Measuring Fundraising Success: Your 6-Step Assessment

What determines if your fundraising campaign is a hit? Organizations often plan fundraisers with multiple goals or combined events, making it complex to track every penny earned or performance metric hit.

Even if you have a singular goal to raise a set amount of money, you must account for all the direct and indirect expenses that offset your revenue. This means it’s essential to track your performance as your fundraising strategy matures.

Organizations of any size can benefit from running comprehensive fundraising assessments. Lay the groundwork early and monitor your performance with these goals, metrics, and other key assessment criteria.

Why measuring fundraising success matters 

Before we dive into measuring and tracking fundraising effectiveness and success, let’s first consider why it’s important to work through defined steps. Measuring your performance allows you to: 

• Build trust with supporters by sharing transparent results
• Weigh your earnings against the national average of 24 cents spent to raise $1
• Learn from your mistakes and missed opportunities
• Improve future campaign results 

Your 6-step fundraising assessment

With the above benefits in mind, let’s move on to the six critical steps for measuring campaign success. 

1. Establish goals and metrics 

What is your definition of success? Part of early campaign planning includes setting specific, measurable goals for metrics like: 

• Total revenue
• Return on investment (ROI)
• Participant leads
• Volunteer enlistment
• Social media views, shares, comments, and responses
• New member sign-ups

You can develop realistic and useful goals by considering industry benchmarks for groups of similar size and nature and examining the past performance of your organization's key metrics. 

With each goal, establish a method (and a responsible individual) to track and report back at the end of the campaign.

2. Track expenses 

Figuring out how much you actually raised requires predicting and tracking campaign expenses correctly. Include: 

• Product or raw ingredient costs for anything sold or awarded
• Marketing, advertising, and signage costs
• Facility use fees 
• Event licenses or permits
• Equipment rental fees 
• Security
• Mileage, meals, or other staff or volunteer expenses 

You may also want to include: 

• Wages for paid staff 
• Extra utility costs specific to the event or its planning
• Purchases to benefit the event that will have additional or future uses

Read more: How to Stretch Every Dollar of Your Fundraising Event Budget

3. Calculate your ROI 

While money isn’t the only factor, it takes center stage for fundraising. Calculating your ROI requires identifying how much money was raised after accounting for campaign expenses. To express ROI as a percentage: 

For instance, if you spent $500 on a tailgate party that raised $900, then your ROI would be 80%: 

ROI provides the cost per dollar raised. A positive number indicates not just revenue, but profit. In this example, $1.80 was earned for every dollar spent. 

4. Consider anecdotal information

While it’s critical to establish key metrics and track your dollars, these aren’t the only measurements for a campaign or event. Review your: 

• Volunteer insights and input
• Participant feedback
• Event photos and videos
• Social media comments

Consider the buzz your campaign or event creates regarding goodwill, reputation, community profile, and other intangibles. 

5. Compile your report 

Gather the goals, metrics, numbers, and insights into a single report—whether it’s a casual internal document or a more formal record for board or public review.

Additionally, consider using a dashboard summary that showcases key data so you can replicate it across other campaigns. This way, you can quickly contrast what does and doesn’t work on future efforts. 

6. Identify takeaways and next steps 

Measuring success isn’t just about stamping a grade on your fundraiser. Each campaign is a learning experience that can help you build a powerful and efficient fundraising strategy.

Remain curious with every campaign and ask: 

• Did the results meet your goals? Why or why not? 
• How did vendors or suppliers perform? 
• How would you rate the participation, engagement, and overall experience? 
• What surprised you? 
• Can you think of any missed opportunities?
• What would you do differently knowing what you know now? 

From these insights, write up actionable steps you can use to prepare and execute your next campaign. 

RaiseRight: Your partner for long-term fundraising success

The most successful fundraisers require minimal legwork, engage your supporters, and offer direct benefits for those participating. That’s why RaiseRight is a top choice for thousands of schools, sports teams, music programs, religious groups, and other nonprofits.

With RaiseRight, your organization can earn all year long through ongoing, stable fundraising, so you don’t have to rely solely on the success of one special event or campaign. 

When you enroll, you and your supporters can use RaiseRight gift cards and online shopping links to earn for your organization. For many brands, you can even earn twice on a single transaction by shopping online through RaiseRight and then using a gift card from RaiseRight when you checkout!

RaiseRight partners with hundreds of well-known brands across every category, including Nike, Gap, The Home Depot, Starbucks, Instacart, and more.