Track Everything and Learn the Patterns

I’m fresh back from last week’s Nonprofit Storytelling Conference; this post is for my small nonprofit friends out there.

At the conference I talked to several nonprofits who did not feel in control of their fundraising results.  And because it’s disheartening to work in a job where you really don’t feel in control of the outcomes, these folks were losing love for their jobs.

They’d make plans, have strategies, send out fundraising… but some years they’d raise more and some year’s they’d raise less.  Fundraising seemed more like the proverbial “black box” than something they could accel at.

The lack of control and power they felt was sapping their energy and enthusiasm. 

I’m writing this post to say that it doesn’t have to be this way.  It’s a solvable problem.  And solving it is the key to fundraising growth.

Here’s my bon mot for how to break the cycle: track everything, learn the patterns.    

This is easy to say and a lot of work at first, but it’s an investment in the only way out that I know of.

Track Everything

Here are three simple examples:      

• Every email has a unique code so that you can isolate the performance of that email. 
• Know your retention rate for major donors every year. 
• Know the performance of your donation page(s), things like the # of visitors and your conversion rate.

You get it.  Think of it this way: every piece of fundraising you send out, every year of fundraising you complete, is an experiment.  If an organization isn’t tracking the results from its experiments, how can it learn? 

Learn the Patterns

Here are the types of things you’ll notice right away:

• What types of subject lines generate higher (and lower) open rates.  Apply the learning, your open rates go up across the board, and your emails raise more money.
• What approach to major donor management results in the most majors increasing their giving.  Apply the learnings and more of your major donors give higher gifts.
• What asks in your letters generate higher (and lower) revenue.  Apply the learnings and every mailing starts to raise more money.

Very quickly, you know which part of your fundraising operation are working the best.  Very quickly, you can change your fundraising operation so that you do more of ‘what’s working the best’ and raise more money.

I know that this is real work for smaller nonprofits.  But I’ll share that in my 30-plus years of fundraising I’ve never seen an organization raise more than a few hundred thousand a year without doing this. 

The secondary consequence of tracking everything and learning the patterns is a sense of control.  You know that this email will do great at that time.  You know that if you handle your major donors in this way, then that percentage of them will give larger gifts this year. 

Quick story – I used to work at a big fundraising agency helping national nonprofits with their direct mail and radio fundraising.  One of my jobs each year was to look at a spreadsheet with the performance of every piece of fundraising, then make a data-driven prediction how much money would come in the following year.

Because everything had been tracked, the predictions were always accurate.  (Of course unknowable things would happen, like natural disasters or unexpected large gifts or a pallet of mail being lost by the post office, but the predictions were accurate enough to make everything easier, from budgeting to hiring staff to making program decisions.)

Anyway, that feeling of control is one of the things that made me love fundraising.  And I want it for you.

But you have to track everything and learn the patterns.