Welcome to Ask a Responsive Fundraiser, where we take your questions to a fundraising expert so that you can grow generosity. Today, we’re taking your questions to Kayla Schneider. Kayla is a results driven data analyst with over a decade of experience in higher education specializing in advancement, enrollment, and business intelligence.
She spent her career transforming complex data into powerful insights, building reporting solutions that fuel decision making and optimizing processes to help organizations grow.
Be sure to check out past editions of Ask a Responsive Fundraiser and leave us a comment on LinkedIn so we can answer your questions!
Editor’s note: Kayla’s answers were edited for length and clarity. Watch the video to see her full answers.
Dear Responsive Fundraiser: We spend so much time pulling reports, but they never seem to give us the insights that we actually need. How can we build reports that are both easy to generate, and give us the insights we need to make better decisions?
Kayla Schneider: This one is so important! I think one thing that is so prevalent right now is, we think we need all the reports and we need all the dashboards, and we then get overwhelmed and we kind of get lost in those reports. So we spend all this time pulling reports but not actually getting what we need out of them.
I think one of the things that’s most important to get started with is that idea of: What are your organization’s strategic goals? What are the main clear metrics that you should be focusing on for your success? And while we might have two, three, or four of them, that’s great. Let’s get started there. Let’s get started with just knowing. These are our North Star metrics. These are the ones that we want to focus on. And that can be different for different organizations.
Maybe you’ve never had those North Star metrics. Maybe start with easy things like focusing on our donor retention: how many people gave last year and then they’re continuing to give this year. That’s so important, and it doesn’t matter how big your organization is, where you’re at. That’s never going to change. We want to make sure we’re always retaining our donors.
Another one that’s so, so important is our recurring giving base. It’s hard to start a recurring giving program or think about those things, but that’s a foundational core. You can count on that money month after month after month. So, focusing on something like that, I think is really important.
And then also just getting started, what’s your average gift size? Just knowing that basic metric and then being able to look at your donors against that metric. Are there donors that are hitting that? Are there donors that are above? Maybe I can segment upon that.
If we take those three metrics and say, “These are the ones I want to focus on today. Well now how can I report on those?”And that is coming up with clear definitions of what your metrics are. Maybe your lapse definition is different from my lapse definition. But at least your organization knows those things.
At least you guys are all focusing on those same goals. And so building those definitions out and documenting them. Not gonna lie, documentation, not my best thing. It’s just not one of my giftings, but it’s something that we have to do to make sure that everybody’s really on that same page.
Let’s document those things, and then let’s create some systems to make those work. Personally, I started working with Excel. It’s great. I love a good Excel report. But if we think about it efficiency-wise, I have to build that report every single time. And that is not great.
I have to build that report every week, every month, however often I’m pulling those reports. It might really be helpful for your team to think about using some tools to be able to do that— like a business intelligence tool. Thinking about, “How do we take one thing that we do all the time, and now I can just update a file?”
It doesn’t have to be difficult. It doesn’t have to have your entire database there, but just one file, and that report is already built. Think about some of those small efficiencies where it might be an investment in technology, but think of the time that your team is saving from having to rebuild that report every single week and every single opportunity. You’re going to save money over time. And think about how you’re saving staff hours, too. That’s just as important.
Dear Responsive Fundraiser: We have a ton of data, but we’re not sure we’re tracking the right things. How can we use analytics to measure what matters most, specifically for fundraising success?
Kayla Schneider: There are a lot of people who do this for a living, and so being able to understand what we’re tracking, what are those right things, there are a lot of different pieces, a lot of different metrics that you can go off of. I think it’s core again to thinking about who you are as an organization.
Maybe your organization has a really high acquisition mode. You get a lot of new donors every year, and keeping those donors is hard. A great example of that is, maybe you have a lot of peer-to-peer donors. You have a lot of people who love your mission, and maybe they’re asking their friends to give to you.
Well, their friends aren’t giving to you. They’re giving to their friend, and so that is a really different model than somebody who is really focused on the foundational aspect. They don’t do any peer-to-peer. They’re just looking at their communities, and they’re focused on event-heavy opportunities.
I think it’s important to take a step back first and understand what your model is. What is your core? What are you guys currently doing today? And is that what you want to do?
