Fundraising reports can help you realise how much donor attrition or downgraded giving is costing your charity and motivate you to do something about it. In other words, fundraising reports that measure fundraising performance can enable you and others in your charity to find out how much money your charity is losing through donor attrition and gift downgrades. Also, to find out how many donors have stopped giving or are giving less than they did last year.
A case study
A recent analysis of a client’s donor files through our Fundraising Fitness Test revealed that in 2007 for every £5 received from renewing and new donors the charity lost £3 from lapsed and downgrading donors. This means that their net gain was only £2!
We also noted that for every three donors that the charity was bringing in through new donor acquisition activities – two donors were leaving the charity taking with them valuable contributions they could have made. So, in reality the charity was only acquiring 1 rather than 3 donors and the real cost of acquisition (including the value of the lapsed donors) was much higher than the initial ROI of new donor acquisition activities.
In my opinion, successful fundraisers are constantly measuring new donor acquisition efforts, as well as donor attrition and downgrades. In addition to this, they are doing something by way of donor reactivation and upgrading mailings to reduce the number of lapsed and downgrading donors.
To find out how your charity can benefit from our Fundraising Fitness Test email:redina(at)mcconkey-johnston.co.uk
Measuring your fundraising performance can help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current fundraising activities.
Many charities carry out several fundraising activities in the course of the year including: fundraising appeals, new donor acquisition campaigns, fundraising events, major donor appeals, legacy campaigns, email campaigns, etc. Often fundraisers doing these activities tend to measure only two things: how much money they got from each activity and how many donors gave.
Few fundraisers are prepared to drill deeper into the data by asking the right questions and generating the fundraising reports that can show them which fundraising activities recruited more new donors, larger donations or, which activities brought in more donors with a greater lifetime value than others, etc. But, those who do measure the performance of their fundraising activities often reap better results from their future fundraising activities.
A case study
As part of our Fundraising Fitness Test for one of our clients we calculated the Return on Investment (ROI) of all their fundraising and non-fundraising (e.g. newsletters, educational materials, etc) packages mailed to the database in the last three years. And, we noted that their charity’s bi-annual newsletter was the best vehicle for converting contacts from the database into first time givers.
So, we recommended that the charity increased the frequency of their newsletter from twice a year to four times a year and strengthened the fundraising ask in it. The result - in the last 18 months this charity has seen a steady increase in the number of the first time givers through this tool.
On another occasion, we helped a client to start measuring the financial contributions from new donors coming from different sources. A few years ago they were investing in getting new donors at exhibitions, regional events, inserts in the Christian press, donors introducing the charity to a friend, offering a free book in return for a modest donation and radio advertising, etc.
Today, they are investing only in three of new donor acquisition activities described above. Why? – Because, our fundraising reports helped them to identify the activities that bring in the majority of donors who are likely to give again and again to this charity.
To find out how your charity can benefit from our Fundraising Fitness Test email: redina(at)mcconkey-johnston.co.uk
