How Important Is It To Collect Data During COVID-19?

The need for good decision-making in the nonprofit sector has never been greater as COVID19 continues to keep fundraisers and donors housebound. Nonprofits have been hit especially hard as unemployment rises and people are giving less. At this point, I believe it is safe to say that our world will never quite be the same – so how do we really determine how our fundraising world is different and how much damage the coronavirus has caused our efforts? 

The answer to both these questions is good data analytics. To truly understand how things have changed, we need to compare our most important metrics and their values from before COVID19 to what they are now amidst this pandemic. This will allow us to quantify the change in landscape and make decisions accordingly. But first, we need to collect data to analyze.  

Here at Turnkey, we are focusing our data collection on ‘snapshots’ of participant data on a regular basis (in our case, weekly). These snapshots include participant identifying information, their fundraising, event interactions (such as when they registered, did they join a team, etc.), and finally any important engagement markers (such as whether they interacted with emails or social media). By taking these ‘snapshots’ of data over time, we have been able to track the evolution of participant engagement and fundraising as this crisis unfolds. It allows us the most flexibility to both track change over time as well as pick a specific point in time and drill down to the event or participant level. We are also able to determine if any outreach campaigns addressing the pandemic have worked or not, effectively allowing us to A/B test outreach campaigns.  

As for metrics, we are paying special attention to the percent of returners among participants (retention rate), the percent of participants fundraising any amount at all (activation rate), and the percent of interaction with social media and email campaigns (interaction rates). These metrics give us a good, quick view of overall performance and are usually the first indicators of issues with other behaviors. For example, if the retention rate is relatively high but the activation rate and interaction rate with emails is low, it could indicate that the organization has been successful in maintaining the connection with their most engaged participants but need to ramp up and/or revise their outreach campaigns and activation messaging. 

While we have been focusing on peer-to-peer participant event data, this mindset can apply to other revenue streams as well. We can easily take these ‘snapshots’ of sponsorships, major gifts, and sustainer giving data. As long as we’re consistently recording the same data points at a regular interval, we can analyze how trends evolve over the course of the crisis. 

Ideally, we would have liked to have been taking these ‘snapshots’ from the beginning of the year so we could understand how participants responded to the crisis and any outreach campaigns from the beginning. However, it is never too late to start collecting data.  In order to fully understand how COVID19 has affected your organization, you need to be vigilant in collecting data. The more you can collect, the more your analysts can do with it. You can never have too much information when making big decisions, so make it at least a little easier on yourself and let your data do some of the work.