In olden days nonprofit fundraising, donor records, notes and analysis were kept in filing cabinets and organized on spreadsheets. Important details about donors lived mostly in the heads and personal notes of development professionals. But we live in the age of data. Everything you need to know about your nonprofit, and your donors, can be tracked automatically. The quantity of data available and the ease of gathering it is astounding. And Mightycause designed our Premium tools with your nonprofit data at the center, so your nonprofit can incorporate comprehensive data tracking, with no platform fees, with price points for organizations of all sizes and budgets.
Here’s how to use Mightycause’s Advanced nonprofit data tracking, and the three metrics you should be paying close attention to.
Data Connect
To offer your nonprofit better and easier ways to utilize the data collected on Mightycause, we’ve partnered with a company called Zapier. Zapier is an online automation tool that connects one program to another, and you can do some really cool, creative, time-saving stuff with it! Using Zapier, you can automate your data from Mightycause into dozens of programs also available via Zapier.
Building Digital Bridges
When you join Mightycause’s Advanced Plus or Advanced Pro plans, you’ll gain access to Data Connect, which is our integration with Zapier. Data Connect allows you to connect your Mightycause account to any other online applications (or “apps”) on Zapier. Zapier has over a thousand apps available. So all you need to utilize Data Connect is:
- A subscription to Mightycause Advanced Plus or Pro
- A free Zapier account
Just a few of the programs you can sync to Mightycause through Zapier are: Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, Gmail, Google Docs & Sheets, Slack, Twitter, Facebook. And that’s a small sampling!
Creating “Zaps”
When you create an automated process through Zapier, it’s called a “zap.” The zap essentially acts as a bridge from one app to another. We have some zaps pre-loaded for Advanced subscribers to help get you started.
To create a zap, you need to choose which programs to connect through the zap, triggers, and actions. So, let’s say you want to set up a zap that triggers a Gmail email from your development coordinator with some fundraising materials when someone creates a fundraiser for your nonprofit. You’d choose Mightycause as your app, choose “New Fundraiser/Team” as your trigger, and specify which page/nonprofit you want this zap to apply to. Then, you’d set up your action by choosing Gmail, and choose “Send Email” as your action. You’d choose the Gmail account you want it to send from, and write the email template. Then, that’s it! With this zap set up, you’re engaging peer-to-peer fundraisers and ensuring they have access to important tools they can use, without someone having to personally send out an email every time.
And if that sounds like a lot of steps, just know that you can create that zap in mere minutes. And when you choose a pre-loaded zap, it takes even less time. Data Connect helps your nonprofit be savvy about your time and smart in how you use the data Mightycause collects from donors.
LEARN MORE ABOUT CREATING ZAPS
Advanced Analytics
Mightycause Advanced also pulls together your fundraising analytics. Now, at a glance, you can find your nonprofit data and all the metrics that are most important. Here’s what you can track with Advanced Analytics:
- Fundraising totals, by year or any range your specify
- Donor retention rate
- Average donation
- Number of unique donors
- Number of recurring donors
- Where your donations come from on Mightycause
- Most common donation levels
We’ll talk a bit more about why these metrics are so important to track in a minute. But with Advanced Analytics, you will never have to scramble to do the math in Excel when your board chair or executive director calls and asks for your donor retention rate in 2016. We do the math for you, and put the analytics at your fingertips. And the more you use Mightycause, the more reliable these analytics will become.
Three Most Important Metrics for Your Nonprofit to Track
1. Donor retention rate
The nonprofit sector has a major donor retention problem. Nonprofits are losing 55% of their donors, and donor retention rates have been sliding downward for years. The reasons aren’t entirely clear, but it seems that most nonprofits pour their resources and attention into acquiring new donors while forgetting to steward the ones they already have. The result is that nonprofit giving is up over all, but the number of people who stick with a nonprofit is declining.
It’s important to monitor your donor retention rate because it’ll tell you how well you’re keeping your donors engaged. The industry average for donor retention is 46%. If your donor retention rate is below 50%, you’re on par with the average nonprofit, but that’s still low. Your nonprofit isn’t average, and you’re not about to settle for retaining less than half of your donors.
Check out tips for keeping donors engaged and coming back to donate in The Mightycause Guide to Donor Engagement and Retention.
2. Average gift size
We calculate this for you in your Advanced Analytics. It’s important to stay on top of this metric for a few reasons:
- It can be a good indicator of your overall fundraising health. If your average gift size goes up, that’s positive! If your average gift size declines, you’ll want to look at other trends in your donation data to figure out where you may be losing revenue.
- It helps you know what your “ask” is.
- When you’re creating or editing your Custom Donation Suggestions, this number will give you a good idea of where to start. (Ideally, you will want to have your Custom Donation Suggestions, which are the suggested donation amounts donors can choose from when making their contribution, bump their donation up slightly. So, if you have lots of donations in the $20 range, try making your lowest ask $30!)
3. Support Metrics
In your Support Metrics on your Advanced Analytics page, you can see where support for your nonprofit is coming from on Mightycause.
This is an extremely helpful tool that can give you great insights into your nonprofit’s fundraising. Here’s why:
- You can easily find bright spots. For instance, the nonprofit whose chart is above is doing an awesome job bringing in donations using fundraisers! So they know that creating campaign-specific pages works well for them, and resonates with donors.
- You can identify opportunities to diversify your fundraising. The nonprofit above doesn’t seem to have utilized team fundraising at all. Since campaign-specific fundraisers are working well for them, they might want to look into starting a team fundraiser, which is a coordinated peer-to-peer campaign. Team fundraisers have a deadline, a goal amount, and usually a specific focus, so given that we know those things resonate with their donors, it’s a natural progression.
Start Getting a Handle on Your Nonprofit Data
Learn how your nonprofit can utilize our nonprofit data tools by getting started with Mightycause Premium. Our pricing menu has options for nonprofits of all size, whether you’re a well-oiled fundraising machine or still growing. Get a first-hand look at our data tools by setting up a demo — you can even take Mightycause Advanced for a test drive to see whether it’s right for your nonprofit.