employees to keep their organisations running. Requesting feedback from these groups will help you create the best possible employee experience.
Here’s how you can use employee and volunteer feedback surveys:
- Evaluate the employee experience: Surveys are one of the best ways of monitoring the employee experience and helping to provide a better workplace for your employees.
- Organise volunteer hours: Surveys make collecting data from volunteers as easy as possible. Use surveys to discover when volunteers are free for specific events.
- Build better training programmes: Use these volunteer experience surveys to determine how successful volunteer training was and whether you could improve your training sessions.
Volunteer recruiting and management
A constant influx of new volunteers will help your non-profit manage events and build donor relationships.
Here are a few reasons why you should use volunteer recruiting surveys:
- Collect applicant data: Remove data silos and collect all applications in one place for easier HR management.
- Streamline selection: Filter survey data to identify your top candidates with minimal effort.
- Discover skills: Look for specific skills to align with future events that your non-profit organisation plans to host.
Non-profit marketing surveys
Market research surveys help non-profits understand their wider audience and identify useful segments of donors to campaign for.
Here’s how you can use market research surveys as a non-profit:
- Collect demographic data: Discover the core demographics of your ideal donor, helping you to create tailored campaigns to increase engagement with valuable user segments.
- Improve marketing strategies: Identify the marketing channels and methods that resonate best with your audience.
- Competitor research: Conduct competitor research to create a database of other non-profits and catalogue their marketing approaches to help inform your own and identify gaps in the market.
How to do market research for a non-profit
Market research is the cornerstone of an effective non-profit organisation. When you understand the market that you operate in, you can more effectively address your customers, motivate donors and recruit new volunteers.
Here are some tips about how your non-profit can conduct market research:
- Get in touch with donors: Contacting one-off or past donors who have stopped contributing can help your non-profit understand donor churn. You can prevent future churn by pinpointing why donors stop working with your business.
- Understand your target market: Use tools such as SurveyMonkey Audience to gain a better understanding of what makes people donate and how to approach them.
- Segment your approach: What works for one market may fall short for another. Segment your donors and use different marketing tactics to engage with them where possible. Use surveys to discover what people are looking for in your non-profit.
- Improve your non-profit branding: Using market research surveys, you can get in touch with donors and identify ways to improve your branding to make your non-profit more relatable to your target audience.
How to measure non-profit success
Success in a non-profit goes beyond measuring your donations over time and monitoring how well you achieve your mission. Your non-profit can use surveys to benchmark and track key non-profit success metrics.
For example, you can leverage the following non-profit metrics to measure your success over time:
- Net Promoter® Score (NPS): The NPS is a general metric that suggests how loyal your donors are to your business. By measuring and benchmarking it over time, you can monitor customer loyalty and demonstrate how you’re improving your donors’ experience.
- eNPS: If your employees are happy, your donors will be too. Survey your employees regularly to discover exactly how you could enhance their experience. You can boost employee satisfaction and drive employee loyalty by responding to their feedback.
- Donor retention rate: A low donor retention rate could suggest that your message isn’t strong enough to keep donors interested over time. By measuring your donor retention rate and surveying current and past donors, you can pinpoint methods to enhance your retention rate and decrease churn.
Tips for running NPO surveys
To gather responses that your non-profit can turn into valuable insight, you must follow the best possible survey practices.
Here are some tips for running effective NPO surveys:
- Define objectives: Before sending out a survey, you should ensure you have a clear understanding what data you hope to gather. This focus will help improve your survey and determine the top questions to ask.
- Keep surveys short: Reduce the number of questions in your survey to ensure that respondents can complete it within five minutes.
- Use closed-ended questions: While one or two open-ended questions are useful, most of your survey should comprise closed-ended questions.
- Analyse after closure: Make sure you wait until you have received many survey responses or have closed the survey before you start to analyse your data.
Related reading: Using surveys to measure and amplify impact
Non-profit survey use cases
SurveyMonkey is a firm believer that non-profits can change the world. Over recent years, we’ve had the pleasure of working with non-profits from around the globe that are delivering a profound social impact.
Let’s explore some examples of how non-profits use surveys to enhance their organisations.
Connecting families with affordable childcare
The Early Learning Coalition of Northwest Florida (ELCNWF) is a non-profit in the US that supports low-income families by funding childcare assistance. The organisation has worked with over 3,500 families and helped over 5,000 children access education.
The ELCNWF uses surveys to streamline administrative tasks, helping with grant applications and provider feedback. As ELCNWF doesn’t have any active data scientists in its organisation, SurveyMonkey’s Analyze tools help them make sense of their data.
Across customer satisfaction, employee engagement and employee satisfaction, ELCNWF uses SurveyMonkey’s features and templates to drive engagement, enhance their processes and bring them one step closer to supporting families in need.
Testing a new non-profit product concept
In the US, Vanguard Charitable sponsors donor-advised funds, with thousands of charitable donors in their network. After the pandemic, Vanguard wanted to survey donors to see how they would prefer to allocate their donations. By leveraging SurveyMonkey, Vanguard discovered that donors wanted to get hyper-local with their donations but didn’t have any information about local non-profits that they might want to support.
The team at Vanguard started concept testing a product using SurveyMonkey Product Concept Analysis, thereby developing their ‘Nonprofit Aid Visualizer’. After rounds of successful testing, Vanguard launched the product, which enables donors to quickly locate local organisations that are important to them.
Using SurveyMonkey, Vanguard gathered over 1,000 survey responses to their product testing. This enabled the company to streamline product development and bring it to market as quickly as possible. Since its launch, the Nonprofit Aid Visualizer, in tandem with Vanguard Charitable, has generated donations that exceeded $1.5 billion (approx. £1.18 billion) in 2020.
Transform your non-profit with SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey has tools and templates that allow your non-profit to succeed. From developing new offerings to streamlining event organisation, SurveyMonkey templates help your non-profit rapidly collect and analyse data.
Non-profits can rely on SurveyMonkey to improve all aspects of their organisation, from increasing donations to developing market research insights. Get started today with SurveyMonkey for non-profits.