With every new idea that comes across your desk, you have to make a decision. Is this a good direction for our nonprofit to go? Is this a smart idea? Can we make this work with our budget? Do we need this?
Making big decisions when you have a shortage of information usually leads to regret. It certainly makes it harder to be confident in your decisions. And while data isn’t the only type of information you can use when making strategic decisions, it certainly helps! Especially when those decisions involve money, time, donors, and resources.
And while data is good, data visualization is even better at helping you make informed, strategic decisions for your nonprofit that will inspire confidence from you, your team, and your board.
What Is Data Visualization?
Data visualization refers to any visual presentation of numerical data. In other words, graphs and charts, rather than tables and numbers. We can more easily and quickly interpret the meaning from visuals than we can from numbers.
With data visualization, it’s easier to compare trends over time, look at multiple variables at once, and communicate to people who have less expertise on a particular topic.
The Problem: Decisions without Accessible Data
Everyone has an opinion.
When we’re talking about fundraising decisions, organizational decisions, and decisions that require an investment of time, money, resources, and risk – you want to make good decisions. And having applicable, relevant, accurate, and updated data helps a lot.
But these days, the problem often isn’t not having data. It’s having too much data. We often have access to more data than we can efficiently use, because it’s not presented or delivered in a way that facilitates the strategic decision-making process.
Or even if it is presented clearly, it takes so long to collate, analyze, and figure out how to visualize that data, that while it worked well for today’s meeting and today’s decision, next time we’ll have to go through the whole process again.
You have too much data, and no easy way to track, monitor, analyze, and present it in a way that’s easy to understand and apply to the decisions you need to make.
Data visualization like graphs and charts is so much easier to quickly comprehend than numbers and tables. But all of these take time to create from the raw data sloshing around in your CRM.
The Cost: Inaccessible Data Cripples Revenue
Without data visualization, your data isn’t easily accessible and is too challenging to maintain and update. That makes it much harder to turn that data into something useful that supports the decision-making process.
If you don’t know your data and are faced with tough and costly decisions, you can get into trouble real fast. You can:
- Miss great opportunities in fundraising, hiring, and strategic planning
- Continue using failed strategies because you don’t know they aren’t working
- Remain unaware of major problems you could have averted sooner
Examples of Difficult Fundraising Decisions
Let’s look at a few hypothetical situations, and then see how data visualization would strongly enhance the ability to make a quick and informed decision.
Situation 1: New fundraising channel
Last year, on the recommendation of a new fundraising hire, you started using Instagram to attract new donors. You create the account, post daily, make short videos, photos, and appealing visuals, and you are gaining followers and engagement.
But is it working?
Should you keep using Instagram and devoting all this time and resources to it?
Is the cost justifying the effort?
How can you answer these questions without data? What data would you need?
Ideally, you’d want to know how many new donors you’ve acquired through Instagram, how many of them have given more than once, and how many became monthly donors.
There are other things that would also be good to know, but when it comes down to it, is Instagram generating new donors and enough revenue to justify the investment?
Because if it’s working, maybe you should increase your investment and start paying for ads. Maybe you should add another social media channel into the mix.
If it’s not working, by how much is it not working? Should you scrap it altogether? Keep it but reduce the time and money you’re investing? Alter your approach?
Without clear data that you can monitor and update over time and that everyone can easily understand, these are very difficult questions to answer. And the cost of making the wrong decision could be immense.
Situation 2: Newly Proposed Strategy
A fundraising consultant spent a few weeks with your organization, and one of their recommendations was to increase your follow-up communications with new donors, repeat donors, and monthly donors.
But you’re not sure how to implement that suggestion or how you’ll know if your efforts will pay off.
Should you use email only for follow-up? Email and text? Direct mail? Phone? All of these and more? Should you treat all three categories of donor the same, or develop a separate strategy of communicating with each?
Whatever you decide, how will you know if it’s working? And can you justify the increased cost and time required for all this follow-up? Will you have to cut something elsewhere? If so, what, and why that?
Situation 3: Alter Your Major Gifts Hiring Strategy
You read online about a new way to conduct major gifts fundraising. Instead of asking your gift officers to do all the work for each of their leads and everyone in their caseload, you could hire a Lead Outreach Associate. This person will handle all the initial lead outreach and manage the data related to incoming leads and potential major donors. They will help initiate with new major gifts leads, build some rapport, and perform some pre-qualification. This will free up the gift officers to devote more time to their qualified major donors who are in the process of cultivation and making a gift.
