How is your organization faring compared to other nonprofits?

Analyzing fundraising data requires benchmarks. Industry resources are valuable in this regard, because they enable you to benchmark your performance against other nonprofits, in addition to your own year-over-year performance.

Trend reports, consistent donor reports, lapsed donor reports and so on are commonplace in fundraising software. Tools that may not be commonplace, though, are reporting and data aggregators that work with the AFP and Urban Institute’s Fundraising Effectiveness Project.

The Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP) is a long-term project with the goal of obtaining industry-wide benchmarks for use by participants (nonprofit organizations). Each year the FEP gathers annual data via a survey. Professionals can manually provide this data using the survey form on the internet. Or, some software applications, including ResultsPlus, provide a way to automatically gather and send the data to the FEP from directly within the software-no manual data gathering or entry necessary.

Please visit our web site for resources, including a link to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, its most recent report, and our whitepaper on benchmarking.

Sincerely,