[Video] Discover Gold in Your Donor Data
In this webinar, Brianna Klink reveals a 4-step process for maximizing your fundraising data.
Preparing Your Database for Year-end Fundraising Success
Edited Transcript
Laura: Thank you for coming! I'm Laura Ingalls and I’m the CEO of Abeja Solutions.
We help nonprofits like yours get donor letters done. And today we're going to be talking a little bit about data.
My partner Brianna Klink is definitely the order to my chaos and she's going to be leading that conversation.
I don't see a lot of workshops on data. It's hard to teach data right. And often I know in the nonprofits I've worked in, that data is something given to the person in the job that turns over all the time. Sometimes you have your junior person working on data.
But we really believe that if your data isn't in order that your fundraising really isn't performing at the level that it should. So, we want to talk about data here in July and going into August to help you get prepared to have your best fundraising season ever.
So with that, let me turn it over to Brianna Klink, our chief operating officer here at Abeja, and I’ll see you in the chat. Thanks.
Brianna: Thank you everyone for coming!
You'll notice a small, little ear here. I'll tip down my camera here. I've got a sick Chihuahua at home today who is being very needy. He shouldn't cause us any problems, but I see we have some animal welfare folk here today.
So again, we are talking about data. But why are we talking about data?
It's because data is the foundation for fundraising success. You've probably heard that marketing and fundraising are all about getting the right message, to the right audience, at the right time. And that is definitely the formula for getting to that fundraising goal.
But how do you know what the right message is? Who the right audience is and what the right time is?
That's where we believe that good data helps you narrow your focus on those times, those people, and those messages that are really going to perform for you.
And if you're not familiar with Abeja, we get your donor mail done whether it's an annual report, monthly appeals, or your holiday cards. We focus on donor mail.
We also focus on those things that make donor mail more effective: your email campaigns that integrate with your donor landing pages, for example.
But we really get people focused on donor mail first before focusing on peer-to-peer fundraising and all that sort of stuff because mail is the most bang for your buck and your time.
Formula for fundraising success
So, let's talk about the formula for mailing success. It's very similar to fundraising success.
I said there's one more element and I would argue that the right cost is important especially when you're talking about direct mail. It's also important for email and all those other projects. Is it a good use of your time, energy, and money?
Though good data is the foundation for all of this, you have limited resources. You work at a nonprofit after all, so we try to help our clients maximize those resources.
So, the right time is just around the corner. The vast majority of funds that come into nonprofit organizations happen in December. The second most profitable month is June, which is the end of your fiscal year in a lot of cases.
But Fall and Thanksgiving these are also very profitable times. People are feeling generous, so you'll definitely want to start planning for your Fall, Thanksgiving, and holiday campaign as soon as you can. That's why we're doing this summer series right now.
Progress, not perfection is the goal
Before we dig into a lot of the content I just want to set levels right now. We as the human race are going under a wide-scale global pandemic. We're stressed out and non-profits are underfunded and understaffed.
Coronavirus has not made our work easier. We can't control the world, but we can work smarter. And that's what data is going to help you do – work a little bit smarter.
We're going to cover a ton of information today, but I want to tell you perfection is not the goal. Progress is the goal. If you have to skip some steps or you can't get as far as you want to, it's fine. Do as much as you can and you'll just get closer and closer to progressing towards your goal.
4-step process to mine data gold
So, how do you mine data gold? It's a simple process – only four steps – and I’m going to go through each of these steps in detail. In the materials tab you'll also find a summary of these steps.
Establish a fundraising data strategy.
Define data standards and document processes.
Add and maintain accurate, consistent records.
Make data-based decisions.
We can't skip all the way to the end of making data-based decisions without some foundational steps.
What is a fundraising data strategy?
So, I don't know if you guys are crafters. It might just be me, my mother, and my grandmother – but we tend to hoard any scrap material that we can find because we might be able to use it someday. So we end up with overflowing closets, overflowing bins. And when we actually have time to craft, we can't find what we're looking for.
Our data is a lot of the same way because there isn't a clear cost of hoarding data. We tend to save it all and then it gets overwhelming because there’s too much and it's a little scary. So we want to start with a data strategy to focus on what we keep.
A data strategy defines not only what data you will collect, why it's relevant, and why it's useful to your organization, but the flip side of what data you won't collect, why it's irrelevant to you, and why it's useless.
So, let's take pet ownership or pet guardianship, depending how deep in the animal welfare world you are. It might be extremely relevant and useful to a shelter that's running a capital campaign for a new cat wing if they can look through their database of donors and say, “These are our staunch cat people, they have been giving to us for a long time, and we think they would be good prospects to ask for this capital campaign.”
Now that same cat and dog guardianship information might be relevant to a small rescue, but it's useless because they're too small. They're already having a having a hard time keeping up with the donor information that they have. You know, sending out emails and getting mailings out. They can’t use the data, so why track it if it's useless to you?
And of course for an adult literacy program, dog and cat guardianship would not be relevant or useful to them. So you want to think about data strategy what you're going to keep, what you won't collect.
I’m not talking about first name, last name, email address, right? Those basic items help you communicate with your donors. I’m talking about custom fields or those fields that are basic to your database, but you don't really need the data for your operations.
For example, I believe in Network for Good that gender and birth date are standard fields. We have one client that had some people focused on trying to find that information. They were spending too long searching Facebook to find out what a birth date was when it really wasn't going to be useful for their organization.
Align data strategy with broader strategies, goals
Now your data strategy really needs to align with your broader goals and your organizational strategy. So we have another client with a board that said, “We really need to be able to adapt to market forces.” And this was before coronavirus hit, so now it’s extremely relevant to them.
What that meant for their fundraising strategy was they needed to increase the percentage of revenue from individual donors versus grants, federal government funding, and program revenue.
They have more control over individual donor giving, right? You can't control what grants are available. You can't control federal programs. Sometimes they go up, sometimes they go down.
So, what does that mean for data? Data strategy is not just what you collect and don't collect, but how you're going to get that information. So, this nonprofit has decided that they’re going to make it super easy for their donors to sign up for their email list and collect mailing addresses from more of their donors because they have a very strong digital presence, but less on the mail front.
And they need to be able to track which types of stories appeal most to their donors because that way they can reuse those stories over and over again or find similar themes. That's where their data strategy comes in.
So Elaine (via chat) says, “What percent of people gave to a food appeal versus a sponsorship appeal? Yes, that’s a tactical comparison of one campaign to another and that's very important information. Then, the next time they have budget or timing for an appeal she can say “Oh wait, we definitely need to do food because that performed a lot better.”
Laura mentioned in the chat that board members often fixate on getting new donors versus donor retention. That's something we're going to talk about next. But your data strategy can also help you have those conversations with those much higher in the food chain. They get distracted by shiny objects, right? They say, “Oh I saw that we need to be fundraising on TikTok.” And you’re like, “No, here's why: because that's not going to move our numbers.”
If you do nothing else when you walk away from this webinar, think about what data you can use to measure progress towards your goals. Do you have access to that right now? And then what could you change to get access to that data?
Now, Laura and I have been in larger organizations with a lot of politics involved and you will find some challenges when you're creating a data strategy. You might have an organization that is shifting its priorities on a weekly basis. So, what you can do if you don't have defined goals or a shifting strategy is just control what you can control.
Think about the things that you want to do personally, even if it's not reporting up into a board that tells you that you're doing a good job – because sometimes we don't get that validation from elsewhere. Control what you can control.
Start with tracking foundational metrics (overall)
If you don't know what you want to track, I would recommend starting with some foundational metrics and start tracking these over time. Some of your donor databases might have these sort of baked in and some of them you might have to pull reports specifically and track it in a Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheet.
But I’d encourage you to start tracking that over time and maybe you don't set a goal right away until you get a baseline – until you understand what's actually happening with your organization.
We’re going to go into each one of these separately, but your foundational, overall metrics are going to compare X time versus Y time period. 2019 versus 2020. Q1 versus Q2. Last week versus this week.
Start with tracking foundational metrics (campaign/tactical)
Then we have some very similar campaign-specific or tactical-specific metrics. And these are going to compare X project to Y project just like Elaine said: this appeal versus that appeal. You know whether you're testing the format or the story or the type of ask. You can see what performs better.
How to calculate overall donor metrics
So, how do you calculate those metrics? First, you need to look at your total donors over all time. That's the number of households that have given to you at least once in any previous period.
If you want to include prospects who haven't given to you, you can. But just make sure that you set a definition and you stick with it, so you're comparing apples to apples over time. You can run a report in your database and see if gift count or transaction count is greater or equal to one.
If you're using households you want to not get every contact in that household, but this single household so you want to set head of household to “true” and that'll give you your total donors over however long you've been using that database.
Then you want to look at the total donors in this particular period. I’m using 2019 as an example, so you can run a report in your CRM “last date of gift was in 2019.” It might be an exact date or it might say last year in your database, depending how they slice and dice data.
And of course your head of household equals “true.” I’ll export that into Excel and when we open Excel you can select any column and in the lower right hand corner it'll show you the count so you don't have to go all the way down and see how many lines are in your data in or in your sheet.
You want to look at total donors this particular period and then find out who are the new donors – they had their first gift. You can deselect the gift date, the last gift date column, and deselect all years. Deselect all years except for 2019 and you'll see who gave that particular year.
Retained donors is very similar. You want to subtract total from the new donors and last is your total donors this period versus your total donors of all time.
I don't want you to memorize these procedures right now. You are going to have to go into your particular database and figure out how this works for you and then write it down. We're going to talk about why you should write it down a little bit later, but you'll have this presentation, so you can look at these instructions and then figure out how it works in your database.
How to calculate rates
Now we were just talking about numbers, whole numbers. But to compare apples to oranges, we want to actually look at rates: retention rate, acquisition rate, and attrition rate.
So the total retention rate is the total retained donors divided by total donors of all time. You'll end up with 22 percent or 40 percent. Their acquisition rate is those new donors. And attrition – also called “churn” – is those who have given to you in the past, but didn’t give to you in that particular period.
So Angela says, “We run reports to calculate LYBUNTS and PYBUNTS, but not much more than that.” I know LYBUNTS – gave Last Year But Not This Year – and SYBUNTS – gave Some Year But Not This Year – but do tell me what a PYBUNT is. Okay, so it's the same as SYBUNT. Cool, a new acronym for me.
Some donor databases have that really baked in, but you might have to set up separate reports to get this information out.
How to calculate overall donation data
Now we want to talk about actual donations, so that's the total number of gifts, the total amount given dollars, right? Because the number of gifts can go down, but if the total amount of money coming in is going up that's probably a good thing (at least in the short term). Your average donation amount is going to help you track that information.
If we are getting fewer donors, but higher gifts that can be a really effective fundraising strategy to laser focus on those most profitable donors. Then you want to see the average number of gifts per donor.
If you have an average of 1.5 gifts per donor, then when you see a donor record that has five, six, seven gifts you know that person is a big target for a major gift ask. You know someone who can do monthly giving. That's the type of person that you'll want to focus in on because they're above your average.
You might also look at those people that are way below average if you have to economize. If we only have enough money to mail 500 people, then those people that are below average may get culled from that distribution list.
Overall metrics example dashboard
Here's just a little example of a dashboard. In some of your donor databases, you can set these up and configure them for yourselves. Some of them have some of this information and not others.
But however you need to do it, I’d recommend having a small dashboard and make it as public as possible so you can track changes over time. That will really tell you if you're moving towards your goals.
There was a lot of activity in the chat while I was yammering on, so I’m going to address some of those things right now:
Let's go back to the comment about board members who might fixate on getting new donors versus donor retention. What you can start showing them – especially on a dashboard like this – is the hypothesis that as your retention rate increases your total gifts and your total amount given are going to increase, too. You're going to see an increase in your average donation rate because those people are coming back to you. Repeat donors give more frequently and they give more out of their pocket. So over time you can show your board members you know that focusing on retention is saving you money it's increasing your revenue and “here I have data to show you that it's happening.” Acquisition is expensive. It costs 10 times more to acquire a new donor than to retain an existing donor. And the average retention rate for nonprofits is just 43 percent.
This is actually data that I’ve anonymized from one of our clients and their retention rate is 20 percent, but they shifted their overall strategy quite significantly in this particular time period. It wasn't mission creep so much as just mission re-alignment. They lost a lot of donors that weren’t particularly aligned to their newish mission, so it’s known. And they understood that they weren’t going to retain as many as possible and they were going to have to acquire folks that were more aligned to their mission.
This is just an example of how benchmarks can help you understand your organization, but ultimately those benchmarks are just information. They aren't a directive. You may not want to retain 43 percent of your donors because of some shift in your mission, because of a new strategy. You might want to do something else, but when you look at the fundamental data you should see changes that get you closer to your goal over time.
