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How should you measure fundraising campaign success? In the world of fundraising, our efforts can often times feel like trial and error.
That’s why the most critical element of success is learning from the past.
Optimizing your efforts will increase results and efficiency overall. This means analyzing your tactics after each campaign to determine what produced results and how you can duplicate that effort. Or, similarly, pinpointing actions that didn’t work or need to be tweaked so you can avoid or refine those strategies on your next go-round.
Measuring success can be especially useful when looking at two successive campaigns on the same subject or in a similar category such as athletics. The parallel nature of these affinity-based campaigns is helpful because you’re appealing to the same community, making it easy to develop targeted outreach to adjust or grow their engagement.
Allowing the campaigns to play off of each other and measuring overall growth is also an opportunity to pin down what makes these types of targeted fundraisers successful over time. Whether this is through analyzing overall results and gift sizes, or determining what received the most engagement on social media, measuring your progress and building in repeatability will promote growth and allow you to expand your operations to include more microsite initiatives.
While it can be tricky to know exactly what to measure and how to adjust your tactics, fear not! This blog is a resource on how to successfully grow your efforts.
How to Measure Success
Your campaign is complete and your hard work has paid off! Now comes the fun part- analytics. There are so many moving parts within a campaign that it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what were the most important factors to your success. There are several different areas that are measurable and can help you move the needle in the long-term. When analyzing what worked and what didn’t consider the following areas of your campaign:
Fundraising Success Metrics
- Cost per dollar raised (CPDR) – Calculates whether or not your organization made gains on the investment you put towards your fundraising.
- Gifts Secured – How many gifts your organization secured over an allotted period of time. Tracking gifts secured over time is another way of saying you’re tracking donation growth.
- Fundraising ROI – Your fundraising ROI demonstrates whether or not you have seen value from the money invested in your fundraising efforts by calculating how much money you raised from each dollar you spent.
- Conversion Rate – Measures how many donors took an action when prompted by your organization.
- Donation Growth – Tracks your gift secured over a longer span of time to help you make sure you’re meeting your long-term fundraising goals.
Donor Metrics
- Donor Retention Rate – Allows your organization to track what percentage of donors in your base have given more than once. Try also tracking this metric separately across like campaigns to see if you’re retaining your affinity audience.
- Donor Growth – Simply tells you how much your donor base has grown (or shrunk) over a determined period.
- Outreach Rate – Measures how often you’re getting in touch with your donors. Keep in mind the correlation between outreach and retention.
Giving Metrics:
- Average Gift Size – Measures the percentage by which your average gift size has increased over a certain period of time.
- Average Major Gift Size – Similar to average gift size but exclusively measures major gift size.
- Online Giving Percentage – Tells your organization what portion of their overall donations have come from online channels, primarily their online donation page.
Digital Campaign Metrics:
- Email Conversion Rate – Email conversion tells you how many of your supporters acted on a certain call-to-action, specifically one included in an email
- Email Opt Out Rate – Measures how many recipients in your list unsubscribed from your email campaign over a certain amount of time.
- Engagement on Social Media – Measures the public shares, likes and comments for your organization’s social media efforts
- Social Media ROI – Social media ROI is what you get back from all the time, effort, and resources you commit to social. And it’s best calculated with dollar amounts.
How To Improve
Now that you have delved into (and recorded) your campaign’s analytics, you can apply your findings to upcoming campaigns. Because you have tracked metrics you can now tailor your efforts for a similar or successive campaign. This can be made extremely simple due to the similarities in communities surrounding these two campaigns.
Set Goals:
Your organization’s success is primarily measured by previous campaigns. Your numbers are unique to your efforts. Setting goals and benchmarks for the numbers you hope to see on the metrics listed above is a great way to cater results to your organization.
Correlate Your Metrics:
Understanding how each of these measurements directly or indirectly affect each other will help you strengthen your efforts. For example, if your donor outreach rate is low and by proxy, your retention rate is not where you would like it to be, boost your outreach program.
Research Your Tactics:
Spend some time on some of these resources to dive into additional tactics that can create deeper engagement among everyone in your community:
