Donor Analytics

Sarah Bock

Our development team is interested in viewing donor analytics...pretty wide-open, I know.   What metrics do you find most useful? What software do you use?  What do you like or dislike about it?  Do you wish you would have chosen something different? If so, what?  Any info/insight is appreciated!

Daniel Bayer

The analytics provided by NXT are pretty good, especially if you have data like gender and birthdate consistently filled in. But even without those, it allows you to look at overall giving, giving by appeal/fund/campaign, and even within certain time frames broken down by (primary) constituency, which is usually the most useful thing, as well as by giving amount. They also have a Donor Lifecycle Status report which is the best - it shows you how many of your donors are lapsed, lapsing, "at risk", recaptured, acquired, and retained. I always direct the fundraisers to this when they want to know who hasn't given yet this year.


In addition to that, I've used the AFP's Growth-In-Giving (or GIG) report, which you can download directly from their website. You have to pull constituent ID and gift dates/amounts from RE, and if you use soft credits heavily you may have to do a lot of editing to that list to get the "right" data, but the report has just about every metric imaginable. If you're a statistics nerd like I am, it pretty much can't be beat, especially since it's free!