Elaine says she gets 85 percent retention. That is amazing! So good job, Elaine. If that's your goal fantastic. Now that you have a really high retention rate you can focus on converting more people into monthly donations. You can focus on estate planning – planned gifts – because those people come back to you over and over again. You can look at that retention and say, “This is probably our ceiling for retention. This is the best we’ve ever gotten, but what we can do is start to increase this total given or the average donation amount by really taking care of those particular donors and laser focusing in on our best in that 85 percent?”
Elaine does say we need more donors. So, that's the other thing: your retention rate might be way high. Elaine has twice the average benchmark of 43 percent, but if you're only retaining 85 percent out of say, 200 donors, you do have to add and that's where an acquisition strategy can help you.
How to calculate campaign/tactic metrics
Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to tell you – each one of you – what to do in your data, but I’m going to show you how to figure out what to look for so you can do very similar calculations on your campaigns and your tactical metrics. These are pretty much the same procedures, but these can help you compare “did the greeting card work better than the letter or did this gala work better than this casual pub crawl, if you’re doing events.”
So new pop quiz: orange or blue? Blue, excellent! So we see a recipe versus someone’s mom trying to tell her how to bake bread. My mother-in-law is like this – bless her heart. We ask for the family recipe and she says, “Oh well, you know, get this and that.” And we say, ”Like, how much?”
Define data standards and document processes
It's much easier to get results if you have a process – that’s what a recipe is. It's defined standards and processes, so that’s our next step in the process to dig for data gold.
I’ve got a little Family Feud game here. Why should we define our standards and document our processes around our fundraising data? So turnover is one of them. We know that CDOs, chief development officers, turn over at least every 18 months and that seems to be going down towards like 16 months.
You may need standards and documentation because you have vacation coverage. You know, someone wants to actually to take a break! Or like me, you have Monday brain. You do something all the time, but sometimes it just stops.
Or you can blame your vendor when something in your CRM breaks. I had this happen to a client recently. They’re like, “We had this documented. We had standard procedures and now it doesn’t work!”
What to define & document
So, what do you define and document? You want to define at the very least how data moves in and out of your system so you can find out where things go wrong. Any stylistic preferences that you might have on how you address people. Do you always use Miss Brianna or Miss Laura? Sometimes organizations in the Deep South do that. You know there might other be other regional preferences, too.
Example data movement
Also, documenting your data entry standards for any custom or non-obvious fields and a maintenance schedule is super important. Here's an example of how data moves from one system to another. A lot of CRMs market themselves as “one system to rule them all,” but they do three things really well and the other five very poorly. So we often see clients that don’t use their CRM's email system – they still use a Constant Contact or Mail Chimp.
Your data flow chart doesn't have to be super complicated – you're not computer architects. But you want to know where things come from, so if you start losing data you know where things go wrong.
Example style preferences: formal household name
Here's just a style preference example. This is how one of our clients addresses household names and they use households for addressing envelopes on their direct mail appeals. It's not as obvious for someone coming into the organization. They might think, “Well, the Klink household. But my husband and I have different last names. It's complicated, so they have that stated in their process documentation.
Example donor data standards
Some standards are things that are specific to your organization. We have one client that classifies donors as active if they gave within the current calendar year. LYBUNTS if it was the previous calendar year. SYBUNTS if it was two or three calendar years ago. That's because their CRM has those fields working like that – in you know it’s just like magic.
But in other CRMs, you can actually do LYBUNT within 365 days, so you want to have the classifications that work for your organization.
Mailing standards are also something that you have options for. If you want mail to actually get to people, you want to follow USPS’ postal addressing standards. But they’re not obvious to the average Joe. You can either go with abbreviated north as N and northwest as NW, or you can spell everything out in full. That's just an example there.
Example quality control schedule
Here's an example quality schedule. Now of course, you're never going to hit this all the time. But it's something to aspire to – that you're going to review new donors on a monthly basis or a weekly basis depending on your volume.
Someone (a donor) might enter their name in all caps or clearly misspell it, you know, because we're typing on our phones all the time. So you do want to make sure that you review it so the next time you send an email, it’s correct.
I get an email from one organization that spells my name with two eyes b-r-i-i-a-n-n-a. I know it was just a typo, but they've never fixed it – even though I’ve sent them messages. You don't want to be in that situation.
