3 Easy Ways to Analyze Your Giving Tuesday Results

# 1: Look at the Long-Term Trend

Most trends play out for much longer than one year. This is particularly true in the nonprofit space, where building significant constituent engagement, fundraising results, and mission impact takes time. 

So, while it is tempting just to compare this year to last year, I encourage you to look back at least three to five years. Every year has its surprises, economic shifts, news cycles, and donor trends. A longer view helps you separate the signal from the noise.

What trends should you look at? Start with a few important metrics:

• Revenue over time, which shows you the overall fundraising effectiveness of your Giving Tuesday campaign.  
• Number of donors over time, which tells how broadly you are engaging your community. 
• Average donation over time—which, at the risk of patronizing you, is just the first divided by the second! This gives you a sense of the average trend in the level of support you have created and can be especially helpful for assessing more technical things, like changes to your donation page. 

Of course, you can go a lot deeper than this, but these three things—or really these two, since the third comes from the first two—can really tell you a lot.

For example, say your revenue has grown over the last few years, but your number of donors is declining. This will increase your average donation, which sounds great. However, that might actually be a trend you want to change, because it means fewer people are responding to your requests for help.

On the other hand, if your average revenue is flat but your number of donors is growing, your average donation will decrease. But that might be worth it in the short term for overall growth in reach. 

# 2: Analyze Your Revenue Concentration

Next, look at the revenue concentration of your Giving Tuesday results. How much revenue came from whom? 

The average donation metric we generated above is helpful, but it can fool you into thinking that everyone gave about the same amount. They didn't.

In almost every campaign, a few donors contribute a lot, a larger number contribute a medium amount, and most people make small gifts. These trends can be quite striking—in many campaigns, one person donates half of the overall revenue raised, if not more. 

In other words, if you raise $30,000 from 500 people, it wouldn't be uncommon to find one $10,000 donor, a couple of $5,000 donors, and hundreds of $20 gifts.

This is powerful data to know, because it helps you understand which constituents are most engaged in your work, not to mention which constituents have the means to support it.

When we work with our clients on revenue concentration, we find it often makes nonprofit professionals uneasy. The idea of some people contributing more than others, not to mention the notion that some donors might merit more thanks than others, runs counter to our ingrained notions of egalitarianism and service.

So, just to be clear, the point isn’t that some people are more important than others—the point is to understand that some donors contribute more money than others. This may or may not be a good thing. Just like any business with revenue concentrated in a few customers, a non-profit with revenue concentrated in a few donors is at risk. It’s good to know where you stand.

Long story short, it helps to know who your donations are coming from. 

# 3: Review Your Channels and Sources

Finally, take a quick look at where your results came from. Did email perform better than social? Which emails performed best? Which social channels generated the most response? Did your landing pages convert differently? Did any paid media pay for itself? And so forth. 

Even a few minutes of looking at basic attribution data can reveal details you otherwise would have missed. For example, we often find that organizations invest heavily in the channel with the most raw activity, when a different channel would have performed better with the same budget.

A Little Analysis Can Go a Long Way

For all the work required to create them, Giving Tuesday campaigns are under-examined simply because by the time they are over, the fundraising team is already sprinting to finish the end-of-year campaign. You don’t need to take three days to sift through your Giving Tuesday results, but an hour or two of honest analysis can help you finish the year strong. 

And these same techniques will help you assess your year-end push, too.

If you’d like a partner to help analyze your results or figure out what’s next, we'd love to talk.

Thanks for the difference you make in the world! I hope your Giving Tuesday was a good one.