Donor Discovery Report Suite

The Donor Discovery Reporting Suite offers flexible discovery of donor behavior and fundraising program performance.  It takes form of a Microsoft Excel workbook with several worksheet tabs.  The workbook uses Microsoft Excel functionalities to "slice and dice" donor and giving characteristics on standard fundraising measurements.

• This audit tool looks at your database over a five-year period and breaks everything down by Acquisition, New Name Conversion, Retention and Reactivation.
• Included with the excel-type worksheets, you will receive many visual graphs.  The full report is over 1/2 inch thick and 75-plus pages providing a great amount of detail concerning the state of your database.
• In addition, you will receive a much smaller report that includes a Summary of the Findings, Comparisons (to other like organizations), and Conclusions/Recommendations (actionable information). 

Overall Donor Giving

Why Perform the Audit

Understanding the ever-increasing pressures and challenges facing today's non-profit organization, Bernard Data Solutions is pleased to introduce our Donor Discovery Reporting Suite, a new service that will help bring focus to key issues driving your organization’s long term growth. We work in partnership with you to answer questions like:

• Is your retention rate increasing or decreasing?
• Which programs are retaining donors the best?
• Is your Donor Upgrade strategy working?
• Are your donors giving more today than in the past?
• Do you have more high dollar donors today than you did one year ago?
• Compared to five years ago, are new donors more or less likely to become loyal, giving donors today?
• Which of your acquisition programs bring in the best donors as defined by subsequent giving?

Gifts per Donor and Average Gift

Benefits

• Donor Discovery in partnership with Bernard provides a detailed look at a Donor File that may not be available today given your current donor database system constraints or limited resources for programming.  For non-Bernard clients, the Donor File Analysis is performed outside of your computer system – not taking up time or space.
• Donor Discovery looks at the overall relationship between your donors and your organization.  We compare many elements at one time to get a true sense for Donor Performance, Attrition, Donor Upgrading and Lifetime Value.
• Donor Performance is typically measured on a campaign by campaign basis.  Donor Discovery goes much deeper to look at how donors relate to your organization.
• Attrition is typically calculated by the number of donors on file last year versus the number of donors on file this year.  Donor Discovery goes much deeper to look at your new donor growth, existing donor retention and lapsed donor reactivation – all at the same time.
• Donation Upgrading is typically a hit or miss venture. Donor Discovery shows which donors are upgrading "naturally".
• Lifetime Value typically requires extensive programming time to integrate into existing donor monitoring systems.  Donor Discovery shows lifetime value after subsequent years.  This can lead to important decisions regarding your acquisition mail strategy.

A Few Technical Notes

• Donor Discovery will focus on donations received within the last six years.  If a donor has been with the organization longer than that, this information is important to be noted.
• This analysis is based upon the same "year" definition as your budget – so if your budget year is different from the calendar year, we will take this into account.
• We analyze "sources" of donations.  These "sources" can be defined any way you would like.  We recommend using Acquisition program categories and major Retention program categories to look at all direct mail efforts.
• Lifetime Value, as calculated through this analysis, does not include any package costs; however, these can be factored in if available.

Getting Started

• To accomplish this analysis, Bernard needs a copy of your donor file with full transactional information.  Name and address need not be included, but a unique donor identifier (ID Number) must be carried with each record.
• It is helpful to have a contact at your organization that is familiar with the donor file.  Once the data is checked and run, a data summary report will be provided for a quality check.  The contact person at your organization should be able to verify that the totals on the summary report are the same as those provided on the donor file that we received.
• Once the donor file is received and reviewed, the final analysis will be available within 2-4 weeks.  We are also available to serve as consultants and provide recommendations for next steps based on the results of the audit.

What are you waiting for?  Get started today by contacting Bernard!