What People Are Really Trying to Do When They Support a Charity
For charities, making people care is often the easy part. Getting them to provide support is harder. Keeping them is harder still. Most donor and volunteer strategies focus efforts on the first of these but whilst a crucial foundation, caring alone is not enough to convert and keep supporters. Doing this requires insight and actions into what potential and existing supporters value most when they give their time or money to a cause.
A charity we partnered with had spent eighteen months reworking their donor engagement strategy. This included better stories, clearer impact numbers, more touching case studies. Donation levels barely moved, and the engagement they did get was shallow: one-off transactions from people who never came back. The cause was good and the team was strong, but something was stopping people from moving beyond passive sympathy to actual commitment.
When we talked to donors directly, the picture changed. People believed in the mission; many had considered giving. What stopped them was never the cause: it included doubt about how their money would be spent, worries about excessive communications and upselling, the potential admin burden and future flexibility over their support. These are not reasons to fix the message. They are clues about what donors were actually trying to accomplish — a different question, one most charity research never asks.
That is what Jobs-to-be-Done thinking is for.
The Job, Not the Donation
JTBD starts from a premise that sounds obvious but almost never guides fundraising strategy: people do not want to donate. They want progress — to move from where they are to somewhere better, in a way that fits their functional needs, their emotional life, and how they want to be seen. The job, not the donation, is what you are really serving.
Once you understand the job, everything shifts — not just the message, but the thing you are actually offering. A charity's product is not the cause; it is the giving relationship itself: how much someone gives, how often they hear from you and in what form, how involved they want to be, how easily they can step up or quietly step back. Those are the levers. You stop asking "how do we get people to donate?" and start asking the more useful question: "what would need to be true for someone to see themselves as part of this?"
The Forces That Drive the Decision
Knowing the job is not enough. People do not commit because they have intellectually understood your mission; something has to move them. Switching Forces maps four dynamics. Two drive change: push, the dissatisfaction with doing nothing, and pull, the attraction of a meaningful way forward. Two resist it: habit, the inertia of staying put or not giving at all, and anxiety — will my money be used well, will I be pestered for more, am I getting into something I cannot step back from? For someone to act, push and pull have to outweigh habit and anxiety. Yet most fundraising focuses almost entirely on pull — better stories, more emotional content — while leaving habit and anxiety unaddressed.
The charity we worked with is a good example. Supporters felt the pull keenly. What stopped them was anxiety: uncertainty about whether they were the right kind of donor, and worry about what ongoing involvement would demand. The fix was not more compelling content but redesigning the offer itself: a clearly bounded entry option that spelled out exactly what it involved — how often they would hear from the charity, in what form, with no escalating asks — plus a low, genuinely committable starting point and an easy way to step back. Anxiety is rarely beaten by reassurance in the abstract. It is beaten by changing what someone is being asked to commit to.
JTBD as a Growth Engine
There is a temptation to treat JTBD as a messaging tool, but what donors lack is rarely a better story — it is confidence in their own role. Reframing around that is a structural fix, not a communications one.
Take two donors giving the same £10 a month. One wants a contribution that asks nothing more of her: a single annual gift, one light note at year end, otherwise a respectful silence. The other, who started giving after his father died, wants his giving to keep something alive: a recurring commitment tied to that memory, with updates that show continuity over the years. Same charity, same £10, two entirely different products. Treat them identically and you work against both. Get it right, and each feels the charity actually understood what they came for.
Choosing the Right Method to Uncover JTBD
Ask donors why they give and they will tell you the mission aligns with their values — true, but just the socially acceptable version. The real picture is messier: ego, genuine care, social positioning, legacy anxiety, guilt. The more socially charged the topic, the more the research method matters. Charitable giving sits at the intersection of money, identity and moral self-image, so standard approaches produce sanitised answers: focus groups generate consensus, surveys produce what sounds reasonable, and interviews only work if the participant feels safe being honest with a stranger.
Online insight communities are particularly well suited to this. Participants respond to tasks over several days, in their own time and words, with no researcher in the room — and people write things asynchronously that they would soften face-to-face. For donor research we pair these communities, recruiting supporters and non-supporters together, with MaxDiff surveys to weigh the relative pull of different motivations. The community gives texture; the quantitative work gives scale and validates what we have heard.
The output is not a report destined for a shelf. It is a toolkit: target segments and personas mapped to the job each is trying to get done, the forces pulling them towards commitment or holding them back, and their real engagement preferences. Crucially, it configures the product, including how often each group hears from you and through which channel, what their updates look like, how the ask is structured, how much room to build into the commitment. That is how the charity reshapes its giving experience and looks after donors over time.
Making It Real
Jobs to be Done only earns its place if it produces something you can act on: an honest understanding of what people are trying to achieve, where the current experience is letting them down, and what would genuinely change their behaviour. That takes research designed to surface the real job, not the filtered version people offer when asked about charitable giving. Done well, it gives you more than interesting findings, it provides a clear view of what your supporters value, where you are falling short, and what it would take to build a relationship worth keeping.
Examples charity case study:
Audience Needs-based Segmentation
We partnered with GroceryAid to help the grocery industry charity move to a needs-led approach to supporting its audience. Combining qualitative community research with a large-scale segmentation survey, we applied Jobs-to-be-Done and Switching Forces frameworks to uncover the needs, crisis journeys and barriers to help-seeking among grocery workers - delivering audience segments, rich personas and actionable guidance to help GroceryAid reach more people, earlier.
