Power Session – Fundraising Goals and Tracking Growth

Amanda Tadrzynski: All right, everyone. Good afternoon. Welcome to our first Power Session, Fundraising Goals and Tracking Growth. My name’s Amanda Tadrzynski. I’m a DonorPerfect trainer. I’ve been with DonorPerfect for just about two years now. One of my favorite Read More

Amanda Tadrzynski: All right, everyone. Good afternoon. Welcome to our first Power Session, Fundraising Goals and Tracking Growth. My name’s Amanda Tadrzynski. I’m a DonorPerfect trainer. I’ve been with DonorPerfect for just about two years now. One of my favorite things is helping clients become a lot more confident in using DonorPerfect for all of their different fundraising endeavors. A quick fun fact about me is that in my spare time, I enjoy singing and dancing, whether that’s part of a local community theater production, whether that’s at my house, or even here at our community conference.

Before I get started with all of the great content, I did want to remind everyone to be sure to put your questions in the Q&A tab so that I can see them and answer them at the end of the presentation. Questions that you guys put into the general chat area may not get answered due to that constant strolling of the screen. Because the theme of our conference this year is Stories Worth Telling, I thought what better way to start off the conference today then with a story.

Everyone, meet Claire Smith. She’s the newest Executive Director at Coral Acres Animal Rescue, a nonprofit whose mission it is to find safe and loving forever homes for abandoned pets. Claire had adopted her own dog Denali, a Husky German Shepherd mix from Coral Acres about three years ago. She was super thrilled to be brought on board and help connect families and pets together. She came on just in time for the organization to start planning their annual appeal efforts. Over the last five years, Coral Acres has done an annual appeal that ran from September through December, and they had moderate success using direct mail, DEP forms, and constant contact as a way to spread their message.

They’ve never set a fundraising goal in the past, but this year, they want to change that, because they’re hoping to use their annual appeal as a way to raise funds to help renovate their dog kennels and increase their capacity from 30 dogs to 50 dogs. Claire has been tasked with having to come up with that fundraising goal, so that everyone on the team is aligned to the desired outcomes and they’re planning on using that fundraising goal along with stories as a way to motivate donors to support their cause. Now, Claire being new to the organization, and a new DonorPerfect user, is freaking out because she doesn’t know how to report on what the organization raised in the past, and she certainly doesn’t know how to set a fundraising goal in DonorPerfect.

Quickly in the chat. How many of you guys have ever felt like Claire at this point? Go ahead and write, yes, no, or heck yes. How many of you guys have ever felt like Claire? All right. Quite a couple of you. Awesome. The great news is that we have the DonorPerfect equation, which you and Claire can both use to help solve this need. The DonorPerfect equation is very simply combining your donor data, what you know about your donors, giving history and behaviors, combining that with a report and filter, which will let you be able to track year-over-year in data and be able to do an analysis of your donors’ behaviors. Once we combine that data with the reports and filters, you’re going to be able to determine a fundraising goal.

Not only will you be able to determine what your fundraising goal is, but I’m also going to highlight how you can use one of DonorPerfect’s newest features, the fundraising goal tracker, to set up to three fundraising goals that you and your team can check in on in real-time to be able to see the success of your efforts, and pivot and adjust your fundraising strategy where needed. Let’s actually take this DonorPerfect equation, and let’s actually put it into action. I’m going to go ahead and toggle over to DonorPerfect now.

[silence]

Apologies, I have three monitors today, so I’m trying to get myself oriented. I’m going to go ahead and toggle over to Quick Search. If I was working with Claire, one of the first things that I would advise her if she didn’t know anything about her fundraising data, would be to open up a donor that she knows supported the annual appeal in the past and look at that donor’s record to figure out what information we have in DonorPerfect that we can report on.

