Greg Warner, CEO of MarketSmart, announces the impending launch of the long-awaited Fundraising Report Card 2.0, including the origin story of the game-changing analytics platform. You can sign up for early access here.
In 2015, I stumbled onto something that changed my life — and I think it’s changed the lives of thousands of fundraisers too.
It was called the Fundraising Fitness Test. Created by Wilson C. “Bill” Levis — one of the founding minds behind the Fundraising Effectiveness Project — it was a brilliant idea trapped in outdated tech. Built-in an aging language (C#), the Fitness Test often took over 24 hours to process simple reports. And benchmarking reports took weeks or months to prepare.
In a world that moves faster by the day, that just didn’t cut it.
Bill and I happened to live just a few miles apart. Soon we were meeting regularly, swapping stories and frustrations.
What united us was this: Fundraisers were working in the dark. Most nonprofits couldn’t access real-time fundraising data. They didn’t have a standard way to define key metrics like retention, upgrade rate, or donor lifetime value. They were left guessing.
And I hate guessing.
So I offered to help. My team at MarketSmart would rebuild the Fitness Test — modernized, cloud-based, lightning-fast. We’d do it for free. We believed the sector needed it. Bill was on board. He introduced me to the inner circle of the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. We were making real progress.
Until we weren’t.
As sometimes happens with collaborative projects, our visions for implementation without politics ultimately diverged. While Bill remained supportive, it became clear that my vision for democratizing fundraising data was on a different path than the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s. Rather than compromise my vision of real-time, immediate, accessible insights for all nonprofits, we decided to chart our own course.
That’s how the Fundraising Report Card was born.
In 2016, we launched it independently. The goal was simple: Give nonprofits access to real-time fundraising analytics. Help them understand their data without having to be data scientists. And maybe — just maybe — help the sector raise more money at a lower cost.
But then, after 8 years, the tech got old. Everything had evolved — and the Fundraising Report Card had to evolve too.
So we rebuilt it.
From the ground up.
Welcome to the New Fundraising Report Card
The new version is faster. Smarter. Simpler. It’s built with modern tools and designed for today’s users — whether you’re a nonprofit, consultant, association, or sector leader.
Here’s what’s new:
– Smarter peer-level benchmarks — compare performance in real-time, with relevant data
– Streamlined data uploads — fewer hassles, more flexibility, faster results
– Intuitive dashboards — built for clarity, not confusion
– And much more
But the mission hasn’t changed. We’re still here to make fundraising data accessible, actionable, and meaningful.
If you’ve used the Fundraising Report Card before, this will feel like a breath of fresh air. If you haven’t, there’s no better time to give it a try.
Want to be among the first to try it?
Thanks for being part of this journey. The best is yet to come.
Greg Warner
Founder, MarketSmart & Fundraising Report Card
