Big data causing big confusion? Debbie West from The Good Agency has some simple tips to help you manage your data more effectively, meaning better results from your fundraising campaigns.

Effective data capture and campaign evaluation are essential to ensure the success of your fundraising programme. There is more pressure than ever to safeguard a steady stream of fundraising revenue with limited resources. To meet this challenge we must analyse current fundraising activities and develop an effective plan to capitalise on strengths and improve areas of weakness.

Don’t worry if you haven’t got the latest fundraising database software or a data analysis team, you can still track, measure and learn by following some simple rules:

1. Get the basics right.
It’s so important that you record your supporter’s details correctly. It sounds simple, but so often this can go wrong. There is nothing worse than a supporter receiving communications from you with their name spelt wrong. Incorrect supporter information could be the difference between receiving a second donation or the end of a relationship with a supporter.

2. Understand your supporters’ giving behaviours.
You should capture data every time a supporter gives to you – including the date and the value of the donation. This information will help you track and measure an individual supporter’s recency, frequency and value (RFV). RFV helps with:

• Targeting – you can cherry pick supporter segments that you know will help you achieve your goals based on the frequency of their giving or value of their gifts;
• Reducing waste – you can unselect supporter segments who are no longer active and/or who are unprofitable; 
• Driving value - years of testing has proven that if you tailor ask prompts to your supporters’ giving behaviours, they are more likely to respond than if they receive an ask that is ‘out of their league’. In order to personalise your fundraising asks, you will need to know how much they have given in the past.

3. Measure your programme effectiveness.
It is important to measure and evaluate activity in order to understand the effectiveness of your spend. To do this:

• Always know what you want to achieve. Set objectives by channel. Be sure to make note of any changes that may occur as the campaign development progresses (e.g. if you mail/call fewer people, ensure you re-forecast). 
• Test, test and test again. A rigorous testing programme will mean you can roll out only what works, thereby increasing the performance and profitability of your programme. Whatever you are testing – eg. creative, channel, ask prompts, timing – ensure that you set up your test segments correctly, with appropriate coding (see below point). If you're making important decisions based on results, don't rely on a single result – run the campaign or test again to be sure. 
• Set up all campaign coding correctly. Use campaign codes when recording data/donations – for example, using the code ‘WM0414’ for ‘warm mailing April 2014’. This will allow you to easily analyse specific campaign activity and results. Coding will ensure that every donation is captured and tracked under the right campaign. Set a formula and stick to it. Work through each permutation so you know you're tracking all activity (if you’re counting call responses, do you know they could only have been generated from your campaign?). Make sure you code each audience segment within your campaign too. This will enable easy analysis of where your income and response is coming from. 
• Be creative in what and how you measure. Sometimes you might use a channel where it's hard to directly assign response (e.g. driving people to your website). In such circumstances, you can do checks on the number of hits to the website both before the campaign goes live and after the campaign has finished. This way, you will know the uplift in hits to your site over the campaign period. Also keep a note of other things that could have a positive or negative influence on the results of your campaign (e.g. coincidental news coverage or competitor activity).
• Create a campaign bible. You don’t need to wait for every last donation to come in before you can analyse results and evaluate a campaign. Most direct mail campaigns are mature at about 12 weeks, so plan to analyse your campaign at this point. Carry out your analysis as close as possible to the conclusion of a campaign – this will mean the detail is still fresh in your mind. Finally, keep all post-campaign summaries for easy reference (we call this the Campaign Bible).

4. Don’t worry about doing it perfectly.
It's better to measure some things (even if you need to make assumptions) than none at all.

Debbie West is head of fundraising & direct response at The Good Agency