Most of you probably don’t know that “Rock on” is my catch phase and I think we can all be rock stars in our right.
As a proud card carrying data geek, it’s my mission to help fundraisers understand the power that lies in a constituent record or event report. I’m often asked “how can data increase participation and fundraising performance?” Another question I often get is “what metrics should I be looking at?” That’s usually followed by “now that I know my average gift, how can this help me?” These are all great questions and I’ll tackle them for you. Are you ready to rock?
Understanding you event data from the prior year will help you set goals for the current year. At the completion of an event I always had a feeling of relief followed by panic. Relief, because we reached or exceed our fundraising goal and the event was a success. That feeling of calm was then interrupted by PANIC because, once the event is over you know have to come up with a plan to not just do what you did this year, but grow the event 20%. This is where data comes in and can help.
For team based event, look at the number of teams formed each month and then break it out by week. If you ran any contests or promotions, note those events by the weekly team numbers. Do you see any team registration spikes? If so, what activities correspond with those peaks? Was there a promotion? Or, did you have advertising, PR or PSA’s in market? Did you make a round of phone calls to past participants? It’s important to layer the results (team registrations) with the activity. This helps you measure, which is activity or combination of activities was most effective. You can also see what can improved for the following year.
When goal setting for the next event take your team numbers and increase them by your percentage increase. Now, if you know your retention rate you can use your rate to figure out the exact number of new teams you need to recruit. According to our Event Benchmarking group, the average team captain retention rate is about 40%. If you don’t know your retention rate, you can use this as a base line. But, here’s a quick way to calculate your team retention rate.
Retention = number of returning teams for 2010 (divided by) Total number of teams in 2009
Now that we know our retention rate, here’s an easy example calculating the number of new teams to recruit:
80 past team x 15% = 12 additional teams
92 team Recruitment goal
40% team retention rate – 37 teams will be retained
55 new teams
So, obviously I didn’t get to answer my three questions. Because understanding your data is so important to events, I’m going to make “Data Rocks” a series. Come by next week and we’ll talk more about metrics and which ones you should keep an eye on.
By Amy Braiterman on Apr 28, 2011
Tagged: Amy Braiterman Analytics benchmark benchmarks data data mining event fundraising fundraising Non-Profit nonprofit