Do your fundraising reports make sense, at a glance? Do they help drive helpful discussions? Good dashboard reports can bring your results to life, educate your board and peers, and save you time every month.
From my 20+ years of building trackers and dashboards for all purposes, I have come to appreciate the power – and limitations – of bringing data into discussions. Here are my tips and the approach I take with clients:
Know your audience. What level of detail is helpful? Appropriate? Where do you want this audience to focus their energy in response to the data? Typically, fundraising dashboards are for regularly reporting to the board, a campaign committee, or an executive team.
Choose the metrics that matter. Dollars raised is the king, but that’s not the only way to prove success! My top four, which take effort to track but are worth it, are:
Donor retention: Measuring the number of last year’s donors making a gift this year is extremely useful. Set strong targets based on your past performance, and tailor your efforts with your renewing donors.
New Donors: The volume of donor acquisition is a sign of future fundraising success, especially when paired with good retention. Focus on a number of new donors to acquire each quarter and invest in the kinds of outreach and giving opportunities that will get results.
Response rate and average gift. In the high-volume world of annual appeals, even modest improvements in these metrics can make a big difference. Make sure to use custom donation links and business reply envelopes that allow your gift processor to code gifts as a response to the right appeal.
Asks and proposals made. You can’t control if a donor makes a gift, but you can be sure you are pro-actively doing your part. Though most of your time may be spent relationship-building, it can be challenging to hold oneself accountable to execute on the critical step: asking. If you are committed to a certain number of major asks or proposals this year to ensure results, record the asks and tally the activities against a goal to demonstrate the efficacy of the hard work you do.
Measure progress against a goal! Most reports tell you a result, but how does your audience know if a result is good? Always measure against a goal, or at least performance over the prior year-to-date. Even better, set quarterly benchmarks so that you can identify when you are off track in time to course correct. Goals should be broken into buckets that are easy to track – so be sure your gift coding structure (Campaigns, Appeals, Designations) matches up with your goals and annual plan strategies.
Make it snappy. Especially when reporting to a board, ensure you are building awareness and trust by demonstrating (a) the scope of the development team’s efforts, and (b) that you have a solid system for tracking results. But don’t drown them in numbers – every report should be short and highly visual, have a few key takeaways, and pivot easily to the conversation you should be having: what can they do to help?
Make it easy. Staff should not have to spend crazy amounts of time manually creating a report every month, and leadership should support their own needs by settling on the right metrics and investing in an appropriate reporting solution. If a fancy 1-click “AI generated” dashboard sounds like a fantasy, don’t fret. A well-written CRM report, or a custom Excel-type tool that takes standard CRM reports and generates a dashboard on a repeatable basis is entirely within reach for an average user, with a little help.
Are you ready to build a better dashboard? Many clients have made big strides in their reporting by investing in a professional data review and a custom dashboard project. You will gain clarity around your goals and strategies, alignment with your leadership, and useful hard skills to empower you to take control of your data. Reach out to The Ostara Group for a discussion about your reporting needs anytime, we would love to help.