How to predict your future fundraising performance with customizable forecasts.
Creating yearly budgets that balance planned spend with expected revenue can be particularly difficult in nonprofit settings, where fundraising income may be variable throughout the year. Even if your organization runs all of the same campaigns again, donor churn, gift upgrades, and other changes can be expected. If you are planning increased investment in specific fundraising programs, even more unknowns are introduced to the equation.
This is where data-powered revenue forecasting comes in handy, allowing you to predict the results of your current trajectory, as well as possible future outcomes based on planned changes.
What is Forecasting
Forecasting in Dataro is a series of interactive data models that offer the ability to predict fundraising revenue for the year ahead, and explore the financial impacts of investing in major giving, recurring giving, and one-time giving. For single and major giving, Forecasts are built using a time series model to forecast future giving, while for recurring giving Dataro uses historical churn and growth numbers to project revenue.
How it works
Single giving: Our forecast factors in historical performance and decomposes it into daily, weekly, monthly and other seasonal trends (eg Giving Tuesday). This way we can account for general, long term trends, with more granular events that impact a forecast.
Monthly giving: We leverage your existing active monthly donor pool, average gift size, your existing churn rate and growth rate to extrapolate future active donors.
Major giving: We leverage your existing pipeline (eg Prospecting, X, Y stage) and success rates to anticipate the expected return.
How to use Forecasting
Dataro’s Forecasting tool is built to help you understand the likely outcomes of your fundraising efforts, whether you are planning mostly business-as-usual campaigns, or considering increasing your investment in specific programs, such as major or monthly giving.
In each of the main tabs: Overall, Single Giving, Monthly Giving, and Major Giving, you’ll see a graph depicting both your actual revenue history, and the projected future. Scroll down to the customizable section to forecast the impacts of changes to your program. If you’ve set a goal of increasing monthly giving, for instance, you can predict the additional revenue that you can expect to raise. Or, if you’re starting with a goal of raising a certain amount of additional funding this year, you can use this tool to determine how to get there.
When to use Forecasting
Making data-informed budget decisions
As you’re allocating resources for the year ahead, having an idea of how much revenue you can expect to earn, and when you can expect to receive it will help you make safe, achievable plans.
Setting (and hitting) your fundraising goals
SMART goals ( those that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) are extremely effective motivators for your team. Use the forecasting tool to help understand the level of effort needed to certain fundraising targets, and to make sure that your goals are high, but realistic.
Predicting the impact of new fundraising efforts
If you’ve brought on new staff or made plans to grow certain fundraising programs, you can likely expect to generate additional revenue - but how much? Forecasting can help you predict the impact of investing more effort into programs like monthly or major giving.