Campaign and event reporting
by Larry Weaver
This month’s case study, with the United Way of Moscow/Latah County, is really a study in simplicity. They have recognized which donors/prospects to target for future appeals, and they keep track of the gifts and the reasons people give: Very basic stuff. As basic as it is, however, the way they track donors and donations gives them a lot of flexibility in reporting.
One of the strong suits of FundRaiser is the ability to create Groupings of people who have one or more things in common with each other, and these Groupings can then be used as often as needed, with virtually any printing process, whether for reports or for mailings. So, when it comes time to appeal to current donors for additional donations, it’s important to have a clear understanding of how you want to record certain aspects of the appeal process as well as the resulting donations.
When creating a Grouping in order to target your appeal letter “audience”, it can be helpful to write down a simple sentence or two describing who it is that you want to target. It can make it easier to choose the right criteria from the many options available. So, for instance, you might write “I want to target anyone who has given in the past three years”, or, if you plan to send differently worded appeals to different classes of donors (based on when they last gave), you might write “I want my first group to be those donors who have given anytime in the past year but not in the last 3 months; my second group of those who gave in the past two years but not in the past year; my last group anyone who gave in the past 4 years but not the last 2 years”. This gives you very specific date ranges to consider, along with the fact that each person to be selected has been a donor, but not much other detail.
For a “motivation-based” appeal, you might consider additional restrictions involving the Motivation codes from past gifts, in order to target people who have given to similar appeals in the past. For appeals that separate donors based on giving ability, you might consider donation-amount restrictions, such as “under $50”, “$50-$250”, and “over $250” past gift amounts.
No matter how you create your Grouping (or Groupings), you may want to use Category Code assignments to indicate that these individuals received the mailing. Remember that you can assign a category code to everyone in a grouping, which will permanently “brand” them as having been a recipient. The code should, of course, reflect which appeal letter they received. The description can be up to 40 characters long, even though the code itself is restricted to 6 alpha-numeric characters.
Later, after the appeals have been sent, and enough time has passed to be fairly certain everyone who will respond has responded, you will be able to use those groupings to see how many from each group responded with a gift. You’ll also be able to see how many from all groupings responded, and, depending on how you created your groupings, you might even see how different appeal letters worked for donors depending on time since their last gift, or depending on amounts of last gifts. So, the real point to all of this is: learn and use the basics, because, when it comes right down to it, people give because they are asked, and asking the right people is the most efficient use of your time as a fund raiser.
