So many of the donations to nonprofits now come digitally, and the majority of those come through your website. While print fundraising campaigns still work for certain demographics to some degree, even those – if well-planned – also include an option to give online. Some people will read the print fundraising material, but then go online to give.
All this means you need to be tracking your digital fundraising analytics. You need to know what’s working, what’s not working, and how well. Is email working better than social media? Does it matter if you pay for ads or just post to your followers? Do multi-channel campaigns work better than single-channel ones?
The only way to answer these and numerous other questions that will help improve your fundraising effectiveness and efficiency is to track your data.
But, which data?
Which metrics do experts recommend? Which metrics are being tracked by other organizations? And which ones actually give you information you can use to improve your fundraising?
We’ll break this down into two categories:
- What everyone else is doing
- What you should be doing
Vanity Metrics – Fun to Look at But Mostly Useless
This is what everyone else is doing, for the most part. There are tons of metrics talked about online and it is assumed these are the ones you should be tracking. But, many of them are useless.
A few examples of fundraising metrics you can ignore in online giving:
- Open rates
- Click rates
- Website traffic
- Page visits
- Bounce rates
- Likes
- Follows
To be clear, it feels great when you post something that goes viral and gets liked by thousands or millions of people. It feels great when your page visits go up and your bounce rates go down. But it’s just a feeling.
None of that really means anything if those metrics don’t also result in more donations. Giving is what counts. Revenue is what powers your organization. So, you can track these metrics if you want. But they don’t give you insight into how to apply them to your fundraising strategy.
For example, suppose you make a social post that goes viral. Why did it go viral? Can you repeat that success again? If not, then there’s nothing there that will inform future strategic planning decisions.
Are you getting more website traffic? Great. Are more of those people also donating? Making decisions that convert visitors into donors is where your attention should be. Not just on getting more traffic.
Hopefully you get the point. These are vanity metrics because they don’t offer valuable insights that inform your future strategies and tactics.
Useful Digital Fundraising Metrics
Now, let’s look at some fundraising metrics that are useful. The good news is, these aren’t much harder to track than any of the vanity ones. If you’re collecting donations, recording the dates of those donations, and tracking each donor with an ID number system, you can easily track all of these metrics.
And it’s even easier with the Fundraising Report Card. Just upload the data, and our system produces all the metrics, including graphs and charts for data visualization you can show to anyone who wants to see it.
Lifetime Value
In digital fundraising, Lifetime Value (LTV) is the single most important metric to track because it reflects the true, long-term financial impact of a donor relationship—not just the quick wins. While many organizations get distracted by immediate metrics like click-through rates, one-time donations, or acquisition costs, LTV forces a shift in mindset toward sustainability. It answers the critical question: How much revenue can we expect this donor to generate over the entire span of their relationship with us? Understanding this number drives smarter decisions about how much you can afford to invest in acquiring, nurturing, and stewarding donors digitally.
Focusing on LTV also encourages fundraisers to prioritize retention, loyalty, and deep engagement—the real levers of profitability. Without tracking LTV, it’s easy to fall into the trap of chasing new donors at any cost, only to lose them after the first gift. Digital channels like email, social media, and online advertising make it relatively inexpensive to communicate at scale, but without a strategy centered on maximizing donor lifetime value, those communications often lack the substance and personalization needed to build meaningful, lasting relationships. Ultimately, organizations that optimize for LTV will grow more predictably, spend more efficiently, and build a stronger, more committed base of supporters over time.
Average Donation Amount
Imagine you’ve run several fundraising campaigns with email and social media. Suppose the email campaigns produce average donation amounts of $36, and the social media campaigns produce an average of $21.
If these averages seem to hold after several campaigns, this tells you something about the types of donors you’re engaging on these platforms, and what you can expect from them.
Now, the other metric you’d want to know in addition to this one is the number of donations. Because an average of $21 with 10,000 donations is better than an average of $36 with 100 donations.
With this information, you have a good set of analytics from which to plan future campaigns. You can realistically project the return on investment of whatever you spend. You have an idea of how donors on these platforms react, regardless of their wealth capacity.
First Time Donors – Donor Acquisition
By tracking donor ID numbers, you can pay attention to how many new donors your digital fundraising efforts attract on the various platforms.
For instance, you might find very few first-time donors on Instagram, and a much higher number coming from TikTok. This matters, because if your goal is to grow your fundraising database and find new donors, you’d want to invest more in the platform that seems to attract them.
But if your goal is to nurture and deepen your relationship and connection with existing donors, you’d put more effort into winning repeat donations.
Repeat Donors – Donor Retention
The flip side of donor acquisition is donor retention. Like the last metric, if you simply track donation dates and donor IDs, you can see how many donors are giving more than one gift through your online giving channels.
Email is a great platform for donor retention. If you’re running consistent email fundraising campaigns, and you see high levels of donor retention – the same donors keep giving – then you know your email campaigns are having a positive effect.
But you can do this with any platform and any strategy. Knowing your donor retention rate helps you understand how well your message continues to resonate with people after they’ve given.
For example, a low retention rate suggests you’re doing well at getting attention and motivating a desire to help in the moment, but that your ongoing communication efforts are failing to engage new donors and bond them to your organization.
Donation Growth
More donations, and bigger donations. Are you getting more donations this year compared to last year? Or is it stagnating or declining?
The number of donations coming in indicates how well your message and mission is resonating with people. Tracking donation growth will help you recognize when you’re starting to lose people so you can pivot your strategy to slow the decline. As it increases, you’ll be able to cite your data to show the confidence you have in your current strategies across your various digital fundraising platforms.
Donation Frequency
How often do your donors give? If you’re seeing gifts come in four, five, six times per year per donor, you know you have a highly responsive donor base. This means it’s valuable to run multiple campaigns each year.
On the other hand, maybe you’re running a lot of campaigns but most people give just once or twice per year. Does this mean you should run fewer campaigns? Not necessarily, but it does tell you something about the willingness of your current donors to give repeatedly. Attracting new donors will be very important in that situation.
This metric also pairs well with your average donation amount. Fewer gifts, but bigger ones, can make a greater impact on your revenue than more but smaller gifts.
Using Your Digital Fundraising Metrics
As you can see, if you want to employ digital fundraising analytics to actually inform your strategy and affect how you conduct your campaigns, it matters which metrics you’re tracking.
Knowing open and click rates doesn’t help you make smarter decisions. Getting more likes is great, but are they giving? And if so, how often and how much?
Tracking useful metrics like the ones in this article will enable your nonprofit to answer questions and improve your fundraising. For example:
- Does paying for social media ads help our fundraising? How?
- Which social media channels are worth more of our attention?
- Do our current donors respond to our digital fundraising efforts?
- Are we doing well at inspiring donor retention, loyalty, and commitment?
- Is what we’re doing working?
These are the kinds of questions you can answer when you track useful fundraising metrics. Useful metrics empower you to make decisions based on data rather than gut feelings or some administrator’s impassioned speech at the latest staff meeting.
The Fundraising Report Card is one of your best tools for making digital fundraising analytics a reality.
You can track all the metrics listed above and many more with three simple data categories – donor ID numbers, donation dates, and donation amounts. That’s all you need, and you’ll be able to track a treasure trove of analytics with an easy-to-use visual interface.
You’ll be able to create graphs and charts for each metric over as many years as you have valid data. You’ll begin to see long-term trends as well as short-term responses to your latest fundraising campaigns and strategies.
And, you’ll be able to show your board, your team, and your leaders what’s working and what isn’t. With the data in front of everyone, the discussion shifts to focusing on solutions.
Try it out – it’s free to use!
