Using Reports To Set Fund Raising Goals

With the start of a new year, there’s a good chance that you’re already well into strategic planning for 2019. No doubt you have a list of goals to achieve such as a certain number or percentage increase in new donors, more consistent donor acquisition, and an increase in total giving or perhaps getting your major donors to increase their giving by a certain percent. No matter your goal, FundRaiser Software has reports which will help you track and reach these goals. 

Increasing the Overall Number of Donors and Prospects

If your goal is to increase your total numbers of prospects (and/or donors), then you may wish to know how many accounts (or names in your database) that your organization has.  The New Accounts report will show you the number of new accounts by month for your organization. This allows you to track trends, as well as perhaps set goals to increase the number of new accounts each month.

Seeing the Peak Months for New Donors

When you want to see how your new accounts transition to new donors, the new donors report will put those numbers in perspective. By comparing the new donors report with the new accounts report, it’ll be easy to see the number of new accounts who became new donors. Just as with the new accounts report, the new donors report will allow you to see trends and allow you to set goals to increase the number of donors each month.

Charting Giving Over Time

The number of names in your database as well as the count of donors are helpful for planning, but without the actual amounts, it may be difficult to forecast future giving. That’s where the Donor Period Comparison report (FundRaiser Spark and Professional only) comes into play. This report shows the giving for each donor over a specified time frame, for example the last five years, or even the last few quarters.

In this way, you can see the consistency as well as to some extent the frequency of donations. In fact, by being able to see the periods side-by-side, patterns that may not have been visible otherwise become apparent. When looking deeper with this report, for example, you can see if many of your donors give quarterly, then perhaps you can move them to monthly givers.

These three reports will help provide an overview of your organization’s charitable giving as well as help you project giving in the future by seeing what has happened in the past. If you’d like assistance with generating or using these reports, please feel free to contact our support team.

If you'd like more help on generating and using reports, we welcome you to contact FundRaiser Technical Support at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or 800-543-4131 or register for our Reports class.