I utilized my skills in R coding and my knowledge managing the donation CRM (Exceed) to design and run an analysis of donation data for Bread & Roses Community Fund. To my knowledge, BRCF had not had the capacity to run analysis on their donation data. My goal was to deliver insights on donation trends and make a case for iterative analyses to support campaign strategy. The following is an analysis of the donation of 2022.
My goal with this analysis was to stress the importance of iterative analysis for targeted fundraising campaigns and identify churn risk and lapsed donors. A comprehensive (yearly or quarterly) review would allow BRCF to target campaigns, especially BRCF's most profitable campaign: year-end fundraising.
BRCF had no process or milestones for iterative donation analysis and relied on in-house perceptions and hearsay to formulate campaign strategy. BRCF relied on a variety of donation methods (cash, checks, PayPal, stock, etc.) to make donating accessible; however, this meant that the organization relied on multiple systems for receiving donations. These systems were not in communication and the organization's CRM (powered by Exceed) did not have capabilities for integrating any payment method. All data had to be entered manually. Therefore, a major problem (and limitation) in developing donation or segmentation analyses was the messiness of the data.
This data was downloaded from Exceed on January 10, 2023 and includes data on donors from December 2021 to December 2022.
I downloaded the data manually from Exceed and cleaned the data in R. I formatted dates and limited the dataset to the pertinent columns. I broke down the data into monthly averages and medians. Likewise, I created boxplots to better show distributions per month. I provided monthly descriptions of donation reasons or motives: Giving Project campaign, Tribute to Change campaign, Change Ride campaign, and fund donations. I also provided descriptions of donation methods (ATH, cash, check, PayPal, etc.), hoping to find data that could help us improve donation experiences. Finally, I provided a breakdown on donation acknowledgements: which donations were acknowledged, how long did it take to generate acknowledgements, and how long did it take to send acknowledgment letters. Donor acknowledgement is crucial for reducing churn risk and improving donor stewardship.
The following findings were presented to the Executive Director directly. My analysis found that an estimated average of 60% of donors preferred to make their donations online via PayPal. The second most popular method for donation was via check. I stressed to the ED that these were areas where I had worked to streamline donations with great success.
When studying our most profitable campaign (year-end) over time (2021-2022), I found that BRCF had received a larger amount of gifts during the 2021 Year-End campaign. However, after generating box plots with averages, limits, and distributions, I found that the 2021 Year-End campaign had a lower distribution of gifts and a lower average of donation amount (+/- $100). Meanwhile, the 2022 Year-End had a larger distribution of gifts and a much higher average amount of donations (+/-$250). Since the ED had limited knowledge of statistical tools, I explained the importance of using box plots to give shape and texture to monthly data. A greater distribution of gifts may mean that BRCF was able to garner and retain support from a greater variety of donors across income or giving groups. Finally, I created line charts showing the changes in our gift or donation processing time by using bi-weekly average change rates:
- Gift submission to gift entry: My analysis provided concrete data on how long it used to take to enter gifts into our CRM at the end of 2021, shortly before I came in as development coordinator. It took the development assistant an average of 20 days to enter gifts into our system, with some gifts being entered more than a month after being received. Understandably, the delay was greater in January 2022, when BRCF received its largest influx of gifts. The delay was caused by the broken tech architecture in the organization and a lagging donation workflow. By December 2022 and January 2023, I was able to reduce this 20 day average into a 7-day average (-%65) by overhauling our entry system and improving integration with out clunky CRM.
- Gift entry to gift acknowledgment: I created a similar line chart showing the bi-weekly average time that it took for our team to enter the donation into our system and send a signed acknowledgement letter to our donors. At the end of 2021, it took the development team on average 30 days from the day the gift was entered to the day the gift was acknowledged. After I was brought on board and was able to streamline our system, we averaged 5 business days to get the letter signed by the ED and mailed to the donor.
The findings discussed above showed how much our team had improved in our last year. We had been able to reduce our donation to acknowledgment time to just a week, which improved donor stewardship, data quality, and financial responsibility. Likewise, it was an important step towards operational and donor analysis. BRCF had not had the opportunity or the expertise to carry out this kind of analysis before. I received praise from the ED, and my PPT with accompanying graphs was presented to the board to inform 2023 fundraising campaign strategy.