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Fundraising Metrics

How strong is your fundraising metrics practice? This short, evidence-based self-assessment scores your organisation against fundraising standards, shows where your biggest gaps are, and puts the most useful fixes first.

It takes about 5 minutes. Every question is optional, and the more you can share, especially real numbers and documents, the more accurate your result.

Which best describes your organisation on: The organisation has a documented position (board-level or leadership-level) on how its overhead/fundraising-cost ratio should be interpreted, including an explicit caveat that a low ratio is not automatically evidence of high effectiveness?

No documented interpretation of the ratio exists; the organisation reports the number but treats 'lower is always better' as self-evident, with no internal discussion of the starvation-cycle risk

Leadership is informally aware that overhead ratios can be misleading, but there is no written position; the ratio is defended reactively only when questioned by a donor or watchdog, without a prepared framework

A documented internal position exists explaining what the organisation's ratio does and does not indicate; the position is used proactively in board reporting and funder communications; staff responsible for financial reporting can articulate the starvation-cycle risk unprompted

The interpretation policy is integrated into annual reporting and donor-facing communications (not just internal use); the organisation actively educates its board and major funders on why overhead ratio alone is an incomplete effectiveness signal; the policy is reviewed periodically against current sector practice

Not applicable / not sure

Which best describes your organisation on: The organisation treats the fundraising-vs-service expense split as a period-by-period trade-off that can expand future capacity, rather than a static ratio to be minimised in isolation each year?

Fundraising and service budgets are set independently each year with no explicit trade-off discussion; the fundraising budget is cut whenever the overhead ratio rises, regardless of effect on future fundraising capacity

Leadership is aware in principle that fundraising spend today can build future capacity, but budget decisions do not systematically apply this reasoning; the trade-off is discussed anecdotally, not modelled

Budget planning explicitly considers the current-period vs future-period trade-off between fundraising investment and service spending; decisions to increase fundraising spend are documented with a rationale tied to expected future capacity gains

The organisation uses a structured multi-period planning approach (even informally) to the fundraising/service allocation decision; past decisions to invest in fundraising capacity despite a short-term ratio increase are documented with outcomes tracked

Not applicable / not sure

Which best describes your organisation on: The organisation has a demonstrated practice of resisting external pressure (from watchdogs, donors, or media) to cut overhead spending in ways leadership judges would harm infrastructure, training, or stewardship capacity?

External overhead-ratio pressure (e.g. a watchdog rating, a donor complaint) directly and automatically drives cuts to infrastructure, training, or stewardship spend with no internal review

Leadership discusses external pressure informally before making cuts, but there is no documented threshold or decision process protecting essential non-programme spending

A documented decision process exists for responding to external overhead-ratio pressure that explicitly weighs infrastructure/training/stewardship needs before any cut is made

The organisation can point to at least one specific instance where it declined to cut infrastructure, training, or stewardship spend despite external overhead-ratio pressure, and can articulate the reasoning to funders and the board

Not applicable / not sure

Which best describes your organisation on: The organisation has an explicit, written definition distinguishing supporter loyalty (affective attachment/devotion to the organisation, mission, or beneficiaries) from retention (the behavioural fact of a repeat gift), rather than using the terms interchangeably in reporting?

The organisation uses 'loyalty' and 'retention' interchangeably in board/donor reporting; a retention-rate percentage is presented as if it directly measures donor loyalty, with no acknowledgment that a donor could be behaviourally retained without any affective attachment (or vice versa)

Staff are informally aware the two concepts differ, but no written definition exists; retention rate remains the only tracked figure, with loyalty inferred rather than separately measured

A written definition separates the two constructs; the organisation tracks retention rate (behavioural) AND at least one direct measure of affective loyalty (e.g. attachment/devotion items in a supporter survey), and reports them as two distinct lines, not blended into one score

Both constructs are tracked on an ongoing basis, reported separately to leadership/board, and the organisation can explain instances where they diverged (e.g. rising retention with flat or falling attachment scores) and what that divergence implied for stewardship strategy

Not applicable / not sure

Which best describes your organisation on: The organisation recognises that a single-organisation retention-rate figure is a limited, brand-bound proxy for loyalty, since a donor can be behaviourally loyal across multiple causes (multibrand loyal) or discontinuously switch between charities, in ways a single database's retention metric cannot see?

