What is benchmarking?  A term often overused in surveys and studies alike, true benchmarking puts your donors at the centre of its analysis, giving your organisation the closest possible insight into donor behaviour, desires and motivations.

Your contact database contains people at many different stages of their relationship with your organisation. Each record could be a prospect, a newly-acquired donor, a long-time supporter, a monthly giver, a major contributor, or a lapsed donor. The mix of supporter segments, and the performance of each, are unique to your organisation and influence the strategies you use to acquire, retain, recapture, and upgrade donors.

Many organisations rely on campaign reporting to assess fundraising performance. These reports focus on the results of each direct marketing effort; they do not provide insight into individuals who were not contacted or into the cumulative effects of your contact strategies on long-term donor value and retention.  Donor or prospect surveys are often relied upon as a way of measuring donor behaviour, but these generally centre on opinion, rather than concrete facts about how your donors interact with your organisation.  Donor-centric reporting puts the donor, rather than the campaign, at the centre of the analysis.

A donor-centric analysis requires more than knowing this year’s high-level numbers for a few key segments.  Comprehensiveness and detail are critical to discovering opportunities for maximising donor value within specific areas of the donor lifecycle. A donor-centric analysis should span many years, since a trend can often be more instructive than a single metric. And a donor-centric analysis should be standardised so it can extend across other organisations to facilitate the sharing of information with peers, building collaborative communities among fundraisers, and providing a framework for sharing best practices.

Target Analytics, a Blackbaud Company, can help.  donorCentrics™ is the only comprehensive solution to help you replenish your donor pool, identify the best prospects, assess donor performance, see how you measure up against your peers, and make sure your information is as accurate as possible.

Click here for more information on donorCentrics.

Click here to see what our clients have to say about donorCentrics.