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Metrics for Measuring Your Next Fundraising Campaign

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So, you just completed another fundraising campaign. How well did it work? 

Unfortunately, many nonprofits would struggle to answer that question with concrete data. Or, they might just look at the obvious stuff like amount of money raised.

The only way to assess the effectiveness of a campaign is to look at the fundraising campaign metrics. But which metrics. They will be different for each campaign, depending on the goals and intended audience. 

Beyond that, how will you know how well this campaign performed compared to previous and future ones? 

To help, we’re going to run through an array of fundraising campaign metrics for a few different types of campaigns. As you begin to realize and think about the great variety of very useful fundraising KPIs (key performance indicators) that are easily available, you’ll begin to see which ones will be most relevant for your next campaign.

Key Performance Indicators for Fundraising Campaigns

You’ll use different metrics for different types of campaigns. 

And it’s important to recognize that every single one of the metrics you can track can be calculated with just three categories of data:

It’s also worth noting that the Fundraising Report Card calculates all the metrics you’re about to see, in seconds, and also transforms that data into powerful graphs and other visuals. It literally could not be easier than this to suddenly have tons of data and the visuals to help share it with your board and team.

Here are a few common campaigns, with the appropriate KPIs you can use to measure their performance.

Donor acquisition campaigns

With donor acquisition, you’re looking to attract new, first-time donors to your organization. You can do this through a variety of online and offline media and tools. People can give through the mail, through your website, and sometimes through other means including social media. 

Measuring the effectiveness of the campaign can be achieved with these metrics:

The most obvious one for this type of campaign, you want to track how many new donors make a gift as a result of the campaign. How to do this? Look at your donor counts right before the campaign goes out. After the appropriate amount of time has passed, examine your donor counts again. All or a great majority of new donors in that time frame will have come as a result of the campaign.

Track the number of donations you get over a chosen period of time. With a donor acquisition campaign, you’re looking for numbers of donors as much as amount, because you can attempt to convert new donors into repeat donors later. 

Just as with new donors, compare total donations from before you launched the campaign to a couple months afterward. 

Next, look at amounts. Before your campaign launches, you’ll have a baseline for the average donation amount for your nonprofit. After the campaign, you can see if this amount increases, decreases, or remains about the same. 

That will tell you what kind of donors your campaign attracted. 

With the Fundraising Report Card, you can also break this and other metrics down into five giving levels. That way, a handful of large gifts won’t skew the average, and you’ll know if any potential mid-level or major donors made a gift.

This one requires a bit more time to see the effects of the campaign. But at first, since most of the newly acquired donors will be one-time donors at this point, you should expect to see a surge in that half of this comparison. 

If you can deliver a good follow-up campaign to your new donors, you may be able to motivate a second gift from a portion of them. The success of your follow-up will show up in your retention rate, which you can monitor by any time period that makes sense for your campaign.

Year-end campaigns

Year-end campaigns, including annual gift campaigns and special campaigns like Giving Tuesday, can attract new and current donors to give. Here’s the array of fundraising KPIs you can use to measure the performance. You’ll see some of the same ones from above, as well as several new ones.

If the year-end campaign makes a big impression with new donors, you will see a spike in this fundraising metric in your December and possibly January data. Giving Tuesday is renowned for its unique ability to attract new donors. 

With the Fundraising Report Card, you can also track the first-time donor retention rate, focusing specifically on donors who gave for the first time last year, and have now given again this year.

Year-end campaigns can be a great opportunity to motivate a second gift from a previous donor. If you see your retention rate increase after your year-end campaign, you’ll know you won some second gifts from previously one-time donors.

While you can create whole campaigns around donor reactivation, opportunities like year-end campaigns can also serve to re-engage donors who haven’t made a gift in over a year. Track this metric after your campaign and see if some lapsed donors have shown their ongoing interest in your mission.

Upgrades refers to donors who give at a higher giving level than they have previously. For instance, maybe last year a particular donor gave under $100. But during your year-end campaign, they gave $150. Or, their total for this year bumped them up to a higher giving level from last year. 

