Lesson 5.6 – Measuring Fundraising Effectiveness

Welcome to Lesson 5.6! The ultimate purpose of building a structured Gift Pyramid in FastFund Raising is to evaluate the success of your development efforts. It is not enough to simply know how much money came in; you need to know how much it cost to raise that money, whether you met your targets, and which initiatives provided the best return on investment.

FastFund Raising provides built-in tools to track financial targets, log direct event costs, and measure donor response rates. In this lesson, we will explore how to input these metrics and use FastFund’s Campaign Reports to analyze your net fundraising effectiveness.

1. Setting Financial Goals

To measure success, you first need a benchmark. FastFund allows you to establish financial targets at multiple levels of your Gift Pyramid:

• Campaign Goals: When you create a Campaign (your broad overarching initiative), you can enter a Goal Amount. This establishes the macro-level target for the year or the specific project.
• Appeal Goals: When you create an Appeal (your specific event or mailing), you can also enter a Goal Amount.

By establishing these targets upfront, FastFund’s summary reports will automatically calculate the variance—the exact dollar difference between your initial goal and the actual funds raised—allowing your board and development team to see if an initiative fell short or exceeded expectations.

2. Measuring Outreach (Rate of Return)

When you send out a direct mail piece or an email blast, measuring the response rate is critical for future planning.

When setting up an Appeal, FastFund includes a specific field called # Contacted. By entering the exact number of constituents who were solicited (e.g., 5,000 mailers sent), you provide the system with the baseline metric needed to calculate the rate of return for that specific appeal.

3. Tracking Appeal Expenses

Generating $50,000 at an annual gala is fantastic, but if the venue, catering, and printing cost $45,000, the net profit is only $5,000. FastFund allows you to track the direct costs associated with an event so you can measure its true net income.

(Note: If your FastFund Raising module is integrated with FastFund Accounting, the expenses posted in your general ledger are not automatically linked here; you must log them in the fundraising module to generate specific Appeal Profit and Loss reports).

Steps to Record an Appeal Expense:

1. Navigate to Lists > Appeals under Campaign Management.
2. Click the Magnifying Glass icon next to the specific appeal.
3. The Expenses window will open. Click the New + (Green Plus Sign) icon.
4. Select the appropriate Account (e.g., Postage, Printing, Facility Rental).
5. Enter a description in the Comment field, the Amount of the expense, and the Date incurred.
6. Click Add to save the expense.

4. Analyzing Campaign Reports

Once your goals, outreach numbers, revenue, and expenses are in the system, you can use FastFund’s Campaign Reports to view your analyzed data. Navigate to Reports on the Main Menu and look under the Campaigns section.

Key reports for measuring effectiveness include:

• Fund Summary: Summarizes the total donations received for each Campaign linked to a Fund. It displays the number of donations, total amount, the campaign goal, the variance, and each campaign’s percentage of the total fund.
• Campaign Summary: This is a highly detailed Profit and Loss report for your initiatives. It summarizes all the Appeals linked to a Campaign. It displays the appeal goal, gross amount raised, the variance, the total number of donations, the Appeal Expenses, and ultimately calculates the Net Amount Raised.
• Appeal Summary: Summarizes the specific Gifts linked to an individual Appeal, displaying the total donations, number of donations, appeal goal, and variance at the most granular level.