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You’re new to running fundraising campaigns, or maybe you’re not. You might run smaller scale campaigns and wing it year-on-year, or to save resources you just work from memory. But there’s so many details that you can’t just wing, and I’m challenging your theory that you can work that well from memory.
Of course, if this is your first campaign then you won’t have this data to work with. But in this case you can begin by conducting an analysis of your current audience demographic on your social media or website. This can help direct the campaign efforts.
If you have run even just one campaign in the past, you can gather the data and create a report to keep track of the most important points for next time.
See below for some metrics to note and what they could provide for you in the way of knowledge and value.
Why wouldn’t you want to track this? This one should be the non-negotiable of all non-negotiables. The whole reason you’re running fundraising campaigns is to raise money, so this is the measure of your success. Tracking this metric with each event is also important to see the growth of your campaign each year.
An example would be if your event raises the same each year, butt with an increasing number of participants. This could indicate the average raised per participant is decreasing. But if you’re not measuring other data points then you could be wrong. What would you look at next if your event shows to be raising the same, with an increasing number of participants and the average raised per participant is increasing? (Hint: are you looking at active participants, or just participants in general?)
Running on from the previous point, it’s a good idea to track participant numbers, and also to track active participants. ‘Active’ means anyone who raised over zero(in whichever currency you’re using). You may have 2000 participants but 1000raised more than $0 in which case you have 1000 active participants, or 50% of your total participants are active.
Donation data could comprise of individual donation amounts, method of payment, or whether donations went to an individual or a team. If you combine this data with the above data then you can find out average donation amounts, as well as teams and/or individuals with highest amounts raised. You can also find out which payment method is more popular, and any trends which may indicate the need to introduce new payment methods such as Google Pay, etc.
Basic breakdown of age, gender, or even geographical location may be useful for knowing where to place budgets to either improve on already great results, or to focus on encouraging growth in another area. This data can be combined with others (as listed above) to identify an age split in funds raised. Is your campaign targeted more towards a younger demographic? If yes, then you’d want to see this in your resulting data, if you can’t then it might be worth accepting a more generally targeted campaign, or putting some thought into how you can adjust your voice.
See if your participants are motivated by cause messaging, or see if your cause messaging could be more specific. Your audience may respond better to health-messaging, or even challenge-messaging yet still be fundraising for a cause. Cause-messaging can be in the form of stories or statistics, but depending on the demographics, one may be more appropriate or effective than the other. Again, if you’re new to campaigns then you can try both and assess the result post your first campaign.
Depending on what you’re trying to achieve and what kind of budget or resources you’re working with, you can find other data to use in the report which will help you in following campaigns.