6 Ways You Can Measure the Success of Your Fundraiser
You’ve just pulled off a wildly successful fundraiser. Now it’s time to look at the most crucial thing, how much money did you actually raise from your event. Knowing exactly what your event brought in after expenses is key to your organizational health. With fundraising, there are several critical components to analyze. These insights will provide the most precise snapshot of your organizational health after the event and help you explore what you need to succeed in planning future events.
Doing a post-event deep dive will help you reveal event strengths, identify weaknesses, and help you to determine where it will be best to put your future fundraising efforts. While there are countless ways to look at your data, these six ways will give you a clear picture of the success of your fundraiser.
1. Return on Investment (ROI)
Yay. You did it. You reached your goal of 100,000 dollars at your fundraiser. Your donors, volunteers, event staff, and in-house team are gushing with excitement. Now is the time to understand how much you invested in raising it. If you spent 20,000, your ROI is 80,000 making your cost per dollar raised $.0.20. Your gross and cost per dollar are essential, especially when preparing donor and board member reports.
2. Average Gift Amount
Knowing your average gift amount is also essential for future ask campaigns and reporting. The easiest way to calculate this is to take the number of donors and divide it into the total amount given. If the number of donors was 500 and you raised $100,000, your average gift size is $200.
If you had a large donation, let’s say $30,000, it is best to subtract that from your total to give you a better picture of the average donation. The yearly rise or fall of the average donor gift will allow you and your team to develop a clear path donor for strategies.
3. Organizational Growth Rate
It is essential to know the source of year-to-year growth. Are your fundraising results increasing, flattening out, or decreasing? We suggest breaking your results into these two categories.
Results from individual appeals and those from events will identify the source of your growth to build on the successful campaigns and rework the campaigns that aren’t bringing in what they need to.
4. Retention Rate
Future fundraising success comes from knowing how many of your donors are new and how many are returning. If you find you are bringing in new volunteers to the organization but have a high turnover rate with senior staff and volunteers, then focusing your efforts on improving internal communication might be good. If the opposite is true and you are retaining donors and staff but not bringing any new blood to the organization, you may best be served by focusing on outreach and growth.
5. Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate measures the overall success of different campaigns. If you sent an email to 100 potential donors and 25 clicked on the link and donated, your conversion rate would be 25%. This method can be applied to all of your campaigns and helps you strategize ways to improve the outreach and conversion rate.
6. Team Participation
Non-profit research shows that team events and programs are some of the most lucrative programs for fundraising. If you have or are thinking about building team events, here are some things to evaluate:
• Average amount raised by teams overall
• Who raises more money, family and friend teams or corporate teams
• The retention rate for teams and team captains
• How many teams do you have
• Average team size
• Average amount raised by each team
• How many new teams have you enlisted year-to-year
Having a clear understanding of donations made by team fundraisers will help you with marketing and recruitment materials to build more teams.
What we like to say to our non-profit clients at Financially Tone is what we measure, we can manage, and we are here to help you do just that! If you have any questions or would like to find out more ways to ensure you are getting the most significant returns on your efforts, we are here and looking forward to becoming partners in the growth and success of your organization.
