GUEST POST // 8 Most Valuable Nonprofit Recurring Reports to Assess
By Joshua Meyer of Bloomerang
How many emails do you receive in your work inbox each day? As a nonprofit professional, that number could reach into the dozens on a busy day. Now, think about how many emails you receive that are actually useful. Suddenly, scores of messages are reduced to just a handful of emails that you need to read and act on.
That’s why it’s essential to set up only the most useful recurring reports for your team. Your team members don’t want another useless email hitting their inbox like clockwork. Your recurring reports should provide value for your fundraising team, allowing you to assess progress and adjust your strategies as needed.
Let’s review the most valuable recurring reports for nonprofits and what makes these reports so helpful:
Donor retention
Giving milestones
Revenue by giving channel
Wealth screening
Donor engagement
Lapsed donors
Campaign progress
Donor interactions
If your nonprofit is running into the same issues or fundraising challenges every year, these recurring reports can help you understand why and adjust your strategy accordingly.
1. Donor retention
Report overview: Your donor retention rate is the number of repeat donors this year divided by the number of donors from the previous year. Bloomerang offers a free donor retention calculator to determine your nonprofit’s unique donor retention rate. For context, the average nonprofit donor retention rate is 40-45%.
Why this report is valuable: Understanding your donor retention rate is key to determining how well your organization maintains donor support year after year. As your donor attrition rate (the opposite of donor retention) increases, you could risk losing exponentially more and more donors as time goes on, as depicted in this chart:
On the other hand, retaining donors allows your nonprofit to access a reliable fundraising stream. Plus, recurring donors are much more likely to increase their giving amounts over time. Therefore, keeping an eye on your donor retention rate allows you to respond quickly to any fluctuations and maintain high levels of donor engagement.
How often to run this report: Once a year
2. Giving milestones
Report overview: Your nonprofit likely sets a variety of giving goals throughout the year that aren’t necessarily tied to a specific campaign. This could include goals surrounding the number of new donors you want to recruit throughout the year, your total donation amount raised since your organization was founded, or a grant anniversary. For example, you might celebrate earning your millionth dollar through donations or recruiting 500 donors since your founding.
Why this report is valuable: Recognizing and celebrating giving milestones can motivate your nonprofit’s staff, volunteers, donors, and other stakeholders. Plus, gathering a variety of eye-catching major milestones can help you fill your annual report with exciting landmark updates.
How often to run this report: Regularly and frequently, such as once a quarter (this timeline helps ensure you can catch and recognize major milestones as quickly as possible)
3. Revenue by giving channel
Report overview: Your nonprofit likely has a variety of giving avenues, including individual donations, grants, matching gifts, memberships, events, peer-to-peer fundraising, merchandise sales, and more. A giving channel report allows you to analyze how much revenue you’re generating through each stream.
Why this report is valuable: Assessing revenue by giving channels allows you to understand how effectively your nonprofit is diversifying its revenue streams. For example, you might find that your organization receives a large percentage of revenue from grants and memberships but less from individual donations and matching gifts.
This can help you determine whether you need to adjust your fundraising approach to diversify your revenue channels and reduce your organization's reliance on a few streams.
How often to run this report: Once a year or several months after you start up new revenue diversification strategies
4. Wealth screening
Report overview: Wealth screening reports identify potential major donors based on characteristics such as stock ownership, real estate ownership, and business affiliations. These reports automatically identify and compile top prospects into an easily readable format to understand who these donors are.
Why this report is valuable: Continuously identifying potential major donors allows you to direct more of your stewardship efforts and attention toward these high-value prospects. You can combine wealth screening data with engagement information to identify donors with a high giving capacity and a strong affinity for your cause.
How often to run this report: Regularly, such as once a quarter, to quickly identify new major giving prospects and launch stewardship efforts
5. Donor engagement
Report overview: Donor engagement reports are offered within some nonprofit CRM platforms. These reports identify each donor’s engagement level through markers like donating, volunteering, and engaging with marketing materials.
