#GivingTuesday: Analyze data and learn

Why you should take data seriously, analyse it and learn from it to make the necessary changes?

Why aren’t you able to be a part of a successful fundraising campaign despite all the efforts? What is it in your campaign that is not attracting enough donors? Or why aren’t you able to retain your past donors and convert them into long term supporters? If these are the kind of questions that arise in your mind, then you need to do some serious thinking about the way you go about your fundraising strategy.

It is not hard to collect data on past fundraising activities around the #GivingTuesday or your donor base or how much of each of your efforts are getting converted into real support or donations. As they say, the importance of data and its measurement matters only if it changes the way you act. This is where analyzing from data gets really important. Learning from what is going wrong and changing your strategy could go a long way in boosting your efforts and achieving your successful fundraising goals.

Here are a few things that you should keep in mind while go about your data analysis and guiding your marketing strategy or the overall campaign on it:

Data on the impact of your Mission

It is important to know what kind of an impact your mission has on the ground. Knowing it and bringing it out to your donors not only improves fundraising but it also builds trust and credibility. It is also important for your team to help build motivation. Track your existing data – the number of people you serve, How much of an impact does a donation translate to, etc.

Data on Donors

It is essential to have data on the people who are supporting and placing their trust on you. You need to analyse how many of them really felt satisfied by your efforts and stayed with your community. It not only helps you to fill the gaps in your strategy but also helps you to meet the expectations of your donors by targeting them accordingly.
Data like the Donation Reconciliation, Stratification of Donors across parameters, Lapsed Donor Reports, Matching Gift Reports, etc could help you in achieving your desired results in this space.

Stories as a source of Qualitative Data

Apart from all the analysing and learning from quantitative data that we have just suggested, we would also suggest you to look beyond numbers and give importance to stories too. Stories serve as a source of qualitative data. They communicate in human terms that are easy to recognize. One should start learning from the people that one serves. Surveys are an effective way of reaching out to a large group of supporters in this regard. Online tools like SurveyMonkey could be of huge help here. But to gather the best stories, you will also need to involve your staff here.

Once we gather all the data and analyse them, we could learn from it and start doing more of what matters and less of what doesn’t. Incorporating it into our marketing strategy or overall campaign strategy could truly help us in our pursuit of a successful fundraising campaign.

Now that we are done with this step of Analyzing, we proceed to the next one of looking at some Fundraising Ideas for #GivingTuesday.