A donor who lapses from the organisation is automatically coded as 'lost' or 'disloyal' with no consideration that they may be a stable, loyal donor to the sector or to other causes (multibrand loyal), just not a repeat donor to this one organisation

Leadership is aware in principle that retention data is single-organisation-bound and may misclassify multi-charity donors, but this awareness does not change how lapsed donors are segmented or re-engaged

The organisation's donor segmentation explicitly accounts for the possibility of cross-charity loyalty (e.g. distinguishing a habitual switcher from a donor who simply moved their giving elsewhere for a specific reason) before writing off a lapsed donor as low-value or disloyal

Lapsed-donor win-back strategy is explicitly informed by this distinction: donors suspected of being multibrand-loyal (rather than habitual switchers) receive a different re-engagement approach than donors showing a documented pattern of habitual, low-value switching

Not applicable / not sure

Which best describes your organisation on: Where the organisation does track a loyalty measure, it reports which specific supporter behaviours loyalty actually predicts (e.g. volunteering, citizenship behaviour, bequest intention) rather than assuming a single loyalty score predicts all forms of donor value equally, including monetary giving?

A single loyalty or engagement score is used as a blanket predictor for all donor value outcomes (donation amount, volunteering, advocacy, bequests) with no evidence checked for which outcomes it actually relates to

Staff suspect loyalty scores predict some behaviours better than others but this has not been tested or documented against the organisation's own donor data

The organisation has checked, at least once, which specific behaviours its loyalty measure actually predicts (e.g. it may predict volunteering and bequest intent more strongly than gift amount or frequency) and adjusts how the score is used in planning accordingly

Loyalty-outcome relationships are periodically re-validated against the organisation's own data, and reporting explicitly separates 'loyalty predicts X behaviours strongly, Y behaviours weakly' rather than presenting one composite figure as universally predictive

Not applicable / not sure

Which best describes your organisation on: The organisation's donor-segmentation and prospect-screening investment prioritises identity, attitude, subjective-norm, and resource/capital variables over personality-trait instruments (Big Five, HEXACO, or similar), rather than commissioning or maintaining a personality-based donor profiling system as a primary targeting tool?

The organisation has purchased, built, or is actively considering a personality-trait profiling tool (Big Five/HEXACO-style scoring) as a primary prospect-screening or segmentation layer, treating trait scores as a meaningful predictor of who will give or how much

No dedicated personality-trait tool is in use, but the idea has not been explicitly evaluated and rejected; segmentation still leans on informal psychographic impressions that blend personality-style descriptors with identity/attitude reasoning without distinguishing them

Segmentation criteria are explicitly built around role-identity (e.g. 'donor', 'volunteer' self-concept), attitudes, subjective norms, and resource/capital indicators; a personality-trait axis was considered and explicitly deprioritised based on evidence that it adds little incremental predictive value

The organisation can articulate, with reference to evidence, why personality-trait profiling was deprioritised in favour of identity/attitude/resource variables, and periodically revisits the decision against new evidence rather than treating it as settled dogma

Not applicable / not sure

Which best describes your organisation on: Where the organisation is tempted to use a personality-trait measure, it checks (or is aware of the evidence) that traits add little to no unique predictive power once identity, attitude/TPB variables, and resources are already in the model, rather than treating a raw trait-outcome correlation as actionable on its own?

