Now that we’re well into the new year, nonprofits are beginning to understand their big-picture fundraising results from 2016.
So far, as with most years, I’ve heard mixed reports — some groups saw improved results over the previous year, while for others, the results are quite disappointing.
If the latter is true for your organization, why might this have happened? What can you do to recover and get back on your feet during the year ahead? [Read more…]
Here’s a guaranteed way to improve your annual fundraising over the next several years: In the first quarter of every year, conduct an annual donor review!
What’s that? Never heard of an annual donor review?
Fundamentally, a donor review is the process of uncovering trends and understanding the gift potential within your donor database. What you’ll discover through this process informs your individual fundraising strategy for the coming year.
Calculating your retention rates is an essential part of your annual donor review. Sometime during the first quarter of the year, you’ll want to calculate your retention rate for the year that just ended. [Read more…]
It’s always exciting to count the floods of money arriving from your year-end appeal.
While its a pretty safe bet to say that most organizations know how much money their appeal brought in, there are other important metrics that are largely ignored.
Neglecting to thoroughly measure and analyze your appeal results means you’ll miss critical information that would have helped you raise more money next time around. [Read more…]
Let’s say you are working on closing out your last renewal appeal evaluation. You’ve done all your calculations. You know your exact net income, average gift, and response rate. So now what do you do with this information? How do you know if your response rate is any good? [Read more…]
The start of each new year, when year-end fundraising fury has calmed and last minute contributions have slowed to a trickle, is a great time to conduct your annual fund evaluation for the prior year.
It’s the time to see how you did, celebrate your successes, to set your goals and plan for the year to come. Schedule this on your annual fundraising calendar for sometime between February or March.
There are essentially three components of your year-end analysis: [Read more…]
Recently, several well-respected fundraising thinkers have been lamenting over nonprofit’s lack of focus on improving widespread abysmal retention rates. Roger Craver, for example, wisely argues that donor retention is the holy grail of fundraising and that charities ignore retention at their peril.
Yet it is practically impossible to work on improving retention rates if you don’t even know what yours are.
I suspect this is the case for many, many nonprofits. If you are one of them, time to start paying attention.