I’m going to open up my favorite constituent Dorothy Gale, because I am a big Wizard of Oz fan. Let me know in the chat if I have other Wizard of Oz fans here. If I was advising Claire, or really any of you guys about looking at fundraising information, typically we’re going to go to the gift tab. When I look at this gift tab, just at a glance here, I’m already looking at the annual appeal in the solicitation field. That’s where I would point Clare’s eyes too, because looking at the way that the data is structured here, it appears that Coral Acre has been using annual appeal in the solicitation field, to track the fundraising effort that motivated donors to give, and they follow the best practices and every year they have an annual appeal with the year on it.

That’s going to make it really easy for us to do a year-over-year analysis to determine what a achievable fundraising goal is for Coral Acres. Now that I’ve done my audit of my data, I’ve directed Claire, and we’ve looked at and determined that the solicitation field is the field that we should build our reports and filters around. My next step would be to take Claire to reports and report center, and we’re going to pick a report that will let us do that year-over-year analysis.

Now, depending on what field you’re reporting on and what data you’re looking at, there are quite a few different reports that you could potentially use and I could never cover them in 30 minutes. But for today, if I was advising Claire or anyone who wants to report on solicitation data, I’m a huge fan of the Solicitation Analysis Report, which is a report that you can find in the financial folder or you can use the search bar and search for it. It’s called Solicitation Analysis.

The reason that I like Solicitation Analysis is one, for the information that the report provides, but I also love the ease at which I can use the sidebar filter to apply a very quick and simple filter. For me, when I advise any client that’s looking to run reports, my first recommendation is to always clear out any existing filters that might be existing. I’m going to take my cursor and remove my date ranges, I’m going to hit clear values to remove any filters that someone may have left behind. I’m making sure there’s no selection filters applied. Now that I’ve cleared out any old filters, I can now apply my own filter.

Me and Claire can go down to the gift and pledge fields and find the solicitation field, and we’re going to be able to click on the binoculars to pull up a list of codes that exist within that solicitation field.

Now at this point, Claire and some of you might actually start panicking because, if you remember from the story we talked about how Coral Acres had five years of data on their annual appeal fundraising. However, I’m only seeing annual appeal 2022 and annual appeal 2021. Whenever we have this happening where we know old codes exist, but we’re not seeing them in the popup box, most likely that means that the code was deactivated so that we’re not seeing old codes appearing in our dropdown list when we’re doing our data entry. When we want to look at older historic codes so we can do these year-over-year analysis to identify our donor’s giving patterns and trends, we just go up to the top-right corner, click show inactive codes, click our heels three times and we have then thank you ma’am. Now I have all of my old annual appeal codes listed out. I can very simply go through my list and check off I want annual appeal 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

Once I select those three codes, I can click done, to apply my filter, and I can now go and click on the blue button to run my report. This is the reason that I like solicitation analysis because it gives a lot of information, which admittedly can be a little overwhelming for new users, but it’s super helpful from a fundraising goal perspective because my goal doesn’t just have to be focused on dollars raised, but I can also focus on looking at the number of donors who support my cause or the number of gifts that I’ve received. Those can be things that I build into my fundraising goal as well.

Now, for the purposes of Claire and me, we’re really only wanting to focus on the dollars raised. I’m going to look at the total revenue column, and me and Claire are going to do a little bit of an analysis and we determine that year-over-year, our donors tend to give between $5 to $6,000 more than the previous year. With 2020 being the exception because there was a pandemic. Taking what we know about our donors’ past behaviors, we’re able to now set an achievable fundraising goal for Coral Acres. Because Claire can say, “I want to raise $2 million,” but unfortunately the data doesn’t support that that is an actual achievable goal.

Claire and I looked at these numbers and based off of what we know donors tend to give about $5 to $6,000 each year more. We’re going to set our fundraising goal at $105,000. $6,000 more than last year, plus an extra $1,000 because we feel really optimistic that all of the sessions that we’re attending from the conference today are going to help us be able to motivate our donors to support our cause even more.

We now know with the DonorPerfect equation that we combined our donor data with the report and filter to get the fundraising goal $105,000. How do we use DonorPerfect’s fundraising goal tracker to put that fundraising goal on the homepage so the entire team knows what our desired outcome is? If we realize we’re not close to meeting that goal, we’re able to pivot and adjust our fundraising strategy where necessary.

