How do your fundraising efforts measure up?

The just-published Individual Donor Benchmark Report from Third Space Studio surveyed 87 organizations with budgets under $2 million per year. We helped sponsor the study and invited Little Green Light customers to participate.

Here are the top two findings, as quoted from the report:

1) The single most important thing you can do to strengthen your individual donor fundraising is to create a plan. We searched for correlations between every piece of data in this report, but the only one that really mattered was whether or not your organization had a fundraising plan.

How can LGL help? Download a copy of our free e-book 6 Steps to a Successful Fundraising Appeal.

2) There’s still a huge opportunity in online giving. Organizations that are just starting online programs have the potential for explosive growth, and those with existing programs (generating $5,000 or more in 2013) saw 25% growth over the past year. If your organization isn’t maximizing your ability to solicit and accept online donations, you’re missing out.

How can LGL help? Make use of LGL Forms, included with your Little Green Light subscription. With an integrated ProPay account, you’ll be taking online donations in no time, and all the information you collect from your online form will flow directly into your LGL database.

The IDB report is full of great metrics that you can benchmark yourself against. Below we list three of the most salient metrics and provide a quick guide to how you can pull that data in your LGL account.

1) Average amount nonprofits raised from individual donors: $170,183

In LGL, click on the Fundraising tab, set the date range to “Last fiscal” and then set constituent type to “Individual”.

individual giving

2) Percentage of individual donor revenue generated from donors giving $1,000 or more: 49%

In LGL, here’s how you can calculate this percentage:

Edit your gift tiers in Settings > Menu items > Gift menu items, so that your tiers are “up to $999” and “$1,000+”. You can make the other tiers inactive for now.
In the Fundraising tab, select “Total giving by tier” from the the View menu to show the count of constituents and total giving by tier.
Set the time frame and gift types to the appropriate selections.
To calculate the percentage, divide the amount in the $1,000+ tier by the total of both tiers. In the example below, that would be $21,200 / $32,191 = 66%.

Total giving by gift tier

3) Percentage of individual donor revenue raised online: 17%

In LGL, this requires a couple of quick onscreen searches:

Run a search from the Fundraising tab for individual giving for last fiscal year, and jot down the total amount given.
Use the filters on the left to show the results for only those gifts that used a payment type of “Online”, or something to that effect. (Note: This approach assumes that you’ve captured online giving using “Payment Type”.)
Divide the amount given using the online payment type by the overall individual total to get your percentage.

giving by payment type

Below is a nice infographic provided along with the IDB Report.

2014 Donor Giving Benchmarks

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