Learn more about analytics and research best practices, as well as real world examples and solutions for nonprofits.

Net Dollars Not Donors Part 1

Somewhere over the rainbow in fundraising, two metrics were established as the gold standard: gross revenue generated and the number of donors acquired.

And that’s a shame.

It’s a shame because you can optimize these two metrics into organization ruin.

Let’s take gross revenue. The reason it is used is because it’s simple to measure. But it has a serious drawback: it doesn’t account for what you spent to raise that money.

It’s like a habitual gambler bragging about the $1,000 lottery winnings they had the night before while omitting the fact that have bought a $5 scratch ticket every week for 10 years. So their real ROI is 0.38.

Wahoo!

Seriously, if you are using gross revenue as your fundraising goal, you need to stop it and start using net revenue. It’s just bad stewardship to use gross revenue goals.

The Regression to the Mean has Begun

by Bill Jacobs | May 31, 2021

A year ago, all of us in the business of fundraising were nervous. Lockdowns were taking place across the world, there were shortages of toilet paper and no one was sure how donors would respond. No one could have predicted that donors would respond in a such an...

December 31 Emails

by Bill Jacobs | Jan 7, 2021

This past year, we tracked email solicitations for both Giving Tuesday and December 31 (your can read about Giving Tuesday here: https://www.analyticalones.com/giving-spam-tuesday/). We wanted to compare these two critical days of email fundraising. Here are some...

Giving (SPAM) Tuesday

by Bill Jacobs | Dec 3, 2020

This year, the whole Analytical Ones’ team tracked our the number of emails we received from organizations, how many we received, our relationship with the organization (active donor, lapsed donor or new donor acquisition), and, when we received the email. Here is...