Check out your duplicates. Look at any of your reports – are they still working for you? Bad and bounced emails. The things that you don't want to get out of control. So your craft closet doesn’t get nuts. You need to do some basic maintenance.
Those are some examples of standards and documentation. What sort of standards or documentation do you guys currently have? And if you don't, which is okay, what are some ways that you could get that information out of someone's head? The person who keeps everything in their steel trap mind?
Since we have a little bit of a shy audience, I’ll just say start with the simple stuff and then move on.
So a couple years ago, I volunteered at an organization and processed their checks. Someone trained me one day, but on my cubicle wall – back when we worked in offices – there was just a simple, half-sheet of paper that listed the steps to process the checks.
You can just start there. It doesn't have to be everything all at once. You don't need a 700-page manual, but start with the things that have the highest risk to you: financial check processing, running credit cards, and refunding donors. And the next time you do that thing, just write down those steps and put it put it on a shared drive or a Post-it note.
Share it however you can. But if you just do these things – one process at a time – it will seem a little less overwhelming.
Another pop quiz. Hopefully you guys get this one right: left or right? So easy, right?
I don't know if you guys have seen the Netflix show “Nailed It,” but I love it because I can’t bake. Laura is the baker of us two. I can cook because I like freestyling, but you can't do that in baking.
So if the step two was creating the recipe, step three was actually following it. And sometimes the results don't match what our intentions are so we need to work hard to add and maintain accurate consistent records and that is an ongoing process
Add and maintain accurate, consistent records
The first step is, if you haven't looked at your records in a while, or if you've made changes to how you’re going to standardize household names, for example, you’ll need to do a comprehensive data hygiene project. We do not have time to cover that here today, but we do have a three-part blog series with step-by-step instructions.
Get to work: 6-step process
Once you have your foundation set, then you need to train your staff – and then train them again. If you are on your own, write things down, too. I do a lot of mail prep in different client databases. And I can’t always remember how to pull the reports out of clients’ databases. Sometimes, I just have Monday brain. So I write it down. I’ve got one sheet of paper for all my clients to say, “This is the process,” even if it's just a couple notes to remind me.
So you may need to train and retrain yourself – and give others easy access to documentation. It's not going to work if the documentation is hard to find, if it's hard to follow, if it's been faxed, copied, scanned, and you know it's got that little fuzzy grainy thing. Make it easy for your staff!
You also need to let people know where to go if they have questions. You don’t want someone trying to jam a square peg into a round hole if something doesn't fit the normal profile.
We’re working with one client on pledges versus gifts and someone – they didn't have any processes – so someone tried to shove that round peg in a square hole and it did not go well. But we figured out a process, wrote it down, and now everyone knows you want to regularly audit your data entries – even if you're doing them yourself.
Everyone needs an editor. Wait a week, wait a month, whatever it is depending on your volume of data. But re-look at your data with fresh eyes and make sure that you caught everything.
Also, try to follow your maintenance schedule as much as possible. Just like laundry, data piles up, you'll never get to it, and it becomes Mt. Doom. So follow that schedule.
The other thing that I mentioned, too, is to definitely archive irrelevant or outdated data you don't want. Data that is clouding up and cluttering up your database. Keep it as records, but pull it out and put it somewhere where it's not getting in your way every day.
So let's hear back from you all, if you don’t mind. Is data hygiene currently a problem for you and what sort of things could you do to clean up before your next major campaign?
So I do want to mention that there is no shame in having messy data. Every organization I’ve ever worked with has messy data – it's just a matter of the extremity of it. It's hard!
And I want to go back to the beginning where I had that beautiful photo of mountains and a lake. We’re pulled in dozens of different directions and data hygiene, data maintenance is hard and it often goes to the bottom of the list of things to do.
The hidden cost of messy data
But because it's kind of hidden, when we go to our database and say, “We have $3,500 to spend on our entire holiday campaign. What are we going to do?” And then you try to pull reports and you think you have 5,000 donors – but it's really 3,500 households – and you send 5,000 letters. You just wasted a lot of money on those additional 1,500 letters.
When you have a lot of duplicate accounts, you're wasting money and you're annoying your donors. I see this a lot. For example, I don’t use Hotmail anymore, but I’m still getting emails. But I still want to hear from Neighborhood Homework House, I really do. So you sign up with another email – because you can't edit your record – and then I get duplicate emails. These are the things that start to annoy your donors and it also costs you money when you don't have good, clean data.
