What People Are Really Trying to Do When They Support a Charitable Cause
Most charities treat donor engagement as a storytelling problem. It isn't. Using Jobs-to-be-Done and Switching Forces, we show why people give and why understanding the real job, and the value each donor is looking for, reshapes the giving experience itself, not just the message.
How Jobs to be Done can help shape effective donor strategies
For charities, making people care is often the easy part. Getting them to act is harder. Keeping them is harder still. Most donor communications strategies try to do all three at once and end up doing none of them justice.
It is a familiar pattern: a charity reworks its donor engagement strategy, developing better stories, clearer impact numbers, more touching case studies. Donation levels can barely move, and what uplift there is tends to be shallow: one-off transactions from people who never come back, or short-lived monthly commitments. The cause is worthy and the team is strong, but something is stopping people from moving beyond passive sympathy to actual commitment.
Talk to donors directly and a consistent picture emerges. People believe in the mission and many have considered giving. What stops them is rarely the cause itself: it is doubt about whether their money will be spent well, whether a modest gift from someone like them even counts, and what a donation would quietly commit them to next. These are not reasons to fix the message. They are clues about what donors are actually trying to accomplish, which is a different question, and one charity research can often overlook.
This is where 'Jobs-to-be-Done' (JTBD) thinking can deliver a fresh perspective.
The Jobs to do, Not the Donation
JTBD starts from a premise that sounds obvious but is often not central to 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 by others. This job, not the donation, is what charities are really serving.
Once you understand donors' jobs, everything shifts. Not just the message, but the thing you are actually offering those who give their time or money. 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. Charities become more effective when they shift their mindset from "how do we get people to donate?" towards a more useful question: "what would a donor need to see as the outcome from their support to remain committed?"
The Forces That Drive the Decision
Knowing the JTBD is a springboard for exploring the triggers and barriers to support. People do not commit because they have intellectually understood a mission; something has to move them, or remove what is in their way. 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.
Supporters often feel the pull keenly. What stops them is anxiety: uncertainty about whether they are the right kind of donor, and worry about what ongoing involvement will demand. The fix is rarely more compelling content. It is redesigning the offer itself: a clearly bounded entry option that spells out exactly what it involves, how often someone will 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 and comfort 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 a personal loss, 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. Pairing these communities, recruiting supporters and non-supporters together, with follow-up robust surveys to weigh the relative pull of different motivations, works well: the community gives context, texture and empathy, the quantitative work gives scale and validates what has been heard.
The output should never be a report destined for a shelf but a toolkit - audience segments and personas aligned to different Jobs to be Done mindsets, including the forces pulling them towards commitment or holding them back, and their real engagement preferences. Crucially, this configures the product: 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 a charity can reshapes its giving experience to align with the outcomes donors are seeking - functionally, emotionally and socially.
Making It Real
JTBD research when done well can provide the fuel to shape more effective donor strategies across teams. It provides 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 tidy version people offer when asked about charitable giving. Done well, it gives more than interesting findings: a clear view of what supporters value, where a charity is falling short, and what it would take to build a relationship worth keeping.
Charity case study:
Audience segmentation & journeys for a charity
We partnered with GoceryAid to help the grocery industry charity move from a service-led 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.