To set that fundraising goal of $105,000, we’re going to go to the home page and I’m not going to save my filters in this case. We’re going to go home because there’s no place like home, and on the homepage we can set up to three fundraising goals. An important thing to make a note of is that every user in the system at this time are going to see the same goals. Right now we don’t have the capability to customize the goals based on the user that’s logged in.

For me, I’m going go and I’m going to click on the empty slot to create a goal, and I’m going to get this popup to create my fundraising goal tracker. The first thing that I can do is, give that goal a name, let’s go with annual appeal 2022, because I am not that creative. I’m able to set my goal amount, which we used our donor data and our reports and filters to determine our goal is $105,000, and we can set a goal timeframe. When do we want to start raising the funds and when do we want the funds to– or when are we going to stop counting those funds?

You’re essentially applying a filter, if you will, to your fundraising goal tracker to say only include gifts that came in within this date range. For Coral Acres, they set their annual appeal to run from September 1st through December 31st. We are going to click on the boxes and set that goal up. I went too far ahead, I’m already thinking about Christmas holidays, but we’re going to start out from September 1st and go to the end of December.

Finally, the system needs to have a code to include within this tracker. In addition to a data gift filter, you’re also setting a code filter to say, only include gifts if they have this specific code. You can only pick one of these four coded fields, but within a coded field, you can pick up to five individual codes. I can only choose a solicitation, a campaign or a sub-solicitation or general ledger code, but within each field I can pick up to five codes within that grouping. Now, in this case, I really only want my annual appeal or I should say Claire only wants the annual appeal, 2022 donations. We’re going to go ahead and select that code, and then the final step is to create my goal tracker. Now I have a fundraising goal tracker, so that every time my team logs into the system, we know how close we are to meeting our fundraising goal. Again, everyone is aligned to the desired outcomes. We’re able to pivot our strategy where necessary, and we can leverage this information to motivate donors to support us. Because when people see you’re really close to meeting your fundraising goal, they’re a lot more likely to want to support your course, because ultimately, they want to see your organization succeed.

While I basically focus only on the monetary side of things, so revenue raised, the goal tracker can also help you set a goal to be able to determine number of gifts or number of donors that you want to support the cause, or your goal could be focused on bringing in new donors through this fundraising appeal.

I certainly don’t want you guys to walk away thinking all of your fundraising goals have to be monetarily focused. That is not the case. With the goal tracker, it does tend to be that way where the goal tracker right now is only focused on that monetary side, but you guys can certainly use other DonorPerfect reports like easy reports, to track goals that are not focused just on giving history. I know all of you are absolutely dying to know, did Coral Acres meet their fundraising goal after we went through this process and after they attended the conference and applied all of the great knowledge that they learned?

Well, I’m happy to report not only did they meet their goal, they actually exceeded it by an astonishing $2,000. A happy ending to our story for today. With that said, that is the end of the content that I had planned for today. What I would love to do is open it up to you guys, what are the questions that you have for me? Let me go ahead and pop over to that Q&A and see what we have going on here. All right. Haduru is asking, is there any possibility in the near future that we could have more than three fundraising goals? Haduru, what I would encourage you to do is use our suggest in board feature and let our developers know that is something you would like to see added in a future enhancement. That is something that we do take into account. It’s one of the things that motivated us to add fundraising goals. Let us know that is a way that we can improve this offering and make DonorPerfect even better.

Judy is asking, can you see the skull on your personal dashboard or just on the organization dashboard? Judy. It’s actually not on the dashboard at all. It’s actually on the homepage when you click on the home icon. If you don’t see this page when you go home, try changing your when I login, and show me that to the homepage. Every time you log into the system, this will be the first view that you see.

Anonymous. Can soft credits be included in these goals? Not at this time, right now it’s only looking at data that’s found on the gift tab that are gift records. Again, though, I encourage all of you to use suggest and vote. It’s your voice in DonorPerfect. Let us know ways that we can make this feature even better. Who knows? Maybe the next conference, I’ll be leading a session where I talk about how you can include soft credits into these fundraising goals.