Anjali says, “Yes, hygiene is a constant challenge. We have a CRM that creates a new contact for each donation and maintaining that becomes challenging.” Wow! Okay, so I’m not going to tell you to switch CRMs right now, but there are probably ways that you can systematize the duplicate removal over time. You might want to look at that as part of your data strategies. In other words, “We know that there's a problem with our CRM that it causes these duplicates and this is the way we're going to handle that.”
Elaine says her nonprofit did get professional help with an import into a new CRM. That's going to save you a lot of time and energy later. It is expensive, right? It is an actual cash outlay to have someone outside fix your data before you import it, but starting a CRM fresh with good data is worth its weight in gold. And they need to work on households for mailings. Households are really tough, but you know, do what you can and if you can get 80 percent of the work done, then great for you.
So last pop quiz: green or yellow? So like darts, when you're looking for fundraising gold, you're not going to hit bullseye every single time. But you’re going to get closer and closer every time. Success is not guaranteed, but it is more probable when you can make data-based decisions.
Make data-based decisions
We've done a lot of foundational work figuring out why what we're going to do, how to do it, and then actually doing it. Now, we're ready to actually make data-based decisions.
This is the hardest part and when you start this process, it’s going to feel like an uphill climb. It's going to take some cultural change at your organization to move from gut decisions, or we've done it always like this, to a data-driven organization.
Practice
So, we're going to practice. I’m not going to tell you much in this particular section. We're going to practice, so the first skill for building a data-driven organization is to test your assumptions. How would you respond if a board member or someone at the latest board meeting said, “Of course we'll still do to the gala. Donors love it!” Or if you don't do events, why or why should you not do the same holiday campaign this year? It worked last year ... right?
Elaine mentions ROI. Absolutely! ROI is return on investment and in my world I think investment is not just your money, but your time, your energy, and your staff’s sanity. Laura says too much staff time for too little revenue. Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes events are just a time suck, but it all goes back to what your goals are and your strategy is.
If your gala is more about connecting with your donors and not about making money, then continue doing it. Then your return on investment is measured by PR mentions or the value of your continued relationships with city officials, for example. Define your metrics before you start and then you can figure out whether you did get a return on your investment.
Aha! And Anjali hits the nail on the head. Anjali is going to say no to both of these because we're in a very different environment, so we need to revisit both the gala and our holiday campaign. That is testing assumptions. You know things are different – they are absolutely different – maybe we need to think a little bit differently (with data as a guide).
Practice: set success criteria before acting
The next skill is setting success criteria before you act. Are you going to do a Fall campaign? What will you track? What will make it successful if you do Giving Tuesday? What does success look like? It may be new donors, not actual dollars. A virtual gala? What does success look like?
Tell me in the chat what your next particular fundraising campaign or program will be and what sort of success criteria you could use to measure success or failure?
I’ll give an example, we're working with a client on a planned giving campaign for September and we know that “wills changed in our favor” is not the goal because that is a more long-term goal. So our success criteria is the number of people who request more information – that's one success criteria that isn’t related to dollars. That’s a sign of a data-driven culture.
Anjali says their Fall newsletter campaign. It’s not a fundraiser, but we want to track open rates to see how many people are actually reading the newsletter. Absolutely. Good success criteria and you might want to look at your last newsletter or your last most successful email campaign and see how those open rates compare so that you can say it was more or less opened. If you have the ability you might also, in your email system, use two different subject lines or two different calls to action and see which one increases that open rate. That way, you can get more data to improve your digital communications in the future.
Elaine also has a Fall newsletter and dollars donated and number of donors are going to be her success criteria. Fantastic!
Practice: public successes and failures
Building a data-driven organization requires public successes and failures. So when that Fall newsletter goes out, how can you regularly publish those metrics that it was better or worse than the last Fall newsletter or the spring newsletter? How can you share what you learn with your wider team?
Because failures in my view aren't so much failures as they are things you learned. Sometimes you might need to test things – that you don't know whether they're going to succeed or fail –so that you can learn and take that on to the next thing. There are ways that you can publicly share your successes or failures in the way you're using data inside of your organization.
