Measure Your Success

Once you’ve passed mid-January, you will have received most year-end commitments, and most nonprofits “officially” close their campaigns. How did you do? Here are some indicators you should be looking at to measure your success beyond just meeting or exceeding your financial goals.

To get the most accurate picture of how well your organization did, you should look at year-over-year (YoY) data to gain context, benchmarks, and, hopefully, actionable insights to guide future campaigns. We recommend reviewing data over three years at least; five years is best. Note that Covid results may skew your data a bit, so perhaps keep 2019 results until you can pull information without relying on 2020 or 2021 year-end, which were anomalous for many nonprofits. 

Fundraising financial metrics

We typically recommend our clients look at these specific financial fundraising metrics:

• Overall funds raised:  How does what you raised compare against your year-end goal and the amount you raised in previous years?
• Average gift size: This data point provides insight into your donors’ behavior and the effectiveness of your fundraising strategy. Are donors giving more or less than prior years? 
• Gift upgrades: How many donors increased or decreased their giving compared to previous donations? Is the percentage of increases growing? How about decreases?
• Recurring gifts secured: Some year-end campaigns include messaging around recurring donations, which can lead to an increase in these reliable gifts. If you didn’t ask for recurring gifts (and even if you did) we love conducting a mini-campaign at the end of January asking all donors who gave at year-end to consider making their gift recurring!

Donor metrics

These are some of the donor metrics we capture and review with our clients:

• Donor retention rates: What percentage of your current donors gave again during your year-end campaign?
• Acquisition of new donors: This number is important, as all nonprofits inevitably lose donors year-over-year. How many first-time donors gave to you? What percentage of your overall campaign dollars came from their contributions? 
• Lapsed donor re-engagement: How many of your donors who hadn’t given recently were inspired to donate as part of your campaign?

Engagement metrics

While dollars and donors are important, it’s also critical that you look at engagement metrics to see if people on your list are connecting with your messages.

• Email open rates: The percentage of recipients who opened your campaign emails, typically tracked through your email marketing software.
• Click-Thru Rates (CTR): Percentage of recipients who clicked on links within your emails, which demonstrates engagement and, often, willingness to donate.
• Social media metrics: Engagement rates —likes, comments, shares—around your campaign messages on social platforms can indicate a connection with your content and mission.

Operational Metrics

It’s also important to look at operational metrics focusing on internal fundraising operations.

• Response time: How quickly did you acknowledge emails or send receipts to donors? Best practice is within 48 hours, but some gifts—especially major gifts that come in during the last days of the year—may take longer. 
• Volunteer involvement: How many donations can be attributed to board members or other volunteers? Is that percentage increasing or decreasing?

Once you’ve pulled this data, we recommend creating a report that you can add to each January. Most databases will have reports to pull some or all of this information. You can use this template to enter all your data in one place.

But, gathering data is only step one!

Why analytics matter and how to analyze your fundraising campaign

To make the most use of your 2024 year-end data, take some time to analyze the information and sketch out strategies for your 2025 year-end campaign results. You’ll refine those in the summer, but making notes now will give you a head start in your planning this summer. Here are some suggestions using the same metric groups detailed above:

1. Financial metrics: If you reached or exceeded your goal, what do you think you could raise at the end of this year? Use analysis from other metrics to inform how much more (or less) you think you could raise. Of course, this goal may change by July or August when you’re finalizing your overall goal. But these notes will be helpful when you start the process.
2. Donor metrics: Should you focus on expanding your list in 2025? Or perhaps refining your segmentation process? Which lists performed best? What donor engagement activities should you put in place in Q1, Q2 and Q3 to increase your major donor response rate?  
3. Engagement metrics: Which messages resonated? Which fell flat? Did you email too much, or perhaps is there room to expand? Did you start your year-end campaign too soon (i.e. no one was paying attention/didn’t respond until later), or did you wait too long and miss a window to increase giving? Did you have a social media campaign that popped, or one that underperformed? What could you have done to increase engagement?
4. Operational metrics: How did you and your team (if you have one) do when it comes to quick response? Did your major donors wait too long for a personalized call from the CEO or Director of Development? Did your board members play a role in asking for donations (calls/emails)? Did the board help in thanking donors?

Each of these metrics brings up opportunities to improve efforts next year and see better results. I’d love to hear which of these metrics you want to focus on—maybe all of them?