A raw bivariate correlation between a personality trait and giving (e.g. agreeableness and donation likelihood) is treated as sufficient justification to build a trait-based targeting rule, with no check for whether the effect survives once identity/attitude/resource variables are controlled

Staff are generally aware that trait correlations can be misleading in isolation, but no explicit incremental-validity check has been run against the organisation's own segmentation model

The organisation understands and can explain that personality-trait effects on giving typically wash out to non-significant once identity, attitude, subjective-norm, and resource variables are controlled, and applies this discipline when evaluating any proposed trait-based targeting rule

The organisation has tested (or reviewed a test of) its own segmentation model with and without a personality-trait variable and confirmed the trait adds negligible incremental predictive power, documenting the result to prevent the tool from being reintroduced later without new evidence

Not applicable / not sure

Which best describes your organisation on: The organisation understands that whatever weak personality-trait effects do exist are cost-contingent: traits predict low-cost or habitual prosocial behaviour (e.g. organ-donor registration, routine small giving) better than they predict costlier one-off giving decisions such as a large cash gift, and calibrates expectations for any trait-based tool accordingly?

A personality-trait finding validated on a low-cost or hypothetical behaviour (e.g. a survey-stated willingness to donate, or organ-donor registration) is generalised uncritically to predict major-gift or cash-donation behaviour

Staff have a general sense that 'personality effects are weaker for bigger asks' but this is not documented or applied when interpreting any trait-related finding

The organisation explicitly distinguishes low-cost/habitual giving contexts (where trait effects are somewhat more detectable) from costlier one-off giving decisions (where trait effects decay or disappear) when interpreting any personality-related evidence or vendor claim

This cost-contingency is written into internal guidance for evaluating any future donor-profiling vendor pitch or tool, explicitly citing that personality-trait predictive power decays as the cost of the ask increases

Not applicable / not sure

Suggested uploads

These are optional. If you can share a few, we can check your answers against real evidence and give you a sharper, more useful result:

� Board or leadership documentation of the organisation's position on overhead-ratio interpretation
� Budget planning documents showing consideration of fundraising-vs-service trade-offs across periods
� Any documented instance of resisting external pressure to cut overhead-adjacent spending
� Donor- or funder-facing communications that explain the organisation's overhead ratio in context
� Written internal definition or glossary distinguishing loyalty from retention
� Donor/supporter survey items measuring affective attachment or devotion, separate from the retention-rate calculation
� Segmentation criteria used for lapsed-donor win-back campaigns
� Board or leadership reporting showing loyalty and retention presented as separate lines rather than one blended metric
� Documentation of current segmentation/prospect-screening criteria (identity, attitude, resource-based, or personality-based)
� Any vendor proposal or internal memo evaluating a personality-trait profiling tool, and the resulting decision
� Internal guidance (if any) on interpreting personality-trait research or vendor claims before adopting them
� Evidence of whether trait-based rules, if ever adopted, were tested against a model already containing identity/attitude/resource variables

Upload any of these documents (optional). You can add several files.

Size limit: 10 MB

A little context

Over the last 3 years, is your work in this area getting better, staying the same, or getting worse?

Getting better

Staying the same

Getting worse

Not sure

Fundraising Metrics

Which best describes your organisation on: The organisation has a documented position (board-level or leadership-level) on how its overhead/fundraising-cost ratio should be interpreted, including an explicit caveat that a low ratio is not automatically evidence of high effectiveness?

Which best describes your organisation on: The organisation treats the fundraising-vs-service expense split as a period-by-period trade-off that can expand future capacity, rather than a static ratio to be minimised in isolation each year?

Which best describes your organisation on: The organisation has a demonstrated practice of resisting external pressure (from watchdogs, donors, or media) to cut overhead spending in ways leadership judges would harm infrastructure, training, or stewardship capacity?

Suggested uploads

Upload any of these documents (optional). You can add several files.

A little context

Over the last 3 years, is your work in this area getting better, staying the same, or getting worse?

Where do you keep the relevant records?

Anything outside your control that recently affected this area? For example a crisis, a funder leaving, or a sector shock.

This is a demo of the tool. If you have any feedback on it, we would appreciate hearing it.