How Fundraisers Can Use Donor Analytics to Raise More Funds

Fundraisers have always relied on their instincts and experiences to predict how donors will respond to their appeals. But with the right analytics tool, fundraisers can gather donor behavior insights and make better predictions about their donors’ likelihood to give. 

Ultimately, donor analytics is all about setting yourself up to make a fundraising appeal to the right donor, for the right amount, at the right time, and in the right way. 

This article explores how to use your donor data to do just this! But first, let’s discuss what donor analytics really means.

What is Donor Analytics?

Every donor has a unique set of interactions with your organization. Over a year, a donor may give $200, open ten email newsletters, go to your walkathon event, and volunteer twice a week. Donor analytics is the process of recording and analyzing donor interactions like these to identify trends and gain actionable insights. 

As there are infinite variables you could study, donor analytics is a vast field. If you wanted to, you could even perform an analysis on your donor’s golfing habits! However, it wouldn’t be a great use of anyone’s time to do a deep dive on your donors’ handicaps. 

So, I’ll outline some of the key donor interactions from which you’ll be able to draw actionable insights to boost the success of your next appeal.

The Right Donor

Depending on its size, a nonprofit can have thousands, to hundreds of thousands, of contacts. Even for smaller organizations, it can be nearly impossible to manually sift through every contact’s details, analyze their interactions, and decide if they’re ready to make a donation or require additional stewardship efforts.

Using analytics to gauge each of your contacts’ engagement levels is an excellent way to save yourself time-consuming work. Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple way to calculate donor engagement manually, so you’ll need donor analytics software like Fundraising KIT.

Donor Score

To make sure you’re up to date with each donor’s engagement level, KIT has a built-in Donor Score feature that segments and prioritizes your donors to determine who’s most engaged and who you most need to reach out to.

KIT examines several factors of a donor’s giving history to determine their score.

• Their average annual donation amount,
• How long they’ve been a donor for, 
• And whether there’s been an increase in their donations in the last year.

Perhaps the most useful application of Donor Score is that it’s much easier to know when to engage in different stewardship efforts.

For example, for a donor that has a low score, it may be a good time to reach out and share exciting organizational updates and impact stories to inspire them. Or, for a donor with a high score, it may be an excellent time to reach out and thank them for their support. 

What’s more, you could even segment your donors based on their scores and send out mass stewardship communications saving you tons of time. We’ll talk more about segmentation later!

The Right Ask Amount

One of the most nerve-racking considerations in fundraising is how much to ask for. Research tells us that asking your donors for the right amount can increase the likelihood of soliciting a gift while reducing the chances of underestimating their ability to give.

For example, if you ask for too much, you could discourage your donors and end up with nothing. On the other hand, if you ask for too little, you could miss out on a more significant donation the donor was prepared to make. It’s challenging to find that sweet spot! 

If you’re too busy to do this calculation for every donor, you can use Fundraising KIT to calculate your donors’ Smart Ask! Based on variables like average donation amount and most recent donation, KIT provides an updated donor score every 24 hours, so you always know just what to ask for. 

What’s more, for recommendations to be as accurate as possible, KIT disregards ‘outstanding gifts.’ For example, if a recurring donor has given $25 each month for the past four years and made a one-time donation of $500 three years ago, the $500 donation will be exempted from the Smart Ask evaluation. 

Ultimately, Fundraising KIT ensures you get the most out of your donors without asking for too much.

The Right Way to Ask

Each donor will want you to communicate with them in a certain way. It’s challenging to predict donor needs, but you can determine what each donor wants to hear and how they want to hear it through an effective donor analytics strategy. 

Donors want to feel like you’re taking time out of your day to speak with them personally. They don’t want to feel like they’re hooked up to a string of impersonal communications. In fact, only 44% of donors say they’re satisfied with the level of communications they currently receive. 

What’s more, personalized communications can result in a dramatic increase in engagement. For example, it was found that personalized emails can improve nonprofit email open rates by as much as 329%! 

So, the best way to create dramatic improvements is to use a donor analytics tool that monitors donor engagement data, segments your contacts accordingly, and provides you with a basis to send more personalized communications. 

RFM Segmentation

One of the most common ways to segment your donors is through the process of RFM segmentation. This process studies how recently a contact has given, how frequently they give, and how much they tend to give. Knowing these three factors allows you to segment donors based on their giving patterns. 

After segments of donors have been created, each is targeted with personalized messaging designed to create a unique giving experience and yield more donations.  

For example, you could send a group of less engaged donors an email donation form that prompts them to give $40, an amount just above their collective giving range. Simultaneously, you could send your most engaged donors an email encouraging them to sign up for monthly giving. 

When working with engagement data, don’t forget to measure whatever you want, not just donations. For example, interactions like opening emails and volunteering can be a great representation of how connected your donors feel to your organization. 

You can assess each donor’s communication and donation history to identify their preferred communication channel. Or, let Fundraising KIT do it for you! Fundraising KIT’s Best Way to Reach Out feature keeps track of relevant interaction data to ensure you’re always using a contact’s preferred communication method.

The Right Time to Ask

Google Analytics is the best tool for nonprofit marketing analytics, such as website and mobile app analytics. For example, if you are looking specifically to track how people are engaging with your organization’s website (i.e., Are they even getting to the donation page?), then Google Analytics is the right tool to use. It is also free to

Now that we know the right donor to approach, how to approach them, and what to ask for, it’s important that our timing is just as well thought out. Fundraisers can perform a simple time of year analysis to make sure their appeals are like clockwork. 

You can identify the time of the year your donors are most willing to give by first listing each month a donor has previously given in. 

Here’s an example: 

December (2014), March (2015), August (2015), December (2015), February (2016), March (2016), December (2016), August (2017), December (2017), January (2018), March (2018), December (2018), August (2019), March (2020), December (2020)

Next, rank the three most popular months.

1. December (6 gifts)
2. March (4 gifts)
3. August (3 gifts) 

Last, simply use these three months as a guide for your future appeals to this donor. This strategy will give you the best possibility of a well-timed appeal instead of making too many, or not enough, solicitations in a month when they prefer not to give. 

KIT even goes one step further and provides you with donor readiness analysis, so you always know how likely your donors are to give within the next two weeks, and you never miss an opportunity to reach out.

How does KIT determine Donor Readiness? A few factors are taken into account: 

• Donor giving history
• Donor communication patterns
• And, the local weather of the donor 

Yes, you read that right! The weather has been proven to have an impact on a donor’s willingness to give!

While I don’t want donor analytics to overshadow the importance of having well-developed fundraising instincts, analyzing donor interactions is a massively useful and complementary practice for fundraisers. Even the smartest, most experienced fundraiser in the world won’t be able to scan their database in a matter of seconds to prioritize who’s most likely to give in the next two weeks. 

So, let your donor analytics system do the calculating, ranking, and segmenting, so you have more time to have the conversations that really matter.