Your fundraiser is over – congrats! However, please don’t stop now. This is perhaps the most important time for you to stay in the fundraising game. Don’t worry, it’s just a few quick fundraiser to-do’s to ensure you’re covered for next year. We don’t want you to regret that you celebrated too early without wrapping up a few details.
To help keep things manageable, we broke up your to-do’s into a five-part checklist. Start here with part one and find the rest by using the links below.
Step one: Calculate your fundraiser metrics.
What to calculate?
This is one of the most important yet overlooked steps of a fundraiser. In order to make informed decisions next year, you need to know what has worked this year (and the years before). The numbers will be most accurate and easy to work with if you calculate them now and record them year over year.
TOTAL NUMBER OF FUNDS RAISED
Be sure each participant of your fundraiser has sent in their final numbers. If they haven’t, consider attaching a reward to those who do turn them in on time.
PROMOTIONS
Once you have those, add them all up. If you spent any money on gear, events, advertising or the like in order to promote your fundraiser, subtract that from the total amount you raised. This shows you your actual profit and if that profit was big enough in relation to how much you spent on promoting things. Record this number to help in calculating how much you should spend on such promotional efforts next year.
AVERAGE TIME SPENT
When you ask for the final amounts raised by your participants, also ask them to estimate how much time they spent over the course of the fundraiser.
This could help in two ways: One, you’ll have an answer for when new participants ask what to plan for and two, you can see if there’s a correlation between amount raised and time spent. In that way, you can learn from top fundraisers about how much time should be invested to keep up with their success.
PRO TIP FOR YOUR FUNDRAISING
1. ANNUAL OVERALL RATE OF GROWTH IN DONATIONS (%)
According to the Fundraising Report Card, this is defined as “net of gains and losses in giving from last year (divided by) the total value of gifts received last year.”
This is a great number to know if you’re a group that prioritizes growth. If you keep track of this, you can better understand if your efforts are going in the right (upwards) direction.
The formula is rate = [(x-y)/y] X 100. with x = the amount raised this year and y the amount raised last year.
2. PRO TIP – AVERAGE DONATION/PURCHASE
The Fundraising Report Card calculates this by looking at “total dollars received (divided by) total number of gifts received (times) 100.”
You can use this to help you understand how much each donor impacts your group. This then serves as an incentive to contact more donors.
The average = x / y with x = the total revenue of your fundraiser and y being the number of product purchasers.
We hope this helps you understand your fundraising success as well as plan an even more profitable fundraiser next year. If you have any trouble gathering these metrics, you can always reach out to us and we will do our best to help!
Now onto part two on how to say a proper thank you.