Let’s see. Blair. Can you set a personal goal? Blair, not at this time because all of the fundraising goals are across all users. Most likely that would have to be another suggest and vote item for you guys to set.

[pause 00:22:03]

All right. If you guys have any other questions. Ah, Marlene, thank you for that question. Marlene asked, when one fundraiser has ended, could we reuse that fundraising tracker? Yes. If I get my cursor to go back to the right screen, let’s say that for Claire, their annual appeal is over and they met their goal and now they want to set a goal for a different general ledger or a different solicitation. All we have to do is click on the three dots next to the fundraising goal that we want to remove. We can click, remove to remove it. Say yes, remove goal, and that’ll then remove that goal from our fundraising goals, and we can create a new one.

You can also click on the three dots and you can edit an existing goal, which means that you can change the name, what amount you’re hoping to raise. You can change the timeframe, and you can add or remove codes from your code selections.

[pause 00:23:42]

All righty. While we have a few minutes left, I did want to just provide you guys with a little bit more knowledge here. Since we got done a little bit early, what I would love to do is just put up on screen some reports that are very helpful for identifying fundraising goals. I talked about solicitation analysis, but we can also use gift comparison by time period, which lets you track your fundraising data year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter, month-over-month, year-over-year, and comprehensive donor revenue analysis, which is a great way.

If you want to set fundraising goals around donor retention, new donors, or decreasing the amount of lapse donors, this can be a great report that you can use to track that trends over three years, and then using reports and export to files which are both custom report writers that let you take your own user-defined fields and incorporate them into a report where you get to determine the layout and information that you want to see.

Just as a heads-up, there will be a handout that all of you can access. That’ll have the links to these reports as well as some knowledge-based articles with step-by-step instructions on how to build and apply fundraising goals. If you feel that you need a little bit more help, then certainly you can reach out to the support team and they will be able to assist you as well.

Jennifer is asking, if you remove a goal, is all of the tracking data lost? What if I want to look back on a past goal? Jennifer, if you delete the goal, it doesn’t delete the donor data. It just deletes the goal so that it’s not easy when you log in to see how much you’ve raised. What you could theoretically do if you wanted to check in on past goals, is you could probably create a goal tracker with an older date range and just see what the results were that way. Or you could just run a DonorPerfect report to see how much you raised.

Yes. Sarah was asking if there’s a similar report to solicitation analysis. Yes, we actually have what’s called the sub-solicitation analysis report, which is the exact same report that I showed you. Instead, it groups the data by subcodes or sub-solicitation codes instead. Depending on what it is you guys are looking the report on, you’ll probably pick different reports to get to that answer.

[pause 00:27:04]

All right. I’m going to have you guys all put into the chat, yes or no. Who here is really excited to leave today’s session and start building their own fundraising goals? Oop, and there goes [unintelligible 00:27:44]. That’s the joy of working at the home office.

Well, all righty then. With that said, I want to thank you guys all for attending this session. I hope you’re all walking away with some new knowledge on why fundraising goals are important, how your donor data using the DonorPerfect equation, can help you set a fundraising goal and how the goal tracker can be utilized to keep your team aligned to your desired outcomes.

For those of you that want may be a more in-depth tutorial on this, or you want to see fundraising goals applied in a more specific scenario, I would encourage all of you to keep an eye out for our upcoming workshops on July 12th, August 9th, September 13th, and October 11th, each one of those workshops are going to focus on a particular topic with fundraising goals being interwoven into those different areas. Keep an eye out on the DonorPerfect website and in your email for the signup for those sessions.

For those of you that are continuing on our next session is going to be, what is an Oreo cookie without the center? What is your nonprofit without middle donors? We also have a presentation by queue, give storytelling as part of a multi-channel content marketing strategy. No matter what session you choose, you’re not going to miss out on any content because all of our sessions are recorded. I hope that you all will join us for the rest of our day and into tomorrow. Thank you all. I hope you have a great rest of your day.