What's New In Raiser's Edge NXT: Benchmarking!

Published

To help identify gaps in your organization's fundraising effectiveness, it's valuable to understand how others perform. In Fundraising, Analyze, those of you in the United States can now compare your donor pool and giving to that of other United States-based organizations using Raiser's Edge NXT.

Under Benchmarking, you can compare:

Retention rate — The percentage of your organization's donors who gave during both the selected calendar year and its previous year.
Recapture rate — The percentage of your organization's donors who gave during the selected calendar year and two-to-five years prior.
Acquisition rate — The percentage of your organization's donors who gave for the first time during the selected calendar year.
Total revenue — How much your organization raised through cash-in-hand giving during the selected calendar year.
Revenue per donor — How much a donor gives in total (on average) during the selected calendar year.
Recent and current donors — How many constituents gave during the past five calendar years or just the selected calendar year.

For consistent comparison across all organizations, the benchmarks include:

All donors, including those now marked as inactive or deceased
Calendar years only — not fiscal year
Cash-in-hand giving — not soft credits — through:
- Donations
- Payments toward matching gifts, pledges, and recurring gifts
- Gifts of stock and sold stock

For apples-to-apples comparison, you can use filters to include only organizations with a specific vertical or mission — such as Health or Higher education — and size like yours. You can also choose which calendar year to analyze. For more information, see the Fundraising Benchmarks Help.

Admins! In Control Panel, choose which security groups or roles can access Benchmarking in Fundraising, Analyze to compare your organization's performance to others. For more information, see the Analyze Rights Help.

News Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® Blog 07/24/2018 1:38pm EDT

Added by Steve Stegelin

10 Comments

Brent Troth Oct '18

Is there a way to print or export the benchmarking reporting?

Lora Cowan Aug '18

Excited that this is now available. We're looking forward to digging in and seeing how it works for us compared to things we've built on our own.

La Donna Borth Jul '18

We're not using RE NXT (yet). But, I've had to produce information like this on very short notice in the past, so I think it's fantastic that these benchmarks are being made available. Thank you!

Steve Stegelin Jul '18

Hey Jennifer, Cindy! Great feedback, thanks for sharing. While most dashboards in Analyze help you gauge your organization's performance against itself (be it in-the-moment or year-over-year), the Benchmarking dashboard is very different. With its metrics, you compare your organization's performance to other organizations'. As such, personalizing the analysis based on unique criteria — such as your organization's fiscal year, revenue type configurations, or campaign categories — could negate the apples-to-apples comparison of the benchmarks, as those settings aren't shared by everyone. Hence, the benchmarks use consistent characteristics such as calendar year and specific specific gift types to ensure a level playing field. That said, we're definitely looking at ways we can enhance the benchmarks in future iterations, so please continue to provide ideas and feedback. Thanks again!

Cindy Filler Jul '18

I love the idea of what you are doing, but right now we find we can't use these reports as they are built out. Adding some flexibility to the options would be helpful. For example, we do include soft credit and we also included planned gifts. If you change received revenue to committed revenue it changes the dollars only and not the donor counts - we want to be able to count those donors based on the type of revenue. There are also differences in what you consider lost/non donors and the timeframes used. I know how difficult it is to write reports like this for thousands of customers that may all have different ideas on how these should be counted. I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents worth any how.

Jennifer Lange Jul '18

Thanks, Steve. I would like to see the Campaign Type control on this, though. I use it a LOT in Retention - glad that it's in NXT on the retention tab. :)

Steve Stegelin Jul '18

Hey Jennifer! Just to clarify, the benchmarks only include cash-in-hand giving and automatically exclude gifts-in-kind like material goods. Hope that helps alleviate any concerns. Thanks!

Jennifer Lange Jul '18

But wait - there's no way to limit the constituents or gifts counted for benchmarking? I have THOUSANDS of material goods donors in my database who we wouldn't want to mix with our cash donors. I need to limit them using a CAMPAIGN TYPE.

Also - any data you're pulling from my instance is now inaccurate for comparison purposes. This doesn't seem helpful.

Steve Stegelin Jul '18

Hey Wendy! We are exploring enabling benchmarking for non-US locales in the future. Would you be interested in having early access and providing feedback as part of that development for Canada? Thanks!

Wendy Wong Jul '18

When will Canadian clients have access to "Fundraising Analyze" in RE NXT?
Will you create a Canadian version or will you give Canadians access to at least compare to the US for the timebeing?