What are effective ways to track donor engagement and retention?

1 Define your engagement goals

Before you can track your donor engagement, you need to define what engagement means for your organization. Different nonprofits may have different goals and strategies for engaging their donors, depending on their size, sector, and mission. For example, some nonprofits may focus on building relationships through personal communication, events, and feedback, while others may emphasize online engagement through social media, email, and webinars. Whatever your approach, you need to set clear and realistic goals for your engagement activities, such as increasing the number of donors who open your emails, attend your events, or respond to your surveys.

2 Use a donor management system

A donor management system (DMS) is a software tool that helps you collect, organize, and analyze data about your donors and their interactions with your organization. A DMS can help you track your donor engagement by providing you with information such as donor profiles, donation history, communication preferences, and behavior patterns. You can use a DMS to segment your donors based on their level of engagement, such as new, active, lapsed, or re-engaged donors. You can also use a DMS to create and automate personalized and targeted communication campaigns for each segment, such as welcome emails, thank-you letters, newsletters, or appeals.

3 Monitor your engagement metrics

Measuring donor engagement requires monitoring and evaluating metrics that reflect your engagement goals. To do so, you can track email open rate, email click-through rate, event attendance, survey response rate, and social media engagement. This allows you to assess the effectiveness of your strategies, identify gaps and opportunities, and adjust your tactics accordingly. For example, you can measure email open rate as the percentage of recipients who open your messages; email click-through rate as the percentage of recipients who click on a link in your messages; event attendance as the number and percentage of donors attending webinars, workshops, or fundraisers; survey response rate as the percentage of donors completing surveys or feedback forms; and social media engagement as the number and percentage of donors who follow, like, comment, or share your posts.

4 Calculate your retention rate

Your donor retention rate is the percentage of donors who give to your organization in two consecutive periods, such as months, quarters, or years. Your retention rate is a key indicator of your donor loyalty and satisfaction, as well as your fundraising efficiency and sustainability. To calculate your retention rate, you need to divide the number of donors who gave in both periods by the number of donors who gave in the first period. For example, if you had 100 donors who gave in January and 80 of them gave again in February, your retention rate for February is 80/100 = 80%.

5 Compare your benchmarks

To evaluate your donor engagement and retention performance, you need to compare your metrics and rates with your own historical data, your organizational goals, and your industry standards. You can use your DMS to generate reports and dashboards that show your trends and progress over time, as well as your strengths and weaknesses. You can also use external sources, such as reports, surveys, or databases, to find out the average donor engagement and retention rates for your sector, size, or region. By comparing your benchmarks, you can identify the areas where you excel or lag behind, and set realistic and achievable goals for improvement.

6 Test and optimize your strategies

Tracking your donor engagement and retention is not a one-time task, but a continuous process of learning and optimization. You need to test and experiment with different strategies and tactics to find out what works best for your organization and your donors. For example, you can try different types of content, formats, channels, frequencies, or calls to action for your communication campaigns, and measure their impact on your engagement and retention metrics. You can also solicit feedback from your donors, such as their preferences, needs, interests, or suggestions, and use it to enhance your engagement and retention strategies. By testing and optimizing your strategies, you can increase your donor engagement and retention rates, and ultimately, your fundraising results.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?