As we approach the end of the year, nonprofit professionals are inundated with articles, blog posts, podcasts, and videos on how to boost donations during the critical final months.
Many offer a familiar set of strategies—whether it's re-engaging lapsed donors, optimizing your donor communications, or timing your appeals just right.
These recommendations are sound, but implementing them effectively depends on how well you can analyze, segment, and crunch your donor data and apply these ideas. And for many organizations, that's where the real challenge begins.
Without the right tools, analyzing donor data can be time-consuming and complex. Whether you're manually crunching numbers in Excel or making requests to your data team, valuable strategies often end up sitting in the "to-do when we have time" pile.
And as the year winds down, that extra time rarely materializes. But what if you could quickly turn those strategic insights into actionable information, even with limited time and resources?
This is where tools like Xpress Analytics can transform how nonprofits approach end-of-year fundraising. Powered by AI, Xpress Analytics allows you to analyze your data with a natural language front-end that helps you quickly get answers from your donor database—without needing to wait for a data specialist or struggle with complex formulas.
Why Traditional Tools Fall Short
Many of the end-of-year strategies you read about involve analyzing donor trends, such as determining if a donor has maintained or increased their giving from previous years. To do this, nonprofits often need to pull information on gifts over time, average donation amounts, the timing of gifts, and whether a donor's giving is trending up or down.
While it may seem like you only need a few key data fields—gift amounts, dates, and donor IDs—to execute this analysis, it's rarely that simple. The relational nature of donor data makes this analysis hard to compile with traditional tools like Excel.
For example, calculating a donor's average giving over several years requires more than just adding up their donations. You’ll need to factor in years when they didn’t give, which complicates the process.
With Xpress Analytics, AI simplifies this type of relational data analysis, allowing you to drill down into your donor history and identify key patterns much faster than you could with spreadsheets.
A Common End-of-Year Analysis Example
One crucial analysis for year-end fundraising is determining whether a donor's giving has increased or decreased compared to prior years.
Heading into the fourth quarter, you’ll want to assess how many gifts a donor has made so far this year compared to previous years, as well as the total amount they’ve given. This can tell you
whether a historically reliable donor is on track to meet or exceed their past contributions—or if they might be slipping through the cracks.
Another useful metric involves tracking the average time between gifts and identifying when a donor typically gives. If a loyal donor hasn’t given by their usual month, it could be a signal they’re at risk of lapsing. This insight allows you to send targeted communications or extra outreach to re-engage them before the year ends.
Advanced Donor Scoring for Better Insights
Xpress Analytics also makes it easy to create a custom increasing-giving score—an invaluable tool for prioritizing your outreach. By assigning each donor a score based on whether their total giving is increasing or decreasing year-over-year, you can quickly identify donors who need attention. For example, a donor whose giving has steadily risen over the past few years may be ready for a mid-level or major gift proposal or offer of a board seat.
Analyzing this data with traditional SQL queries could take hours, but Xpress Analytics makes SQL-powered insights accessible to everyone, even if you don’t have technical expertise.
Prebuilt Analytics to Save You Time
To make your year-end efforts even smoother, Xpress Analytics comes with a library of prebuilt analysis templates, including the most common end-of-year donor insights.
Whether you're looking to identify lapsed donors, evaluate giving trends, or forecast year-end contributions, these ready-to-go reports will help you take action quickly. In fact, you may never take the leap to design your own reports because of all the insights included in the built-in analyses.
And we’re continually improving our platform by incorporating new, innovative ways to analyze your data. Our team is always on the lookout for fresh ideas to boost your fundraising performance, and we welcome suggestions from nonprofits about what kinds of insights they find most valuable.
If the idea is something we think others could benefit from, we will make it available to all users.
Data Security You Can Trust
With the growing adoption of AI, data privacy remains a top concern for many nonprofits. At Reporting Xpress, we ensure that all data processing happens within a secure environment, without sharing any of your information with external AI providers. Your data is yours, and safeguarding it is our priority.
Many/most of the tools your team will come across don’t operate like this, and there is a significant risk of data leakage.
As you plan your year-end fundraising strategy, imagine the time and stress you could save by having a tool that quickly turns your data into actionable insights. No more guesswork or endless manual crunching of numbers or grinding over some non-intuitive reporting tool—just clear, data-driven strategies that you can implement when it matters most.
There are variations on this approach from companies like AWS and Snowflake, but the investment needed to get started is significant, as is the expertise required. Xpress Analytics is part of Reporting Xpress, a company conceived and cofounded by nonprofit executives who understand the constraints most nonprofits must deal with.
The solution is scaled and optimized for nonprofits and is extremely affordable.
Want to Learn How to Utilize Your Data to Maximize Your End-of-Year Giving Strategy?
The first 50 Organizations to sign up will get a free end-of-year giving coaching call with our analytics experts.
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