REVAMPING YOUR FUNDRAISING ANNUAL GIVING PROGRAM

One way of identifying opportunities in your organization’s fundraising annual giving program, is by conducting an analysis of donors giving trends to highlight opportunities which can then be applied into concrete annual giving strategies.

Depending on the resources at your disposal, an analysis may be conducted in-house with the help of a database programmer or using an outside consultant or agency. In either case, here are some basic metrics to consider when briefing your database programmer, consultant or agency on the requirements of the analysis:

1. The big picture : Look at the general state of donors: Split donors into – active donors, lapsed donors and dormant donors. This can be visually displayed using one pie chart and will give you a high-level view of the state of your donor-base, helping you identify right off the bat if your organization has a donor attrition problem.

2. Donor loyalty : Breakdown the active donor segment in terms of number of years that donors have been consistently giving. This will give you an idea of how loyal your active donors are. Have most active donors just started giving this year or do you have a high proportion of donors who have given for 3, 4 or more years consistently? The answer will determine what strategies you will put into place to cultivate these donors.

3. Donor attrition : What percentage of your donors has not given in more than 12 months? When you look more closely at lapsed donors, do you see donors who have only given one gift in their history or have these donors given repeatedly over time? How to best reactivate donors will be partially dependant on their donor history with your organization.

4. Level of giving : Analyse donors by annual giving amount – How many donors have given over certain thresh-holds (ex: $250-$499, $500-$749…etc)? This part of the analysis will help you identify opportunities to upgrade donors to other programs.

5. Repeat giving : What proportion of your donors give more than once in the same year, through your annual giving program? These donors constitute your core base of donors. These are the donors who give when asked. These are repeat donors who are active and loyal to the cause. This is the group that we want to build on.

6. Giving anniversaries : If you have multiple campaigns throughout the year, that target essentially the same group of donors, go through the exercise of mapping out when donors are contributing. You may see a subset of active donors who are consistently giving at the same time of year regardless of how many times they are contacted at other points in the year. The other communications may serve to help keep them engaged but there may be opportunities to tweak your annual giving program to ensure that you continue to maximize giving but increase efficiency in terms of the media used and content provided in communications to which these donors are not actively giving.

7. Prospecting : identify which fundraising sources generate NEW donors to your organization. Break this information down by volume of donors, average giving, cost of obtaining these donors AND look at their giving patterns in the 2 years following their first donation. Which sources of donors generate the highest value in the 2 years following their first gift?

Once you have obtained these metrics, you will be in a better position to start implementing concrete strategies to increase the performance of your annual giving program.