To improve either your individual fundraising skills or the effectiveness of an organisation’s fundraising you first need to understand where you are. There are a number of tools and strategies that can be employed to measure the efficiency of your fundraising, highlight strengths and weakness and showcase opportunities to make a greater impact.
How do you know if your fundraising is improving or deteriorating over time? Evaluating an organisation’s fundraising performance is not just something that is used internally by management, but also by prospective donors keen to support the organisation’s that offer the most impact for their contribution.
The value of measuring and recording an organisation’s fundraising performance increases exponentially over time. Data covering just a few months is able to illustrate short term changes and trends but data spanning several years can highlight critical long term trends that can have a significant impact on your organisation and your fundraising strategies. You can learn where you are coming from, where you currently stand and where you are heading towards.
Quality records can even alert you to when it is necessary to change tactics or reallocate resources if one income stream is struggling or if another is doing significantly better than expected. Year on year records will showcase your performance on the same activities the previous year, helping to inform you on whether your output has increased or diminished.
Statistics don’t always tell the whole story and shouldn’t be used in isolation but as a complementary tool to your existing knowledge. Whether you are out in public fundraising face to face or writing grant applications from behind a desk you will already have some understanding of whether you are performing well, the number of opportunities available to you and your expected success rate. You can use metrics to substantiate and challenges your own perceptions and add a crucial extra layer of knowledge and insight into your fundraising decision making. Read More
