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When we set out to conduct thousands of AI-powered interviews for non-profit strategic planning, we knew we'd learn some valuable lessons along the way. What we didn't expect was just how clearly these patterns would emerge across organizations of all sizes. Whether you're planning to interview 10 board members or 1,000 community members, these key insights will help you maximize participation and gather meaningful feedback. Here are our field-tested strategies for getting the most out of your stakeholder interviews:
1) Ensure participants see their invitations
- Validate e-mails as deliverable before sending out surveys. This gives clients a chance to correct bad contact info and protects your sender reputation.
- Always send an announcement from a name your participants recognize to keep an eye out for the interview invitation. Let them know, who will the invitation come from? What will it look like?
- Send reminders. Because we provide unique links, we know who has and who has not completed their interview. Everyone is busy, and we find giving a final reminder one week before the survey conclusion helps boost response rates.
2) Show them why they should care
- Don’t be afraid to do personalized outreach and encouragement to VIP participants. A personal invitation from someone you know is harder to say no to than a mass e-mail.
- Anonymity kills accountability. When folks know that you can see who is participating, they lean in to get it done. It’s important to note that measuring participation doesn’t take away from the ability to protect the anonymity of response content.
- It’s reasonable to shoot for 100% response rates from team members and board members. The further out your participants are from your day-to-day, the lower your response rates will likely be. For engaged clients/donors we see completion rates in the 10-15% range. If you are trying to interview folks that are not engaged regularly, 1% might not be a good target.
- A thoughtful welcome message explaining why their opinion matters and how it will be used can make a big difference.
- Consider incentives to compensate them for their time. We want participants to have a good answer to the question of “what’s in it for me?”
3) Lower the opportunity cost for them
- Be respectful of the participants’ time. It’s fair to ask a board member to take an in-depth interview that could take 30-45 minutes, but ask the same of a donor who hasn’t engaged in a few years? I bet you can predict your completion rates.
- Question complexity has a significant impact on completion time, we’ve found that AI coached questions take about 2 minutes, normal open-ended questions average about a minute, and multiple-choice questions are often just a few seconds. Unless you are targeting a very engaged audience, shoot for a total survey time of around 5-10 minutes max.
- Be thoughtful about survey design. It is good practice to mix diverse types of questions so that participants don’t get bored, and it allows you to do both quantitative and qualitative analysis with a single survey.
- Let your participants warm up to the process and start off with easier questions – once someone has filled out a handful of multiple-choice questions, they are more likely to dive into a hard open-ended question than if you have them dive into the deep-end right out of the gate.
4) One size does not fit all
- When designing your survey, it is important to put yourself in the participants’ shoes – are you asking questions that they will have the experience to answer?
- Consider entirely different questions for distinct groups of stakeholders. We often see the following groups being popular for non-profit strategic planning:
- Staff
- Leadership
- Board Members
- Donors
- Funders
- Community Partners
The art of stakeholder interviews isn't just about asking the right questions—it's about creating an environment where people feel both motivated and empowered to share their insights. By focusing on accessibility, engagement, and respect for participants' time, you can dramatically improve both the quantity and quality of responses. Remember: every completed interview represents someone who cared enough to share their perspective. Make it easy for them to do so, and they'll help you build a stronger foundation for your strategic planning.
