Tracking upgrade donations

Question

What is the best way to track increased revenue from donor upgrade asks? We received wonderful response from an upgrade ask to our monthly donors, and want to be able to track it in the best possible way.

In addition, we wish to track donors who gave more this year than last.

How can I track this easily so we can celebrate and demonstrate our success to our Board?

Kristian Zemlak · Answer

One approach that worked well for our team was creating a separate campaign or appeal code specifically for upgrade requests. That made it much easier to compare pre- and post-upgrade giving levels and identify donors who increased their annual contributions for board reporting.

Faith Murray · Answer

You can do this a couple of ways, but it has to happen either in the data entry or in the output analysis. A lot depends on how much information you need in your reporting. You can either

* Add a note/custom field or other mark to the gift denoting an "upgrade" along with the amount of upgrade
* You can export their pre-appeal recurring gift payment amount, along with their most recent recurring gift payment amount, and then use excel formulas to subtract the columns against each other
* You can operate solely with total giving benchmarks, in which case you would pull a gift report for recurring gift payments, denoting total dollar amount of gifts pre-appeal and post-appeal, but filter the report to only include donors with an active recurring gift template created pre-appeal (thereby excluding new recurring gifts made after the appeal)
* If you use Gift Amendments to change gift amount, you can pull a gift query, using input fields filtering for recurring gift type, amendment date, and active status; and output fields of gift amount and amendment gift amount variance. The "variance" field will give you the difference between the "previous amount" and the "new amount", although I can't say for sure whether a decrease would show as a negative or positive quantity in the results. You would want to test that.

Aldera Chisholm · Answer

Is this from a direct mail appeal, or, are they smaller appeal asks? When it's direct mail, If the upgrade group was a sub-set of the mailing, I would give them a dedicated package. I like to track the ask on the appeal comments when I assign it to the constituent so you can see asked vs gave. That you'd have to analyze in excel, but I find that easiest for tracking a large group.

For more this year than last year, the "Comparative Report" under Standard Reports is a great one!