In the New Fiscal Year, Look Back Before You Start Again at Zero

This time of year, many nonprofits are counting up the last of June’s gifts and trying to get to a total that meets their fundraising goals. When the reports come out, most fundraisers will start the new year again – at $0.00 – without thinking about how last year went, why it went that way, and how it can be better. It can always be better. Here are some ideas for looking backward, even if only briefly, to fine tune your new fundraising year.

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1. Did you increase the donor pool? Did you acquire more donors than you lost? Did you renew almost everyone? Or bring back people from 2 or 25 years ago? How did you renew or reacquire? What worked? See this article on donor retention for more.
2. Did you increase overall average giving? A lot of us get stuck at the first ask amount – I can often guess it when conducting analytics studies on my clients’ annual giving programs. If your first ask is the same, is your second a little higher? And did you assume the increase amount or use a strategy based on analysis?
3. Did you stay in touch with all of your major gift prospects? If you find that your major gifts pool is too large for your gift officers to visit, is it because you don’t have enough gift officers or is it because you have too many suspects in your pool? If you didn’t reach everyone, how will you parse out who should absolutely be visited or called really soon?
4. Did you meet all your campaign goals? I once worked with a director of annual giving who let her staff pitch her into a cold spring lake if all departments met their goals. If you met all of yours, I hope you’ll find a suitable way to celebrate. If you did not, why? Use data, not your assumptions, to find out.
5. Did your engagement team bring in more engagement? This topic is often hotly debated on Prospect-DMM, a listserv for data scientists in the nonprofit sector. What is engagement? If you have defined it, then measure it. Remember Peter Drucker’s advice: Only that which is measured is rewarded.

By now, you may be thinking, “Marianne, you’re just asking us to do analytics.” What I am asking you to do is look. You need to know what worked and what didn’t. If your direct mail campaign suddenly dropped in number of gifts or total giving, find out why. If you know, you can shift. If you don’t know, you’re in for a surprise. 

A good set of reports or a good dashboard should answer most of these questions. And if you don’t have the information you need on a particular topic, then you now have the opportunity to build a workplan. For instance, if your major gifts team does not have a work plan, then it will be difficult to find out if your gift officers have met their goals. However, showing the percentage of major gifts prospects who were cultivated in a given year helps start the workplan discussion. 

A keynote speaker at a DRIVE conference some time ago shared that he had discovered a fire hydrant in New York City that made more than minimum wage in parking fines because the space in front of it was not marked as “No Parking.” He told us that people kept asking him how he figured that out, and he replied, “I counted.” But he did more than that.

• He asked. He wondered about traffic patterns and parking fines in New York City.
• He looked. He downloaded the right data from the right sources and examined it.
• Then he counted.

​If you would like to share your year-end assessment ideas with us, comment below. Or write to me at marianne@staupell.com.