Maybe you want to make a change, and you want to add something in. That’s totally fine. But again, sitting down as a team and saying, “This is what we’re doing and this is what we’re focusing on.” Whether it be having that high acquisition channel, then I would say, donor retention is the key metric that you want to focus on. How do I take those peer-to-peer donors and how do I convert them?
I want to make a specific model to engage those types of people specifically—so taking that group of people and saying, “I’m going to focus specifically and ask really clear messaging to get you to understand what we do, why they should care about us, rather than just their friend that they gave to.”
So again, taking it back to understanding those different pieces. Maybe you have a good foundation of people that are already giving. Maybe we want to think about giving frequency. How do we say, “I have the same donors. They give every year, year after year”? That’s great.
How can we ask them to give two times this year instead of one? How can we increase their impact? It really comes back to that idea of: What’s your model? How are you doing your fundraising? What does your audience look like? And then focusing on those specific pieces to really hone in on that North Star opportunity for your team.
Dear Responsive Fundraiser: Our donor records are full of duplicates, outdated info, and other missing details. What’s the best way to clean this up? And once we get it cleaned up, how do we keep it accurate moving forward?
Kayla Schneider: Let’s start by setting some clear expectations. I worked at a university for about a decade, and we never finished our data cleanup projects. And that’s okay! It’s hard. It’s so hard—especially if you’re coming into a system that’s been in existence for years and years. It’s okay. Everybody’s dealing with it. And so, I want to kind of set that expectation.
Bad data is out there. It’s really, “How do we deal with that bad data?” And then setting some benchmarks of saying, “Now this is what we want to do moving forward.” Some of those pieces that I think were really important for me was trying to do some research of what that bad data was.
So highlight that and say, “Okay, I have wrongly formatted numbers and phone numbers. Some information was held this way for this many years, but then we changed it for this many years.” It’s good to list those things out and get a great lay of the land to understand which are the biggest things that we see today.
These are all the pieces. And then you can start to prioritize. “Which ones are affecting us the most in our fundraising today?” and being able to say, “I’m going to attack this one first.” The perfect example is bad phone numbers. What am I going to do? If I don’t have a tool that helps me see those bad phone numbers, I’ve got to figure one out. I can use technology like Excel. I can export out all my phone numbers. I can do some matching against those with some simple Excel equations to say, “Do they have 10 digits? Are they these types of things?” Doing some of these things in bulk will ultimately save you a ton of time.
Create some efficiency there, but tackle it one problem at a time. So now, I’ve cleaned up my database and I’m going to put some parameters in place to say, “Now we have this information coming in, and this is what it should look like.” What you’re doing is, you’re creating some standard business processes.
So, we’ve started that. We’re creating those business processes. We’re saying from now on, “This is how we enter in data. This is what it’s going to look like.” That way, you’ll be able to have that data that’s cleaned up in the back end, and can schedule some regular check-ins. You’ll be able to say, “Hey, are there things that I can do within my system to highlight if I have some bad data?” or “Do I need to run a process every now and then to be able to see I’ve established how I clean it up?”
Maybe every quarter I pull a list of phone numbers and I say, “Okay, these are the ones that have been errored. I want to see who’s entering in those errors, provide some training for my staff to make sure that they can do that appropriately next time.” And then again, fix them up. And continue that iterative process over and over and over again.
Let’s face it. You only have so much time in the day. I think prioritization and efficiency is so important. We’ve talked about AI. AI is hip and cool and fun, but how do we bring some of that in and help you with that? It might be scary up front. There are some things that we want to focus on, like not uploading donor data into AI. That’s not something we want to do, but are there different pieces of technology that might be able to help us with some of these?
A great thing that I had set up with my team is, we used Asana and we used it for project management. And so we did do some of that work. We said, “Okay, this is something we’re going to do every month and every quarter. And here are the tasks that need to be completed. Here are the people that we need to have.”
So again, like we’ve set up that business process to say, “These are the things we need to focus on. This is weekly, this is monthly, this is quarterly,” and just work those things out to say, “We know that good fundraising starts with good data. It’s the core of everything. This is just a continuous process that everyone deals with every day.”
Good data and the need for good data will never go away. So making sure that your team is really dedicating time to that is so, so important.
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Building better reports, tracking the right fundraising metrics, and maintaining clean donor data all come down to prioritization and efficiency. By focusing on North Star metrics, leveraging automation, and creating clear business processes, your nonprofit can optimize fundraising success.
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