For instance, let’s say you identify a highly engaged monthly donor named Ethan. He gives just $10 per month to your organization, but he frequently interacts with your nonprofit’s marketing outreach, including sharing your social media posts and reading your email newsletters. Based on his level of engagement, Ethan could be a good prospect for increasing his monthly giving amount.
Why this report is valuable: You can sort constituents in your CRM to identify your most engaged donors who would be good prospects for upgrading their giving.
You can also use this report to identify high-value donors who are currently at a low level of engagement. Using information in your CRM about donors’ preferences, you can create marketing outreach that resonates with them to reignite their involvement.
How often to run this report: With some CRMs, you can check your donor engagement scores daily. We recommend regularly monitoring scores for your highest-value donors at least once per month or every other month.
6. Lapsed donors
Report overview: Lapsed donor reports include LYBUNT AND SYBUNT reports. LYBUNT stands for Last Year But Unfortunately Not This, and refers to donors who gave the previous year but haven’t yet donated this year. SYBUNT stands for Some Year But Unfortunately Not This means any donor who has given in any previous year (besides last year), but not yet this year.
Why this report is valuable: LYBUNT and SYBUNT reports help to identify recent and long-time lapsed donors who may be likely candidates to give again if they receive stewardship efforts. By sending outreach materials that thank these donors for their previous gifts and emphasizing their potential impact if they give again, you can reengage more of these supporters.
How often to run this report: Once a year
7. Campaign progress
Report overview: Whether you launch a GivingTuesday campaign or a major capital campaign, you need up-to-date, frequent information about the initiative’s progress. Using your fundraising software, you can track campaign progress through metrics such as total donations or total supporters contacted.
Why this report is valuable: Campaigns require a lot of hard work to plan, and you don’t want your efforts to go to waste. By reporting on campaign progress, you can measure the success of your strategies and determine whether you need to intervene to get your campaign back on track.
How often to run this report: Regularly throughout your campaign, depending on the timeframe. For example, you could run this report monthly for a multi-year campaign, or weekly for a one-month campaign.
8. Donor timeline report
Report overview: A donor interaction or timeline report is a recap of all the touchpoints a donor has had with your organization over a defined period of time. This could include donating, volunteering, opening an email, interacting on an Instagram or LinkedIn post, speaking with a staff member, participating in a peer-to-peer fundraiser, and more.
Why this report is valuable: Multiple nonprofit staff members may interact with a current or prospective donor throughout their supporter journey. A donor interaction report makes it easy to see every touchpoint, creating a seamless, personalized experience for the donor or prospect.
For example, let’s say you’re stewarding a major giving prospect, Jenn. Throughout Jenn’s donor journey, she may have volunteered at a canned food drive, shared a Facebook post from your nonprofit about your volunteer program, and had a personal tour of your food sorting facilities from one of your staff members. Using that information, you can build on previous interactions by sending Jenn a personalized email that shows how donations directly support your volunteer program.
How often to run this report: You can generate a donor interaction report at any point during the donor stewardship process to understand where a certain prospect is in their supporter journey. It’s especially useful to run these reports before a one-on-one meeting with a major donor prospect to ensure you have all the information you need heading into the meeting.
Whenever you start using a new software tool, like a fundraising platform or CRM, think carefully about the types of reports you should generate through the platform. Robust software tools allow nonprofits to report on any number of metrics, but we’ve found that the reports in this guide are the most useful for keeping your team informed.
This guest post was written by Joshua Meyer.
Joshua Meyer brings more than 20 years of fundraising, volunteer management, and marketing experience to his current role as the VP of Demand Generation for Bloomerang. As a member of the Bloomerang marketing team, Josh manages the organization’s growth marketing efforts. Through his previous roles at the Human Rights Campaign and OneCause, he has a passion for helping to create positive change and helping nonprofits engage new donors and achieve their fundraising goals.
