What $$ are measured towards campaign success?

Patrick Hansen:

Greg,

There are lots of ways to measure fundraising success at year-end. First and foremost, I would keep an eye on total dollars raised. Meaning, compared to past years (and independent of channel - direct mail, telemarketing, online, etc.) are you raising as much or more than you raised in the past? There are the other key metrics on donor retention, average gift, etc that you are probably already tracking as well - we can't really track for you using Convio's tools.

In terms of online metrics and the way that we'll be benchmarking you versus your peers in the Booster Shot Program, we'll be setting up a donation form specifically for your end-of-year fundraising push. In addition to getting your end-of-year email appeals out the door, we'll be providing a fundraising banner/image that links to your end-of-year donation form. You can then place this banner on your homepage, on your blog (if your organization has one), on your MySpace page (again, if you have one), or anywhere else across the web where you have access to placing HTML code.

Some organizations may choose to use a dedicated or "vanity" URL in their direct mail - this is entirely up to you, but if you do this, you might redirect that vanity URL to your end-of-year donation form to provide better tracking of your total response to the campaign (instead of having those gifts go by default to your general site donation form).

With all this up and running and in place, you should have a variety of ways of promoting end-of-year giving, all of which is trackable by reporting on your end-of-year donation form. So, yes - we'll track the email giving response, but we'll also track the overall response on your end-of-year form. These are the metrics that we'll use to generate our benchmarks and provide you with a comparison relative to your peers. These campaign benchmark metrics will not include general giving on your other web forms, but we will additionally make a general comparison of all funds raised online in December for you vs. your peers in the program.

Finally, It's important to know that some supporters will receive your email and not click on a link in the message, but separately open a web browser, go your homepage, and make a donation. Constituents who are particularly concerned about phishing and other web-based scams are likely to respond to your eAppeals this way. In cases like this, the gifts won't be trackable back to a specific email message and may not be trackable to your end-of-year donation form.

-patrick

Yes, that makes sense in order to be comparing apples to apples against peers in the Booster shot group and outside of that.

My thoughts were that key measures would be:

- response to the campaign directly in response to email appeals

- total online response from group contacted through the Booster campaign through website (any forms) for that period of time

- total reponse from group contacted across any channel (capturing impact of multichannel communications / appeals as some will also be receiveing other communications and also may have other preferred methods to donate)

Patrick Hansen:

You're definitely looking at it the right way. We hadn't thought about doing the group-based segmentation analysis on giving (your second bullet), but we'll bring that up with our analytics team as we pull together the actual benchmarking in January. If there's a consistent way to do this across all of the clients in the program, we'll take a look at it.

Your third point is, in many ways, the most interesting, though obviously not something we're going to be able to do for you, since we (at Convio) don't have access to all the data across all channels. Most organizations struggle to do that kind of multi-channel analysis (either because they don't have the time, or the complete data, or the right skills to pull it off), but if that's something you're planning to do for your end-of-year campaign, I'd love to see the results!

-patrick

Happy to share all info. We will apply an appeal code to all solicited / sent and as such will be able to track response to that appeal or more broadly.

Also we are planning on adding package codes under the appeal that will provide info on segments within the total file. Struggling a bit on how to segment: if it should be based on RFM as out mail is, or based on past channel (online only, multi-channel, offline only), or based on motivation for prev online gift (in-mem, peer-peer, direct gift) which would allow us to tailor msg accordingly.