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Do you know what you're looking for in your fundraising post campaign report?
You’re new to running fundraising campaigns, or maybe you’re not. You might run smaller scale campaigns and wing it year-on-year, or to save resources you just work from memory.
But there are so many details that you can’t just wing, and I’m challenging your theory that you can work that well from memory.
If this is your first charity campaign then you won’t have previous fundraising event data to work with.
First fundraising campaign
Awesome! Welcome to the world of peer-to-peer fundraising!
If you haven’t got previous data to work with when it comes to a past fundraising campaign, there is still data you can use.
Pull through data from your organisation. Data such as:
Beneficiaries
- Most frequently requested assistance
- Most used services
- Prioritise a list of service improvements
- Types of beneficiary support
- How funds are currently distributed
Donors
- Average donation
- Age
- Location
- In memory of
- Where they come from
Behaviour of your website visitors
- Most visited page/s
- Where they come from
- Out of total website visitors, how many go to the donation page, and of those, how many complete donations.
- Other active interest indicators such as volunteering page.
Findings from charity surveys
- Any sentiment regarding the charity
- Ideas of which type of fundraising event may appeal to your fundraisers
If you can get some or all of this data, you’ll be in a much better position when planning your first fundraising event.
Great! You’ve done this before. You’ve seen a fundraising event in action for your charity, and now you’re looking to maximise your data for next time.
Have a quick look at the data suggested in the section above, if you’re interested in how you can back your event decisions with organisational insights.
Otherwise, let’s dive straight into metrics you can assess from your most recent fundraising event. Ezy Raise provides extensive data on your fundraising campaigns. We can either put together a full report presentation for you, or you can download the data yourself and identify your own insights to work with.
Some metrics to measure in your next non-profit fundraising report:
Total funds raised
The main reason you’re running these campaigns is to raise money for your cause, so tracking the total of your fundraising events should be the non-negotiable of all non-negotiables.
Tracking this metric each year is also important to see the growth, decline, or plateau of your campaign over time.
Participants
Tracking participant numbers is a good idea. But there are also active participants to assess.
‘Active’ participants means anyone who raised over zero (in whichever currency you’re using). How many participants kicked off their fundraising?
You may have 2000 participants, how 1000 of them didn’t raise more than $0. In this case you have 1000 active participants, or 50% of your total participants are active.
Donation data
Donation data could comprise of individual donation amounts, method of payment, or whether donations went to an individual or a team.
If you combine this data with some of the participant data you’ll get above, then you can find out average donation amounts, as well as teams and/or individuals with highest amounts raised.
You can also find out which payment method is more popular, and any trends which may indicate the need to introduce new payment methods such as Google Pay, etc.
Participant demographics
Basic breakdown of age, gender, or even geographical location may be useful for knowing where to place budgets to either improve on already great results, or to focus on encouraging growth in another area.
Identify an age split in funds raised. Is your campaign targeted more towards a younger demographic?
If yes, then you’d want to see this in your resulting data.
If you’re not seeing the results from targeting based upon age, then it might be worth testing a campaign less focused on the age aspect.
See if you notice any patterns in the rest of the participant data and then think about how you can tailor content to those demographics.
Maybe high-level demographic data is irrelevant for your cause and it shows to be irrelevant for your campaigns too. That’s not a bad thing. There is so much data to be found in our reports, you’ll find something you can hook onto for next year.
Returning participants
How many participants return multiple times? Maybe you have a low return participant rate, and if this is the case you should further investigate why this is the case.
If you plan to run your fundraising event year after year, then putting strategies in place for fundraiser retention is really important.
You will find it harder to build strategies for this without noting the current retention rate, as well as other factors, such as whether it has increased or decreased with any tactics you’ve previously placed to improve this metric.
Messaging evaluation
See if your participants are motivated by cause messaging, or see if your cause messaging could be more specific.
Cause-messaging can be in the form of stories or statistics, but depending on the demographics, one may be more appropriate or effective than the other. Again, if you’re new to campaigns then you can try both and assess the result post your first campaign.
If not cause messaging, your audience may respond better to health-messaging, or even challenge-messaging yet still be fundraising for a cause.
Fundraiser Email reporting
Don’t forget email reporting. If you’ve sent any communications throughout the fundraising campaign, whether acquisition or retention, you should be assessing the effectiveness of them.
If you’ve done some A/B testing, now is the time to collate all results to start thinking about next time. Were the results as you hypothesised? Did you get enough data to conclude the test?
If you’ve got the right tracking in emails (if we create and send your emails, we’ve got you covered!), you’ll be able to assess which emails gained specific results. For the acquisition phase for example, you’ll be able to see which emails resulted in the most sign ups.
What’s next for you?
No matter what you’re trying to achieve and what kind of budget or resources you’re working with, make sure you use data to help you shape your campaigns.