Elaine says, “I think visuals would help my board get it.” Absolutely, a graphic is a very powerful thing. PowerPoint and Excel have built-in charting capabilities that you can just plug in numbers and it magically makes a pie graph or a bar chart. Think about ways that you can tell the story around your data and visuals.
Practice: analyze and make decisions
The last thing we want to do is to practice analyzing your data and making decisions. This is anonymized data, but it's real and it's looking at the overall metrics that we talked about for the years 2019, 2018, and 2017.
First, I want to ask you what patterns do you see in this data? What trends do you see? Elaine sees fewer gifts, more money. Absolutely. Acquisition is starting to go down, but a higher retention rate and average gifts over time.
Let me get my little drawing tools. See this 13 retention rate? Yikes! That's really low and it's starting to increase over time, right? But at the same time, we're losing donors. With this data, this organization decided to basically archive those low-performing donors, get them out of their stream, and really focus in on retention. They changed some of their acquisition tactics: reduced those and spent less time on social media.
Then they spent more time on direct mail tactics and donor communications that resulted in a big increase in their average gift rate. It's doubled over time, so if someone was looking at this and said, “Oh gosh, is this a more effective fundraising organization?” I would say so, but these numbers might look different depending on your strategy, right?
So here's what I want to challenge you to do. Before your board asks you, before things go haywire, pull some metrics and just look at them. Sit with them and start to look at patterns and what can you do with that information.
For example, if your average gift was $35 in 2017 – that's when you last updated your standard donation page and that first ask amount is $35, but now your average gift is $75 – you can start increasing that first gift ask box on your generic, non-campaign donation page. You can probably even move that average gift higher because you know that people are giving more than that $35 dollars.
You can look at – you know I don’t have the average number of gifts on here – but we can really easily see 6,112 gifts by 9,000 people so that’s about 1.8. Now I can look at my entire database and pull a report of all of the donors that give more than two gifts in three years. And that's who I’m going to target for my monthly giving campaign. That's who I’m going to focus on.
Before you have to make decisions, start playing with some things. Figure out what’s happening, why it's happening. You probably won't be able to predict exactly, but you know you can start building some hypotheses that can help you with your 2020 year-end strategy and your fundraising strategy moving forward.
So that's my challenge to you: practice looking at your data, analyze it, and make decisions. Now I do want to caution, though, that it's very easy to get into analysis paralysis. That’s where you can't make a decision. We all do it and try to get out of that because, whether your campaign succeeds or fails, you learned something – so that's a success unto itself.
Overwhelmed? Abeja can help
I just spent a ton of time talking about data. It can be a little bit overwhelming, especially if you're a small organization. So you can outsource some of that work here at Abeja. We can help with both the data services and getting your donor letters out fast. We help with every step of this 4-step data mining process: strategy, hygiene, getting your standards and processes documented, and analysis.
We also do data appends. That might be helpful for some of you that look at your database and say, “Gosh, we're missing a lot of mailing addresses or we need to know the political affiliation of our donors because of some particular campaign.” We can get that data appended for you.
We also can manage any of your donor communication campaigns – especially those direct mail ones. We can write your appeals, design them, prep your lists, do all of the gift string calculations, and manage your printer – whomever you want to use. Even if you do it internally, I have a lot of tips and tricks on how to make that a lot easier for you and save money.
So, we have some questions in the chat: “Do we also provide donor acquisition services? “Yes, so that that's sort of a data append, too, if you want to lease lists of likely donors to your organization. People that would be good prospects. We can help you acquire those lists.
It works a little bit differently than traditional marketing. In the consumer world, you'll go with EDDM – that's Every Door Direct Marketing through USPS – or you'll look at demographics like income or the car that they drive. But with nonprofit donors, strangely enough, the richest people don't tend to give as much as the normal, middle-class folks. So we look at donors to organizations like yours – to causes like yours – and then lease those lists for you. We can walk you through that process, too.
I’ve used up 74 of our 75 minutes, but I’m happy to stay if you have any questions. Laura’s going to be following up just to get your feedback on this webinar. We don’t want to waste your time – we want to give you content that is really useful and actionable. So we'd love your feedback on that.
You can always email me at brianna@abejasolutions.com. We're going to email both the slides and the resources out to you, too, so if you have any questions send them in the chat I’ll be here for a few more minutes. Otherwise, hopefully we see you at a future webinar and, if not, good luck with your next fundraising campaign! Thank you.
