Top Appeals Analysis for a Campaign or Fund

Appeals — the solicitations used to ask donors for gifts — can help raise money toward specific campaigns or funds. On the record of a campaign or fund, its top-grossing appeals appear under Top appeals. For each appeal, you can view:

To track the direct impact for an appeal, Revenue provides how much it acquired for the campaign or fund.

Tip: With the Revenue type filter, you can choose whether to analyze revenue received through cash-in-hand giving or committed through pledges and matching gifts. For more information, see Revenue and Recognition.

To view a list of gifts an appeal acquired for the campaign or fund, select its Revenue amount. For further analysis, select Create list to open the list in Lists, where you can apply additional filters, choose columns, and save for future reuse. For more information, see Lists.

To track an appeal's effectiveness, your organization may set goals to raise through the solicitation. If your organization sets goals for appeals, Goal provides the target amount to raise.

To track the effectiveness of your appeals, we recommend you track any related expenses, such as postage and printing costs for a direct mailing. Under Top appeals, you can quickly gauge the return on investment (ROI) of each solicitation.

  • Cost — How much your organization spent on the appeal, based on its expenses.

    Tip: In the database view, you can track and manage an appeal's expenses on the Attributes/Expenses tab of its record.

  • Net amount — How much your organization gained (or lost) on the appeal. In short, the revenue received minus any cost.

With this information, you can quickly compare the effectiveness of the appeals that support the campaign or fund and identify which most contribute to its success. If an appeal struggles to drive gifts to the campaign or fund, consider these Appeals Best Practices.

Note: Hang tight! It may take up to three hours for these metrics to update based on new or edited information. If no one at your organization has used the reports in over a month, the initial data refresh might take up to 24 hours.