Fundraising Report Template to Track Your Fundraising Metrics

Classy offers a range of data collection and custom reports for fundraising to help you better understand your progress and connect meaningfully with donors.

You can use Classy’s templates to monitor your organization’s most important metrics, customize those templates to best serve your goals, or create your own custom reports from scratch.

In this post, we’ll cover some of the Classy report templates worth setting up as you get started with data analysis and common customizations for those reports. We’ll also highlight three custom reports in particular that you can use for inspiration.

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Classy Report Templates to Track Important Metrics

If you’re not sure where to start with Classy reports, try a template. From your Classy account menu, select “General Reports” from your navigation menu and then “Recommended Reports.”

This will provide you with a list of different report templates that can help you begin to visualize your most important data. The Classy report templates include the following:

• Attendees: Use this report to see anyone who has attended an event for your organization.
• Upcoming Expiring Recurring Plans: Identify recurring plans with upcoming credit card expirations.
• Returning 1-Time Donors: These donors have donated multiple times to your organization and would be great candidates to convert to recurring donors.
• Failing Recurring Giving Plans: These recurring donations were not successful for any certain reason; reach out to the donors to remedy it.
• Recurring Plans Over 1 Year: Highlight active recurring donors who have been a year-long supporter.
• Inactive Top Donors: It has been a year since these top donors contributed to your cause; remind them of your mission.
• Inactive Top Fundraisers: These fundraisers haven’t had a donation within the last week; give them a word of encouragement and advice to help with their fundraising efforts.
• Recently Refunded Transactions: Streamline your finance processes by quickly identifying refunded donations and transactions.

Data Points to Customize in Classy Templates

You can also start with a Classy report template and then customize it to narrow in on specific data that interest you.

Some of the most common customizations nonprofits use include:

• Updating Date Ranges: You can easily update the date ranges for your reports to review data for whichever time frame is of interest to you, such as looking at the data for the previous quarter, current fiscal year, or duration of a specific campaign.
• Filtering Out Offline Donations: Classy users have the option to track offline donations through the software. However, you might want to just look at the activity for your online donations. If so, it’s easy to filter out offline donations in your report.
• Adding Donor Information: You can add whatever donor information you might need to help you manage the relationship. For example, if you’re running a “Returning 1-Time Donors” report, you might want to add the donors’ phone numbers or addresses to make it easy to send them personalized outreach encouraging them to become recurring donors.
• Filtering for Specific Donation Types: If you’re curious about how many donors are using different payment methods, you can filter your reports for donations made via digital wallets versus other transaction types.

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3 Custom Reports to Improve Donor Data Monitoring

Classy’s report templates are a great place to start with donor data monitoring, but there are other custom reports you can run, as well. Below are three of the most common reports we see nonprofits use.

1. Pacing

Pacing reports show how much your nonprofit raises over time. This can help you understand your current performance and set future goals. When creating a pacing report, you’ll need to determine how you want to measure your growth, such as:

• Month over month
• Quarter over quarter
• Year over year

Once you see your growth over time, you’ll want to use that information to understand what’s happening. If you raised more over time, look at the strategies you implemented, such as sending more email appeals, which may be useful to continue implementing in the future. If you raised less over time, review which campaigns were more successful than others so you’ll know where to invest future energy.

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2. Zero-Dollar Fundraisers

You may have peer-to-peer fundraisers who haven’t raised any money since beginning their campaigns. Rather than recruit more fundraisers, you can identify these zero-dollar fundraisers and offer them the support they need to be successful.

When you create this report, you’ll want to select the date filter to exclude any fundraising pages created within the last week. Once you have your list, you can pull the email addresses for any zero-dollar fundraisers and send them an engagement email series with tips and tricks to help them get their first donations.

3. Supporter Celebrations

You can also use custom reports to creatively connect with your donors, such as wishing them a happy birthday. To do this, you’ll simply go to your supporters list and then add the “birthdate” column.

Once you have your list, you can either wish your supporters a happy birthday to build your relationships or encourage them to consider starting a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign for your nonprofit as part of their celebrations. Birthday fundraisers have become increasingly common given social media platforms, such as Facebook, suggesting them to users.

Use Custom Reports to Track Progress and Grow Your Efforts

Analyzing reports on donor data can help your nonprofit grow and connect more meaningfully with your supporters while remaining efficient. If you want to dive into the details of making Classy reporting work for you, make sure to check out our Classy Academy course on data and reporting.