Data, data, data – we all want more fundraising data!

It’s time to participate in the 3rd Annual Individual Donor Benchmarks Survey! This survey is limited to nonprofit organizations with budgets under $2 million and a focus on grassroots fundraising.

Creating strong fundraising plans and analyzing your results are two of the best ways to ensure your organization has a successful fundraising program. But often you are operating in a vacuum, with no way to compare your goals or results to similar organizations. There are few reports that provide some context for your organization’s fundraising work, and it can be difficult to compare your organization to those with revenues of $5 million and email lists in the 100,000’s.

This unique donor survey is working to solve that issue by collecting our own data for smaller organizations!

The goal of this survey is to take a slice of the nonprofit universe and create a better set of metrics for small to medium organizations – those with budgets under $2 million and a focus on grassroots fundraising. Our hope is to give nonprofits a clear picture of realistic fundraising goals and results that they can share with staff and Board. 

Are you wondering what you’ll receive beyond exclusive data to better your fundraising efforts?

Everyone who completes the survey will receive report of their data plus a PDF copy of the 3rd Annual Individual Donor Benchmarks Survey. Not only do participants get data, and who doesn’t love data, but everyone will also be entered to win one of five prize packages including:

• One year’s subscription to the Grassroots Fundraising Journal
• A fundraising book from Chardon Press
• Two hours of fundraising consultation from Third Space Studio
• Two hours communications consulting from BC/DC Ideas

All this and it only takes about 20-minutes! To participate, please take the survey at http://www.thirdspacestudio.com/2013-individual-donor-benchmarks-survey/ before Friday, April 11th.  

We’ve kept this survey short and easy to complete, including a new tool to calculate additional data as you fill out the survey. The questions focus on the organization’s results, people and background. Development staff can take a look at all of the questions before they get started. Download a PDF of the full survey here.

Once the survey results are compiled, in June, the 3rd Annual Individual Donor Benchmarks Survey will share results on:

• Organizational and individual donor revenue growth
• Individual donor revenue as a percentage of overall revenue
• Recurring donor programs
• Online fundraising and social media
• Board involvement in fundraising

…and much, much more!

The survey results will also look at the ways budget, fundraising staff size and geographic scope impact these statistics.

We are working in partnership with the Grassroots Fundraising Journal to get the word out and be sure we include a wide range of organizations. We hope you can participate in this year’s Individual Donor Benchmark survey! Please fill out the survey before Friday, April 11th. 

Survey coordinator, Third Space Studio, will keep data confidential and only share the results in the aggregate. If you have any questions, please feel free to be in touch with the survey coordinator, Heather Yandow, at [email protected].