Fundraising Optimization Guide Overview
The Fundraising Optimization Guide is a powerful tool designed to help you better understand your active donor file using key fundraising metrics. It tracks your historical performance and predicts future growth, providing clear insights into your fundraising efforts. For organizations with DonorTrends predictive analytics, the guide also offers straightforward action steps for optimizing performance across various fundraising strategies.
Getting Started
You can access the Fundraising Optimization Guide from the links on the Fundraising Management dashboard or by searching in the Sidebar. Once opened, you'll see a list of Opportunities that can improve your fundraising efforts, including options to increase retention, upgrade donors, grow your sustainer program, reactivate lapsed donors, and identify planned givers. The specific options available will depend on your package and permissions.
Feature Details
The Fundraising Optimization Guide contains five specialized pages focused on different opportunities:
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Increase Retention: Visualize the impact of improving multi-year and new donor retention rates on your revenue.
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Upgrade Donors: See potential results from increasing upgrader counts and average upgrade amounts.
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Grow Sustainer Program: Identify potential new sustainers and prevent attrition in your monthly giving program.
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Reactivate Lapsed Donors: Understand how reactivating lapsed donors impacts your revenue.
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Identify Planned Givers: Track how well you're encouraging donors to become planned givers.
Each page includes potential and historical performance cards that display relevant metrics. At the bottom of each guide, you'll find actionable steps to take, including recommendations for Automations to build or suggestions of donor lists to use. With DonorTrends, you can immediately generate these targeted lists.
Feature Navigation
Read more about specific actions you can take:
- How do I access the Fundraising Optimization Guide?
- How do I use the Increase Retention page?
- How do I use the Upgrade Donors page?
- How do I use the Grow Sustainer Program page?
- How do I use the Reactivate Lapsed Donors page?
- How do I use the Identify Planned Givers page?
Tracking Your Success / Reporting
Each section of the Fundraising Optimization Guide includes historical performance graphs that allow you to measure your success over time. You can filter these graphs to show data through the end of each quarter or the full year. The guide defines donors as any contact or financial household that has made a contribution during the years included in the analysis, with financial households counted only once even if both members made donations. The metrics also include attributed contributions using donor-advised funds, workplace gifts, or family foundations.
When to Use the Guide
The Fundraising Optimization Guide is most useful when planning for a new fiscal year or individual fundraising campaigns. Use it to examine past performance, identify action steps to improve future giving, and forecast different outcomes by adjusting variables in the models to see how changes will affect your bottom line.