Product Highlight - Donor Performance Analysis

One of the best ways to gain insight into your fundraising program and donor response is a donor file audit. A file audit or donor performance analysis (DPA) allows fund-raisers to view donor giving, emphasizing the trends of key indicators of fund raising success from year to year.

DPAs often contain multiple reports that analyze everything from donor renewal patterns to donor life cycle stages. Typical sections within a comprehensive DPA are described below:

Analysis by Donor Life Cycle Stages – Analyzes trends for current donors as well as life cycle stages such as New Donors, Second Year Donors, Multi-Year Donors, Lapsed Donors and Second Year Reactivated Donors. For the average organization, New Donors represent 15%-30% of the total number of donors giving. For organizations with less than $1 million in income, this tends to drop to around 10%. Multi-Year Donors, the core of any donor file, often represent 33%-66% of a file. Multi-Year Donors tend to represent a larger proportion of the file for smaller organizations and a smaller proportion of the file for larger organizations.

Donor Movement Analysis – Examines how donors upgrade, downgrade and remain at the same level of annual giving, as well as those who lapse. Also shows donor movement trends within giving ranges. Generally, smaller donors, $20 or less, will tend to lapse altogether rather than downgrade. Larger donors begin to downgrade first before lapsing altogether, providing fund-raisers with the opportunity to re-engage them before they are lost.

Donor Renewal by Year of Acquisition – This analysis shows how recent, successive acquisition efforts have impacted renewal in subsequent years, and clearly displays the renewal rates for donors acquired in each of those years. First-year renewal rates can range anywhere from 19 to 60 percent, but usually fall within the mid-20 to mid-30 percent level. After that, about 70 to 95 percent of these renewed donors renew again in their third year on the file.

Armed with this information, an organization’s fund raising managers can identify possible reasons for donor behavior. The DPA can help identify strengths and weaknesses as well as potential threats and latent opportunities.

CLICK HERE to view a sample DPA report. (1.8MB)

Charitable Sectors Favored by Americans

The DonorPulse 2003 polled a random sample of people nationwide to learn what types of organizations they have given to and what types they intend to give to.

About a third of the population have given to health, medical or hospital charities (33%) and social service organizations (34%). Slightly less than a third (30%) have given to religious charities in the past year. About a quarter of the population (28%) have given to international charities. Similar proportions intend to donate to these types of organization in the coming year.

Most of these results are similar to last year’s poll. One notable difference is a 7% drop in giving to international charities. In 2002, about a third of the respondents said they had given (35%) or intend to give to international charities (32%). This year’s results show and only 28% have or intend to give to these types of organizations.

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DonorSpeakT is a free publication of Campbell Rinker, a market research firm dedicated to helping organizations obtain accurate feedback from their constituents through surveys, focus groups, personal interviews, donor file analysis and advanced statistical modeling.