5 Steps To Evaluate Your Mobile Giving Fundraising Performance

No matter how well you feel your nonprofit fundraising, mobile giving or crowdfunding campaigns are doing, you can always do better. 

or crowdfunding campaigns are doing, you can always do better. 

Evaluating your fundraising performance is one such method that helps you find out where the scope for improvement lies.  

The vast majority of Americans – 96% – now own a cellphone of some kind. The share of Americans that own smartphones is now 81%, up from just 35% in Pew Research Center’s first survey of smartphone ownership conducted in 2011.

Therefore, incorporating ‘mobile’ in your plans, isn’t just trendy it is a necessity. 

Mobile giving also greatly improves the performance of your campaigns across different age groups. 

When you go mobile first, we always advise nonprofits to keep their strategies and evaluation methods simple.

1. Start by setting SMART goals. 
2. Ask yourself these 3 golden questions after completing any mobile giving campaign.

Most nonprofits do not have the luxury of specialized teams for specific functions and one administrator ends by wearing different hats. By the end of a campaign, your people have already invested a lot of themselves. Being self-reflective and critical is at this stage is challenging with the energy low and the emotions high. However, looking at your organization’s performance and figuring out a way to make it better next time is necessary.

Here are 5 ways that would help go about with a mobile giving specific examination of your fundraiser: 

Start with data

A data analysis is the best way to learn best practises and areas of opportunity at the end of your fundraising campaign. Begin with collecting data. How much did you collect? How much of it was from text donations ?

Once you have these numbers, you should also look for your year-over-year numbers. If this is the first time you have included Text-to-Give as a donation option, check how much it impacted your donations. If you have already used it in previous years, how much has it impacted your campaign this year? Is there a growth or a slowdown in text-donations? Gut feelings do not work here. Get going with the data. It will provide a clear roadmap for discussions within your team and compel them to work with facts.

Check the key impact

Assess your data and derive relevant information pertaining to mobile giving. We at GiveCentral provide our clients with the ability to look at different reports on their dashboard. With our platform, our clients’ are able to check their donations over any data range and with any specific keywords associated with their fundraising campaign.

To understand how, let us take an example, where you are trying to analyze your campaign for mobile giving donations.

For this, you would need the following information associated with mobile giving services:

• The total amount raised.
• The number of successful donations.
• The number of people who donated using mobile giving.
• The average donation amount.
• Whether the donations one-off or recurring.

Your first campaign debrief step will naturally be to find out how the idea of including mobile payments performed overall.

Determine overall conversion

To find out overall conversion, you will need to find out how many of your supporters saw your mobile giving keyword. This could be from people visiting your website, impressions on your social media pages, the number of direct mails you have sent, and the number of event attendees. Divide the number by the number of donors and multiply the result by 100. Here you have the conversion rate of  people who became your supporters due to the use of a specific keyword.

It would also help you project your marketing results. 

Find out your average donation

Your average donation amount gives you an insight into approximately what number of your supporters are currently comfortable donating via text. If the average donation amount is higher or lower than your expectations or what you have asked, you have the data to model your next text giving campaign.

Use the tools

GiveCentral has always tried making the work of nonprofits simpler. We integrated numerous reports and statistical tools for the organizations to understand what they are lacking in. Overlaying this data with your fundraising activity, would help you understand what aspect of your campaign attracted the most audience. For example, it could be social media posts, audience segments from a mail campaign etc. Understanding what your audience likes the most will help you create better campaigns in the future.

So there it is, the simplest steps to evaluate your mobile giving campaign. Identify the areas that aren’t working for you well and mend them for improved results in your next campaign.