Stop! I know you’re eager to put your fundraising plan for 2011 in action. It’s February already. But have you looked at what you did in 2010?
Do it. You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been, right? Take the time to look at the key indicators for fundraising progress before you plunge into a new year. I guarantee you’ll find something that surprises you.
Start with the most basic financial goal posts:
- gross revenue
- fundraising expenses
- net revenue
Compare the three above to previous years. What happened? Do you know why your gross revenue was higher or lower? How about your expenses? Does your 2011 budget still make sense given your analysis? Do you need to make any adjustments?
Then, check out a few key indicators of fundraising health:
- number of gifts and donors (not always the same thing!)
- average gift
- number of new donors
- number of lapsed donors
And don’t forget your donor pyramid. Does it still look the same as last year? How many people gave under $100? $100-499? $500 and above? Have the numbers moved from last year. Why?
Look at fundraising efficiency. What is your cost per dollar raised in each of your fundraising programs? Has it changed? Why? What about your fundraising expense as a percentage of your organization’s budget? Do you know why it has gone up or down?
Fundraising isn’t just blindly chucking things at our donors. You have to know how each and every effort has performed in order to make adjustments to grow and improve.
If you don’t have an operating database or if your database is very basic, use your financial records to gather a list of donors and donations in Excel. Or, see if your financial system can export into an Excel spreadsheet. Once you have a spreadsheet of donors and gifts and some idea of your expenses, you can do many of these calculations using Excel.
It would be great to have a super-dooper database that would spit out these reports for you, but few of us have that luxury. Make do with what you have. Brush up on your Excel and start crunching those numbers.
And once you get them, make sure you share them. Create a dashboard report that will keep you, your boss, and your board informed about your progress throughout the year.
This may be just a reminder for many of you to do your analysis before the year gets away from you. But if you’re struggling with how to start evaluating your fundraising program or if you’d like to dig deeper into ratios and benchmarks, consider coming to our next Front Range Source workshop on February 8. You can see the details by clicking here.
Happy calculating!
