BLOG POST
Before an organization can create a feasible fundraising plan for the future, they need to understand their past efforts, results, and existing fundraising strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Article from the Growth & Co Blog | Posted on March 6, 2022 by Larissa
Eager clients often approach me with a specific fundraising initiative they are excited to execute. A recent example was a direct response campaign including a solicitation letter to their entire community requesting donations. When I asked how they select, write, and mail to the people who will receive the letter, this client couldn’t outline a consistent process. Unsurprisingly, this client also couldn’t provide past letter performance results like net revenue, the number of letters sent, donations secured, new donors, and lost donors. They didn’t know how much money past letters had resulted in, yet wanted to spend time and money sending more fundraising letters to their entire community.
Some may say that a solution to improving fundraising results is creating a fundraising plan. A plan is undoubtedly part of the solution! However, before an organization can create a feasible fundraising plan for the future, they need to understand their past efforts, results, and existing fundraising strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. They can do this by conducting a fundraising audit that assesses things like:
With a strong understanding of their fundraising efforts and results, staff can plan initiatives that will have a more substantial return on the investment of time and money. For example, by auditing existing CRM and information management capabilities, staff could know the percentage of incorrect mailing addresses in the CRM. They could learn what percentage of recipients respond with a gift and if respondees are regular donors, event attendees, or have some other characteristic in common. They could know if donors respond at higher rates during certain times of the year, such as promptly after the annual gala. They could understand if the CRM enables them to send a letter to multiple segments and use automation to reduce workload. Perhaps they will learn the work needs to be done manually and causes frustration and delays for staff. By auditing just the CRM and information management component of a fundraising operation, an organization gains insights that form the basis of the fundraising plan and improve specific tactics like mail campaigns.
A fundraising audit also helps an organization understand what else is possible. Following the above example, they may determine they need a volunteer to update missing contact information in the database. They could decide to only mail to existing donors and event attendees and only after the gala and during December when they know response rates are highest. The organization saves money by reducing the number of ineffective campaigns from four to two by only mailing at strategic times of the year.
The organization can reinvest this saved money into other opportunities. These opportunities could include upgrading the database to enable staff to pull mailing list segments quickly. Suddenly the task of creating mailing lists that previously took fifteen hours four times per year only takes one hour two times per year. That’s fifty-six hours for other initiatives in a fundraising plan, such as donor thank-you calls and meetings!
These kinds of campaign improvements, time savings, and fundraising operation enhancements can only happen if an organization has the insights they need to write a feasible fundraising plan. These insights come from conducting a thorough fundraising audit.
If you have questions about how your organization should conduct a fundraising audit on your organization, don’t hesitate to get in touch!