There are a lot of tools, tips, platforms and programs out there all telling nonprofits why they are essential to their fundraising work. And some of them may be. But every nonprofit should be using the Fundraising Report Card. Why? Because there’s one truth in our ever more technological world no organization can escape:
Data is everything.
We live in a world that depends on data. AI is data-driven. It can’t generate your data. It can only use it. But you have to compile and generate your own data. The problem is, while most nonprofits try to do this, data management quickly becomes overwhelming.
Data Overload Makes Data Useless
If you can’t see your data in formats that make it easy to understand and easy to use in your decision-making process, then it has little use. Here are a few reasons why so many nonprofits and other organizations find themselves buried in data but unable to utilize it to anywhere near its full potential.
Your team is overworked
Nonprofits are perennially understaffed. It’s the nature of the business. You want to use as much money as you can for your mission, not paying people. And this is generally wise, because donors want it that way.
But this usually results in overworked employees who are also often not paid well enough. So when you try to add tasks for things like managing data and creating spreadsheets, graphs, and charts to present to board members and donors, it’s a big job. Most organizations don’t have the bandwidth to do this on a consistent basis.
With the Fundraising Report Card, you can keep your data updated and current all the time, nonstop, and you can create graphs and charts for all sorts of fundraising metrics whenever you want, in minutes. And they look good too.
Your leaders and fundraisers are flying blind
Because your leaders and staff don’t have consistent access to updated fundraising data, they usually find themselves making decisions without accurate information to back them up.
The Fundraising Report Card can help you find out how well you’re doing or not doing with regard to a number of key fundraising metrics:
- Donor retention
- Average donation amount
- Donation frequency
- One-time vs recurring donors
- Lapsed donors
- Donor lifetime value
- Donor reactivation
- Donor churn
- New donor acquisition
- Donor upgrades
- And many more
In just minutes, you can have all this information – plus graphs and other data visualization tools to go with it.
Then, you won’t be flying blind anymore. You can make decisions based on what’s actually happening, not just gut feelings or what feels right.
Suppose you discover your new donor acquisition rates are terrible, but you’ve been sending acquisition marketing for years. That would be a good indication you either need to stop wasting money on that strategy, or find ways to improve it.
Board doesn’t have updated actionable data
When the board doesn’t have updated information, they too cannot make informed decisions. When it’s hard to understand the data that’s in front of them, the same problem occurs. Your board needs visually clear information on a range of fundraising metrics at their fingertips so they’ll know what’s working and what isn’t.
When you start tracking your fundraising data over many years, you can see patterns emerge that will transform your fundraising. Your board needs to have this information in a way they can easily understand.
For example, what about fundraising events? If you do your event in the same month every year, you should see the effects of that event in a number of the fundraising metrics tracked by the Fundraising Report Card.
With this kind of information at hand, your board can make better decisions about how to use and manage your live events in the future. And this will be true with all sorts of other aspects of fundraising.
The Fundraising Report Card Delivers
This is about two things:
- Saving time (and time is money)
- Being more informed
Saving time will never not be valuable. And being more informed with actionable updated data – at all times – will enable you to consistently make smarter decisions that help your organization grow while reducing waste.
It’s truly a win-win scenario. There is no downside. You save time, save money, have better data that’s easy to see and understand, and make smarter decisions that benefit your mission and please your donors.
Everyone wins with the Fundraising Report Card
And that’s why so many nonprofits are already using it. The data you see on our Benchmarks page comes from the thousands of nonprofits who already use our platform and upload their data regularly. It’s not our data. It’s data from other organizations like yours. And as more nonprofits participate, the quality of the data only increases more than it already is.
To use it, you only need three categories of data so all your donor information is protected and kept private:
- Donor ID numbers
- Donation dates
- Donation amounts
That’s it. That’s all you need. We won’t know anything about any of the actual people donating. You can continue promising your donors that you keep all their information confidential.
Ready to start using this powerful, time-saving, and simple tool?