You like the idea of an LOA, because it means you can actually operate with fewer gift officers and yet, in theory, raise more money because the gift officers won’t have to spend so much time on outreach and data analysis.
But will it work? How will you know if the newly hired position is working as intended? Your gift officers might report feeling happier, less stressed, and more productive, but are they bringing in more revenue than before?
The Solution: Instant Data Visualization
As mentioned earlier, graphs and charts beat numbers and tables almost every time when it comes to ease of interpretation and clarity. But graphs take time to produce. If you could update your data and the graphs at the exact same time, instantly, you would completely remove that roadblock.
That’s what the Fundraising Report Card delivers. You can take your reams of hard-to-use but immensely valuable data from spreadsheets, databases, and your CRM, input them in the Fundraising Report Card, and turn that into easily digestible visuals, at the push of a button.
And the great thing is, you only need three categories of data – donor ID numbers, donation amounts, and donation dates.
Let’s see how this applies to the three situations above.
New Fundraising Channel
Suppose you launched your Instagram campaign in April of last year. Now, it’s April of this year. With the Fundraising Report Card, you can immediately see how many new donors you’ve gained over the past year, and how it compares to previous years.
If your donor acquisition has been consistent but relatively flat for several years, and since last April you can see on the graph a steady upward climb, that would be a strong indication that the Instagram efforts are paying off. But if you see no changes over the past year, or even a decrease in new donor acquisition, that would tell you it’s not working, and may even be harming whatever you were doing before.
You could supplement this with a look at your donor retention rates – how many donors gave a second time? And you can examine monthly donors. If Instagram is making a difference, it will show up in these metrics. And by monitoring this over time, using constantly updated visuals that you can create in seconds, you won’t ever be sitting there in the dark, wondering if it’s all worth it.
Newly Proposed Strategy
The follow-up strategy proposed by the fundraising consultant can be tracked by monitoring a few different fundraising metrics:
- Donor retention
- Donation growth
- Donor churn
- One-time vs recurring donors
Each of these metrics can be influenced by a well-run follow-up strategy. What you would hope to see is higher donor retention because people feel heard, seen, valued, understood, and informed. So, they give again.
Likewise, you’d hope to see fewer one-time donors and more recurring donors. Your donor churn rate should decline as fewer donors drop off because the follow-up helps sustain the relationship. And your donation growth should increase too.
With data visualization, you’ll be able to effortlessly track all these metrics as you implement your follow-up plan. You can also track things like giving levels – how much people are giving – and pay attention to any changes you observe.
You might discover, for example, that even with follow-up, you still lose about the same number of one-time donors as before. But you gain more monthly donors at the same time, and these are increasing more than they ever have before. You could track both of these trends clearly on the graphs as you compare data from the last five years.
This would tell you two things:
First, keep following up because it appears to be leading to more monthly donors. Second and more important, make extra sure to keep following up with your monthly donors, because not only are you gaining more of them, but they’re sticking around longer than they were before.
Major Gifts Hiring Idea
Did this new Lead Outreach Associate position work out?
You’ll need to monitor this for at least a year, possibly longer, to get an accurate picture of this since major gifts fundraising operates on a longer cycle. So the sooner you start monitoring and updating it with easy data visualization, the sooner you’ll know.
In this case, you’d want to track donation growth data at the highest giving level, $5000 or more per year, as well as average donation amount.
What you’d hope to see is more donations and bigger donations, in the above $5000 giving level. This would mean that even though you’re operating with one or two fewer gift officers, you’re producing more revenue from major gifts, and the new position seems to be working out well.
However, even if the graphs remained flat, that would mean you’re receiving the same level of major giving, but at lower cost for the organization. So even a flat graph in that case would be a win.
Make Better Decisions with Data Visualization
These are all hypothetical, but you can see how much impact it has to be able to generate updated data visualization assets at the push of a button, for the exact fundraising metrics that apply to whatever decision you’re faced with.
The efficiency the Fundraising Report Card makes possible in terms of the time you’ll save by not having to crunch all these numbers yourself is alone enough reason to start using it.
But in addition to the efficiency, as you’ve seen, you’ll have data at your fingertips, that everyone can quickly see and understand. And that visualized data will help you make smarter and more data-informed decisions in situations where making the wrong choice – or making no choice – can have severe consequences.
And all you need to upload to start producing tons of data visualization is your donor IDs, donation amounts, and donation dates.
