In Sasha's blog this week, Julie, at Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Center, explains how they use FundRaiser Professional's Campaign Management section to keep track of return on investment (ROI) for various events, as well as keeping track of responses to mailings, like newsletters. But what if you don't have Professional? Can you work around that limitation to get a better picture of ROI and similar characteristics of your campaigns? Well, the answer is "yes", you can, but it may take a bit more creative thought and planning on your part. Here are a few tips to help:
1. ROI is a simple math problem... honestly
So, how simple is it? Well, it's just a matter of taking the expenses involved in a fund raising effort (whether a mailing, physical event, or advertising, etc.) and subtracting them from the donations derived from that effort. Even with Campaign Management, you need to know the total expenses in order to "plug in" that amount to the event page. In other words, then, ROI = Income, less Expenses: ROI = I - E
2. Unique identification is the key
Many times I've said that Codes are nothing more than unique identifiers of gifts or people. They can be used to indicate WHY a gift is given (Motivation), or HOW a gift is to be used (Purpose). These codes can then be used to gather together all those who gave at a particular event, for instance, or who give with the same goal in mind. Category Codes, with their unlimited usage capabilites, can be used to record attendance at an event, or even negative responses to events. You never have to worry about running out of possible Category Codes, either, since there are more possibilities available than you'll ever have time to create in your lifetime (2.5 billion or more, in fact).
3. Use Staff Tickles for noting event expenses
One of the main reasons to have donor management software is to be able to have all the information you need at your fingertips when working various aspects of your fund raising. If you create an "Expense Tickle" for each event, and update them as new figures come in, everyone who uses FundRaiser can have access to them, making it much more convenient when it's time to figure the current ROI for an event. Staff Tickles are independent of name records, which make them ideal for this type of notation, as well as task reminders, etc. To create them, go to the Windows menu above the tool bar, then to Staff Tickle.
4. Reports can be limited by codes
When you create a report, remember that the Advanced section of the report will allow you to limit the report by code usage. In other words, if you just want people who have certain Category Codes in the report, you can do that. Or if you just want people whose gifts have certain Motivation or Purpose codes (or both), you can do that. When you want to see how much has come in for a particular event so far, simply limit the report to the appropriate Motivation (event) code. Then you can open the Tickle for that event to see the total expenses, and the report will show (on the last page, depending on the report), the total donations. A great report for seeing multiple event totals at once is the Donation (or Deposit) report variation called the Summary Report. Look for the Motivation code section in this report to see all the event incomes (for the time period you specify).
To learn more about how to use FundRaiser to your advantage, check out the training videos in the Customer Portal section of our website.