Nonprofit organizations face three main challenges within the lifecycle of every donor relationship, individual or corporate.
1) The first challenge is getting that initial contribution. How can you convince this individual or company that your nonprofit is worthy of their support? - Donor Acquisition
2) Once that donor is in the fold, the nurturing process begins. As you deepen the relationship, what can you and your team do to convince that donor to give more next time? – Donor Cultivation
3) Finally, the third challenge is perhaps the most important to long-term sustainability. Retention. How can you keep that donor involved and contributing each year. – Donor Retention
Current Reports are too Macro Focused
One of the key jobs of development professionals, particularly management, is to track key performance metrics for these three big challenges. By knowing your past performance, you can spot weak areas and start to set goals for future improvement.
The problem is how will you really know what good growth goals are by ONLY looking at your organization’s past performance? You won’t.
Several annual reports such as Giving USA that provide thorough analysis on charitable donations, the Blackbaud Index which specializes in overall and online giving, and the Fundraising Effectiveness project which primarily focuses on donor retention. Nonprofit Finance Fund dives into the financials that connect money to mission. These reports give us great insights, but mostly at a macro level.
We believe development/advancement departments still need to be able to look at key performance indicators for acquisition, cultivation, and retention and they need to benchmark against nonprofits in their specific vertical.
Introducing FundraisingGrader.com
FundraisingGrader.com was launched in August to solve this problem. We’ve created the very first crowdsourced report for benchmarking fundraising performance.
If you have access to your nonprofit’s basic fundraising statistics, we invite you to visit fundraisinggrader.com and take the two-minute survey!
After you submit the survey, we’ll send you personalized fundraising tips based on your results! We’ll even compare your performance with your nonprofit peers who have participated.
Our ultimate goal is to provide a valuable fundraising benchmark for nonprofits of all sizes (per # of constituents in database) and all the main verticals (per nonprofit cause) so that organizational leaders can more effectively measure success, set goals, and address weaknesses.
We’d Love Your Help!
The Fundraising Grader is in beta right now, and there are two ways you can help us make this a valuable resource for you and your nonprofit peers.
- Take two minutes to complete the survey for your organization.
- Send any feedback tips to me directly at [email protected].
