Event Fundraising Blog

Tracking your nonprofit’s analytics helps you spend money wisely. You purchase Facebook ads and create campaigns, you write blogs, craft video and other content to pursue a strong inbound marketing strategy. It's necessary to track the traffic to your site so you can determine what's working and what isn't. But most of the time these analytics only provide a simple snapshot of when a person visits your site or contributes to your cause. Multi-touch attribution can give you a broader picture of how and potentially why they decided to support your mission.

Nearly half of nonprofits do not measure social media metrics – they simply don’t know how to collect the information or they don’t know what to make of all the numbers. However, as social media plays a larger role in nonprofit marketing strategies, it’s important to track the ROI of your efforts and attempt to measure your reach and engagement. Here are a few quick tips to help you decide what to measure and how to analyze these social media metrics.

A/B testing (or split testing) is a classic direct mail fundraising tactic that has been widely adopted by online marketers to track constituent engagement and find out which version of a web page prospective donors (or event participants) connect with most. You can test layout, graphics, colors, copy, headings, and any other elements of your page, to see the effect changes have on the time on site on pages, or completion rate on donation forms.

Online fundraising leader Network for Good has released a landmark study on conjunction with TrueSense Marketing that examines online gifts of $381 million to more than 66,000 charities over the last seven years. The study analyzes 3.6 million donations and provides key insights into online donation trends, donor-charity relationships and the emergence of online giving. Network for Good has released a number of groundbreaking research papers in the past, including How Crisis Compels Donors to Give Online in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and The Wired Fundraiser, which took an in-depth look at the role of technology in fundraising. The full study is available from www.OnlineGivingStudy.org, but we’ve compiled some of the key takeaways for you here.

If you’ve been on Wikipedia recently, you may have noticed the banner ads featuring a fundraising appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Since August, the Wikimedia Foundation has been running a fundraising test each Thursday afternoon for one hour. These tests are designed to show which messages will best motivate donors this year. From this data set, we’ve put together some highlights of what the Foundation has learned about online fundraising from listening to their data.

Events create volumes of data to measure: how many people turned out, how many donations were made, how many donors donated, how many volunteers participated, and how many miles were covered, to name just a few metrics. In addition to all these very tangible metrics, there are the metrics that are harder to capture, like the friend of a participant abandoning a donation form.

A recent research report by Convio & Donordigital reports that that there’s no single set of changes to a donation form – horizontal or vertical gift string, one-column or two-column form field layout – that’s guaranteed to work for every organization.

Philanthropy, fundraising and higher education scholar Noah Drezner, Ph.D., discusses the value of collecting data about your prospects and donors and using that data to raise funds more effectively and efficiently.

Is analytics a priority for your organization?  If you've read our guide to event fundraising analytics, you already know that analytics is the cornerstone of every fundraising campaign we build at Event 360.

Predictive analytics -- the science of identifying and cultivating new donors by analyzing characteristics of existing donors -- has become indispensable to many nonprofits according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.