Donor upgrades show you how many donors have increased their giving, and a year-end campaign is a great time to study this KPI. 

On the flip side, other donors may have given less this year than last. This could mean they didn’t give at all during the year-end campaign, or gave substantially less than before. If you see downgrades in high numbers, you’ll want to investigate and see if you can determine why people are reducing their giving.

Check your average amount before and after the year-end campaign goes out. Just like the acquisition campaign, you can see if the latest one had an effect on this figure.

And by the way, with the Fundraising Report Card, it’s easy to adjust the time frame for the metrics you’re studying. For a year-end campaign, you can use a small range, such as just the month of December, and you’ll see the average amount donated as a result of your year-end fundraising efforts. 

Lastly, with year-end giving, you hope to preserve some recurring donors. Many donors give every year in December, so this is the campaign that allows you to get an accurate figure for your recurring donors for the year as a whole. If you also see a rise in one-time donors, that would mean your campaign effectively engaged new and existing donors at the same time.

Mission-driven campaigns

Mission-driven campaigns can be designed to reach new or existing donors, so the fundraising KPIs you will track can vary quite a bit. 

For example, you might send an email campaign that gets seen by all your subscribers. Such a campaign could win new donors as well as win gifts from previous ones. The performance of these campaigns will show up most in specific metrics you’ve seen already:

Other metrics you might use

You can run a great variety of fundraising campaigns. Evaluating the performance may lead you to additional metrics not yet discussed.

Comparing Campaign Performance

Now that you’ve had a look at the numerous metrics you can use to evaluate the success of one fundraising campaign, it’s not hard to see how you can use the same ones to compare one campaign to another.

Each time you run a campaign, calculate the relevant metrics, and compare the changes to other similar campaigns you have run. Annual ones like events, Giving Tuesday, and annual giving are easy for this purpose. 

Be sure and use the same time frames after each campaign for comparison, and check to see if there were multiple campaigns running one particular year. You do want to compare apples to apples.

You can also broaden your scope and compare the success of all the campaigns from one year to all those (or lack thereof) of other years. All the metrics listed above will enable you to make annual comparisons from a variety of statistical perspectives. 

Visualizing Campaign Outcomes

With the Fundraising Report Card, all of this can be done in mere minutes. You simply upload your most updated data for donor ID numbers, donation amounts, and dates of donation, and then let the platform make all the calculations.

And in addition to the statistics, it will also produce powerful visuals in the form of graphs and charts. 

These enable you to not just know your metrics, but communicate them to others on your board and team. Data visualization is essential for fast and clear communication of complex statistics, especially when those figures cover multiple time periods. For fundraising comparisons, this is nearly always the case, because you are comparing performance over several years so you can monitor trends and respond accordingly. 

Examples of Fundraising Campaign Metrics

Want to see some of this in action?

This page shows live data from the Fundraising Report Card for average donation amount, retention rate, and lifetime value. You’ll also see how each of these is further broken down into five giving levels. 

This can be very revealing when evaluating the performance of a fundraising campaign. You might find, for instance, that your retention rate skyrockets for the $250 to $1000 giving level, but that it held steady in all the others after a particular campaign. That would tell you what sort of donors responded most strongly to that campaign, and which ones didn’t.

This can be useful for several reasons. First, you could interpret this as a need to segment your campaigns more, and next time will send different content to donors at various giving levels. Or, you could also choose to send less or even no content to certain giving levels since so few responded. This might save money without significantly reducing the amount given in the next campaign.

Farther down the same page of data, you’ll see several different flavors of donor retention rates, as well as its cousin, the donation retention rate. The report card calculates three types of donor retention rates:

Repeat donor retention refers to any donors who have given more than once, and have now given again. So, at least three donations given in consecutive years, or other time periods.

Try it out!

As you can see, there’s a treasure trove of fundraising metrics and KPIs waiting for you in the Fundraising Report Card. It’s simple and easy to use, and will save you countless hours of trying to corral all this data yourself, not to mention creating all the graphs and visuals.

Now, you’ll have you data, be able update it instantly whenever you want, and will see the effects of any future campaign you send right there in the data. 

Upload your data to the Report Card today

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