This Spring 2026 take part in a ground breaking study to explore how insight drives fundraising performance.
In collaboration with
We believe that Insight — in all its forms — is fundamental to successful fundraising. It helps charities understand supporters, engage supporters, and ultimately raise more income. But despite its importance, there’s still surprisingly little shared understanding of how insight is used and managed within the charity sector.
To help answer those questions answer we’re inviting charities to participate in a project study to identify the role insight plays within fundraising and explore how ‘insight orientation’ differs among charities, and ultimately to understand how insight may impact fundraising performance.
Participating involves completing an online survey, that contains three topics:
1. To research the role of performance metrics within organisations
Despite the current popularity of benchmarking, there is very little information in the sector regarding how benchmarking is being used and which metrics are seen as most important by senior fundraising management. The last paper to look at this topic was way back in 2007.
We have the opportunity to enhance the knowledge in this area, especially because the last paper to look at this topic was way back in 2007 when digital fundraising was less common than today and measuring and supporter experience was in it’s infancy.
2. To discover the importance ‘insight orientation’ has upon fundraising performance.
Various benchmarking studies, including The IFL Forum Indigo evidence the wide differences in fundraising performance between participants across key metrics. This begs the question ‘why do some charities achieve better performance than others? What do they do that makes the difference?
One finding from multiple academic studies is the positive correlation between increased performance and one or more forms of ‘orientation’, such as customer / supporter orientation. Our primary focus is ‘intelligence (insight) orientation’.
The hypothesis is that those brands that undertake activities to generate, disseminate and respond to intelligence about their sector, category, competitors and supporters, other things being equal, typically perform better than those that don’t.
By surveying a range of charities we’ll be able to report back to them on insights that they can’t gain from anywhere else, specifically which aspects of intelligence orientation make the greatest difference, and the popularity of each insight activity participants engage in. Armed with this information charities will be better able to assess their own use of insight with a view to developing more advanced and productive insight activities.
3. To explore insight management and investment
This section will uncover how insight functions are managed internally, looking at insight roles and where they fit within the organisation, for instance it is a separate function, or absorbed into the fundraising team. And is it more closely aligned with brand and audience or data functions
In addition to ‘insight orientation’, performance can obviously be affected by a wide range of contextual factors, most notably sustained fundraising investment. So, to provide some context for each participant we include a short section on their changing investment levels into fundraising.
How will you benefit?
Overall
- Establishing current behaviours and attitudes towards insight.
- We’ll attempt to create a ‘typology’ of charities based on their behaviours and attitudes towards insight.
- We’ll establish ‘what best practice looks like’ within the sector. And, depending upon participation volumes, how this differs by market, category and charity size.
Performance metrics
- You’ll gain an understanding of which metrics are most commonly used by fundraisers, and how important they are perceived to be.
- You’ll learn how metrics are used i.e. which are most commonly used when petitioning for budget increases.
- You’ll understand whether larger charities place different levels of importance upon metrics than smaller charities.
- And which metrics are most often presented to the very top management of charitable organisations?
Orientation
- You’ll gain insights into answering the question ‘why some charities perform better than others’, specifically what role insight orientation plays in creating success.
- You’ll discover how popular different activities are, as well as understanding what sets the best performers apart.
- This unique information will help you identify which additional insight activities you may wish to introduce to your activities in-order to help growth.
Participants will receive
- A PDF report in which we explore the key insights from the study. The report will compare your answers to the average of other organisations (you will not be able to see how specific charities responded).
- Access to an interactive online results page.
- Invitation to a results webinar in which we’ll look at the key findings and additional insights.
Things to know
Costs
There is no cost to participate.
Dates
The survey will go live from February 23rd 2026 and we expect to close the survey at the end of March.
Audience
While we’re interested in responses from fundraisers of any seniority, our ideal respondents will be at a managerial / director level within fundraising, insight or communication functions.
Survey length
We anticipate the survey will take approximately 10-15 minutes.
Links to the survey
For members of The IFL Forum
For all other charities
Project creation and delivery by
Adroit Insight
Beautiful Insights
With thanks to the following for their support
Project Background
The direction for the project was influenced by a range of academic papers, each exploring some theme of insight orientation within the charity sector, ranging from market orientation to competitive analysis.
Below is a list of the key papers. Many of the papers are hugely interesting and may be of interest to you. If you’d like to access any of the papers please get in touch with james.long@adroitinsight.com