Improvements to INDIGO
This year we’ve made some fantastic improvements to the Indigo benchmarking platform. It was awesome before – but now it’s got better!
The common theme for this year’s improvements has been the goal to enable fundraisers to understand their performance, and that of other participants, in a new light.
We introduced many of the changes to this year’s Indigo webinars and while feedback been great, we’re aware that a few of the changes we’ve made need a little explanation to help users get the full benefit.
Here are some of our favourite improvements.
The Growth and Decline chart
The Growth and Decline chart shows the net impact of gains and losses, and where they’re occurring. We ‘found’ the chart while exploring for new ways to visualise which factors were driving Individual Giving growth, and the idea popped up in a paper from 2012. if you’re interested in learning more about it you can download a copy of the original paper below – apologies or the poor quality!
Although charities usually watch their overall growth in giving very carefully, it’s rare they pay as much attention to the gains and losses that make up those results. Looking only at the overall net performance doesn’t tell fundraisers what is really happening in their fundraising or where to invest additional resources to improve fundraising effectiveness. Neither is it sufficient to look only at the new gifts coming in.
To understand what is really happening in a way that is useful for planning and budgeting, it’s necessary to analyse both the fundraising gains and the fundraising losses – in value and in donor numbers – from one year to the next.
In a nutshell, growth in giving is increased both by maximizing gains AND minimising losses in order to make intelligent and informed, growth-oriented decisions.
The basic concept is that growth in giving from one year to the next is the net of gains minus losses.
Growth consists of donations by
- Income from new donors
- Income from reactivated lapsed donors
- And the value of donations from active supporters who increased their giving from the year before
- The ‘lost’ value of recruits from last year who didn’t give again
- The ‘lost’ value of supporters who were active in the previous year but not this year
- The value of donations from supporters who decreased their giving from the year before.
The result is the Growth Decline chart.
Why we love it.
At a glance it can help fundraisers identify the balance of gain and loss, and which parts of the individual giving programme deserve their attention.
And INDIGO participants will be pleased to know you can look at your own performance this way, select another participant within your market, or you can look at the whole market at once.
If you’re interested in learning more about the thinking behind this chart please feel free to download a copy of the original paper below – apologies or the poor quality!
The Pareto Chart
Despite being well known the Pareto concept, sometimes called the 80:20 observation, is often an undervalued approach to understanding our fundraising programmes. Our view is that it can be hugely useful when market conditions are volatile or you’re reassessing your channel and/or product mix.
The concept of the Pareto curve is to compare the distribution of inputs to outputs, with the Pareto principle observing that the typical distribution is that 20% of the inputs creates 80% of the results. Or for Pareto, the observation that typically 20% of his pea plants in his garden produced 80% of the peas.
In a fundraising context it’s most commonly used to illustrate the distribution of income generated by supporters – that a minority of supporters contribute a large majority of the overall income. But it can also be used to understand the efficiency of your media spend on recruitment activity or reliance on a relatively small number of products.
How does this help?
At Adroit we use the Pareto curve as a warning, a red flag, when we observe that overtime, you’re becoming over reliant upon a relatively small percentage of donors.
Knowing that you’re heavily reliant upon a small percentage of supporters, or reliant upon a particular media channel for your acquisition strategy, should trigger careful consideration towards the volatility of that part of your individual giving strategy. How are the giving patterns of your top supporters changing, what are the external threats to their attitudes and behaviours that may cause their support to falter. And what about recruitment channels – from a fundraising perspective if we learned anything from Covid it was to diversify your channel mix and not be overly reliant upon Face to Face!
Why we love it.
The Pareto curve is an excellent reminder that while we measure the effectiveness and efficiency of our fundraising programmes, we’d do well to keep a close eye on our levels of reliance – and if they’re uncomfortable high, to create strategies to lessen the over reliance.
Retention by payment method
If you’re a participant in the INDIGO benchmarking study, you’ll know that you can compare Regular Giving retention rates across a wide range of variables including;
- Retention by media channel
- Retention by product
- Retention by price point
- Retention by gender
- Retention by age group
This year, after consulting with INDIGO participants we’ve added payment options allowing you to gain insights on how different forms of payment impact retention. So whether you want to understand which payment type works best for a particular age group, or recruitment channel, we can now help.
How does this help?
When looking at retention we often focus exclusively on the factors we believe have the greatest influence and fail to correctly explore factors which can make a significant difference and are highly actionable. Payment options are one such example of the communication that often gets overlooked.
Supporter Journeys
Communicating how supporter cohorts move between segments overtime is vital to comms planning yet it’s always been a bit tricky and certainly time consuming to visualize. The approach we’ve taken provides a graphical impression of the magnitude of ‘flow’ between segments overtime – which for those of us who prefer to process information graphically rather than numerically is ideal.
How does this help?
It helps you compare your performance to other organisations quickly and provides an excellent way to digest sometimes complex supporter journeys in a relatively simple way. We’ve found it especially good at showing the movement of legacy supporters between legacy segments or flags.
Single Giving Retention
Perhaps the simplest way to gain a far better understanding of the performance of your single giving supporters is to report on the give again rate of newly recruited single givers, separately from the give again rate of existing single givers (those on the file >12months). Why? Because having a single give again metric can give a hugely skewed impression of how well your post Yr1 supporters are performing. And if the number of single giving recruits changes each year, it makes the metric inconsistent when comparing performance overtime.
Splitting and reporting the two groups separately is hardly new, nor rocket science but we’ve often surprised by how often charities have a combined metric for both groups.
How does this help?
It helps you get an accurate picture of how well each group is really performing, rather than a single metric that leaves you still in the dark.
Indigo
The value of joining INDIGO
INDIGO enables you to compare your performance against some of the largest, most innovative charities from around the World – using REAL data across hundreds of metrics and income sources ranging from Regular Giving to Corporates – from legacy to Major donors.
Each year Adroit works with the IFL Forum to develop the INDIGO benchmarking study – a unique project that enables participates to benchmark their performance against other NGO’s in markets around the World.
Using transactional data, the study compares the performance of charities from around the World, providing an unrivalled view of the market.
For more information about INDIGO benchmarking please click the link below
Written in December 2024. James Long.