The Right Reporting to Ensure Your Annual Fund Campaign Stays on Track

The annual fund is often the mainstay of an organization's ongoing fundraising strategy, and you probably know how important good data is to a successful annual campaign.  

You probably have a lot of data, but it needs to be turned into Actionable Information for you to be able to:

• Keep an eye on several key overall metrics
• Track repeat donors to ensure that they do not lapse
• Rekindle the fire in donors who have previously lapsed
• Identify new major donor prospects
• Track donors who have previously donated and leveraged matching gifts to increase the size of their gift
• Keep an eye on past-due pledges
• Perform analysis on where donations are coming from by attributes, constituent codes, etc., across various appeals so you can figure out what is working, and what is not, and adjust accordingly
• Make sure your board stays updated so they stay engaged

In general, the more frequently you can update these analyses, the more effective your campaign will be. But, that is a lot of data crunching and reporting that can take away time from your core critical database maintenance, deeper data analysis, creative efforts, donor meetings, and other high-value tasks that drive success. 

At Reporting Xpress, where we automate slicing, dicing, crunching of data, reporting, and securely automate the distribution of actionable information, we have seen the following reports most commonly used to ensure the success of annual fund campaigns:

• Gift Detail and Summary Gift Reports.  The standard versions of these reports are pretty limited. Consequently, many organizations invest significant time every day/week/month building customized versions to get the views and format desired.  One of the most common customizations for an automated annual fund gift report is to segment and subtotal data by constituent code or attributes.
• Progress Reports. The same type of segmenting and subtotaling around constituent codes and attributes that is desirable in gift reporting is often desirable on a dashboard-style progress report.  Seeing donations categorized by these important data points can often provide insights toward finding new donors.  
• Improved Board reports.  More visually appealing and insightful reports will help keep your board engaged in the process.  The ability to automatically distribute in advance of meetings provides board members more time to study the reports.  Automating board reports frees more staff time for actual fundraising. 
• Anniversary Reports.  Many donors give during certain times of the year in conjunction with their own cash flow, tax planning, etc.  The Anniversary Report highlights donors who are coming up on the one-year (or any other period) anniversary since their last gift.  
  A similar Lapsed Donor Report captures donors who would have been expected to give by some date but haven’t, giving you a chance to reach out to them.
• Custom SYBUNT/LYBUNT.  These reports identify donors who have given in the past, usually 2,3,4 or 5 years in a row, but not this year, or not this year or last year.  Reporting Xpress reports can use any logic.  For example, donors who gave some years in the last 5 years but not this year, donors who gave 7 out of 10 years, 5 years in a row but don’t count if they skipped a COVID year, etc. 
• Changes in Wealth Ratings Report that identifies anyone whose wealth rating as assigned by Raiser’s Edge has recently changed.  This info is not visible inside RE.
• Donors with Matching Gifts Last Year Report.  These are often high-value targets because their gifts get magnified by the match.
• Past Due Pledge Reports.  Most organizations have their own rules for who belongs on a past due pledge report and those rules require manipulation of the standard reports, usually in Excel.  This logic can be automated.  For example, pledges are past due after 90 days, unless the pledge is from a board member, in which case it goes on the report after 180 days.  And, if a donor has an assigned development officer, they go on a separate report for that development officer only.
• Donor and prospective donor analysis by constituent codes or attributes.  These are often time-consuming to create because they often require exporting data to Excel and the manual manipulation of data to get the desired results.
• Automated Stewardship Reports.  Reporting Xpress can help you expand the number of people involved with stewardship.  For example, reports that are automatically distributed to executives and board members showing all gifts in the last week over $1000, or the top 10 gifts this month, etc.  These stewardship reports typically contain all of the donor’s contact information so that the recipient can easily reach out via phone, email, or letter to thank the donors with whom they have a relationship or connection (friend, neighbor, colleague, etc.).