Imagine you’ve just wrapped up a big fundraising campaign. You met your fundraising goal! That must mean your campaign was a success, right?
Yes and no. Fundraising totals are one way of tracking your campaign’s effectiveness, but they’re far from being the only important metric. Measuring a more diverse array of metrics helps you more meaningfully pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of your latest fundraising efforts. Using these insights, you can continuously improve your ability to raise funds, reduce costs, and connect with supporters effectively.
In this guide, we’ll walk through six of the most important metrics you should be using to track your fundraising campaign’s success.
1. Overall Return on Investment (ROI)
ROI is the metric that helps you contextualize abstract fundraising totals, measuring whether a campaign generated more revenue than it cost to execute, providing a clear picture of overall health. A gala that raises $30,000 is not necessarily a better campaign than a silent auction that raises $15,000, as blowout events often cost tens of thousands of dollars to execute, which eats into your ROI.
Calculate your ROI using the following formula:
(Total Campaign Revenue – Total Campaign Expenses) / Total Campaign Expenses x 100
A low ROI often signals an imbalance in spending or fundamental issues with donor targeting, while a high ROI indicates efficient fundraising. To improve this metric, audit your operational expenses to reduce overhead (just because you’ve always done the campaign this way doesn’t mean that’s the only way to do it!). This might include consolidating your technology stack, opting for online-only events, or segmenting your audience communications to reduce ad spend.
Keep in mind that the return on your investment may be more than just financial. Your summer volunteer fundraiser may turn out to be less efficient, in terms of staff time and costs, compared to your other campaigns, but if volunteer surveys suggest that it’s a critical part of recruitment and retention, you’ll want to factor that in when deciding how much to invest.
2. Donor Retention Rate
Securing a first-time donation is only the beginning of a successful fundraising strategy. Your donor retention rate measures the longevity of these relationships, reflecting the strength of your stewardship and the resonance of your communications.
The donor retention rate formula is:
(Returning Donors / Total Donors from the Previous Period) x 100
To increase your retention rate:
- Unify data silos: If your organization is struggling with a mountain of disconnected data, Giant Rabbit suggests creating thoughtful integrations to centralize key information or selecting a CRM solution that can track your touchpoints and communication history all in one place.
- Personalize follow-ups: Use your data to send specific, mission-focused impact updates rather than generic thank-yous. For example, an animal rescue center might send an update to a supporter who contributed to their adoption fund, sharing how many pets have found their forever home in the last six months. A personalized touch reinforces the value of their specific contribution, and a well-configured donor communications platform can automate the personalization so it doesn’t require too much of your time.
- Promote recurring giving: Sometimes, donors lapse simply because they forget to give again. Try an experiment steering new donors toward a monthly giving option, and see how your community responds. (Of course, it’s important to be clear and to allow a supporter to give a one-time gift if they prefer.) Ask your web developer about integrating your preferred payment portal with your website, CRM, or e-commerce shop to make it easier to collect recurring gifts and communicate with recurring donors.
Retaining existing supporters provides stable revenue and is significantly more resource-efficient than constantly acquiring new donors. Keep track of your donor retention rate to maintain lasting relationships that foster community, increase your revenue, and help your organization become more financially resilient.
3. Donor Acquisition Cost (DAC)
DAC is the comprehensive financial investment required to convert a first-time supporter. Expanding your donor base always requires some upfront investment, but scaling sustainably means keeping those initial expenses in check.
Use the following formula to calculate your DAC:
Total Acquisition Expenses / Number of New Donors Acquired
To lower your DAC:
- Refine your ideal profiles: Focus your acquisition budget on audiences with a high proven affinity for your sector. For example, an animal shelter might focus its acquisition efforts on people with pets.
- Leverage peer-to-peer networks: Empower passionate existing supporters to recruit their friends and family, effectively crowdsourcing acquisition and reducing marketing costs.
- Optimize technical infrastructure: Make sure that when you do attract a potential new donor to your site, your invitation to give is clear and well-crafted. Work with a nonprofit website development team to ensure your donation page is welcoming, tuned to the level of engagement you expect from your visitors, and quick to load and navigate. (And of course, make sure you’ve got analytics in place.)
This metric helps you measure success by showing the financial viability of your outreach strategies and whether your marketing efforts are effectively reaching new demographics to build sustainable revenue.
4. Landing Page Conversion Rate
Your digital presence is the primary way new supporters will discover your organization and make donations. A well-optimized landing page helps you convert visitors into supporters.
This metric is measured by the formula:
(Number of Completed Donations / Number of Page Visitors) x 100
Maximize the return on your hard-earned website traffic by optimizing these digital elements:
- Remove friction: Limit required form fields to the essentials (name, email, and payment information) to help users complete transactions quickly. Use a tool like Lighthouse to make sure the page loads smoothly and quickly.
- Implement visually-appealing, user-centric design: Utilize striking, user-focused visual elements and clear, concise copy to make your case and guide the user’s eye to the donation button. Consider partnering with a web designer to build an intuitive user experience (UX) and a user interface (UI) that aligns with your brand and integrates with your CRM and finance software.
- Ensure accessibility: For maximum reach and to show that you care about everyone in your community, use an accessibility checker like WAVE to identify and fix accessibility issues on your donation form.
- Keep your site secure: If your form is self-hosted, keep your website and server up to date with security updates. If you’re having trouble with malicious micro-donations (bots testing large numbers of stolen credit cards, also known as “carding”), try adding an invisible CAPTCHA or a tool like Cloudflare’s Turnstile to block bots without slowing down human donors.
Optimize your landing page to maximize the return on every marketing dollar spent toward driving traffic to your website.
Consider the ROI of Your Metrics
While more and better numbers are great, collecting and analyzing data takes time, and it’s important to be strategic about how much effort you dedicate to your metrics. Before you begin collecting data, ask yourself, “What actions might I take, based on this information?” Metrics are only valuable if you can make changes based on what you’ve learned.
If you’re a one-person fundraising team (maybe also a one-person comms team, and perhaps also a one-person executive team), some of these numbers may feel difficult to calculate, or you may not have time to act on what you learn. Be thoughtful about your own time, gather the data that’s most accessible, and use the metrics in this article as a thought exercise, even if you can’t calculate them to the dollar.
On the other hand, if you’re kicking off a new type of campaign that you plan to repeat, or you’re conducting an experiment to validate a new strategy, the metrics may be more valuable than the donation dollars themselves, because you’ll be shaping future campaigns based on what you learn. In situations like that, it’s worth your time to dig into the details, even if it requires some new digital plumbing (or a few spreadsheet deep dives) to get the numbers to inform your future efforts.
Tracking these core metrics moves (at a scale and with a level of detail that’s appropriate for the size of your campaign) helps your organization create a stable, sustainable approach to revenue growth. Partner with experienced technology experts to align websites, CRMs, and analytics infrastructure to gather this data and recommend actionable changes to your campaigns, to empower your staff to focus entirely on advancing your core mission without needing to spend all their time in spreadsheets.
About the Author
Daniel Heath
Daniel Heath has spent the past 25 years immersed in nonprofit technology. As the co-founder of Giant Rabbit, he works with nonprofit teams of all sizes as they navigate CRM migrations, website redesigns, and the long-term challenges of keeping systems relevant, secure, and well-behaved.
