Blackbaud Mobile - Analytics

First post of the New Year!  Hope you had a great holiday period.  Back to work now and carrying on my Mobile discussions that we were having before the new year.

So how often have you taken in 650 gifts in the first 20 mins of trialling a new fundraising tool?  Would you consider that a success?  That happened recently with a new Blackbaud Mobile client (whose name will be revealed when I get permission from them to reveal it!).   However success like this is nothing if you can't measure it and measure it in a timely manner where you can actually do something with it.

When we were building the new platform we had taken into account the fact that so many mobile fundraising tools were a little on the poor side when it comes to analytics, data and recording ROI. So we've tried to record everything that goes on with the tool.  When does it get shared on social media, How many donations have come in, when, how much are they, where did they come from?  Was radio the best tool to use or was it Social media.

The only way to get better at this type of fundraising is to test, test and test again.  It's new stuff so there is no silver bullet (although I doubt there ever will be) so you need to work out what is best for your organisation. Do your donors prefer to be solicited on Facebook or local radio or perhaps it's best in the newspaper?  All of this has to be taken into account.

 Now here is the thing - how quickly do you need this data - For a direct mail campaign you probably would be looking for results in the first 4-6 weeks, for email it's probably nearer the first few hours but with something like Mobile where the contact and the reply are almost instant you need to be quicker than that.  We've built the tools so that you can see the results in seconds rather than hours. So if you send out an appeal you can see straight away who has replied back to it, who has checked out your Facebook tab or viral video and be able to tweak in real time.

So let's say you have an event that you are soliciting mobile gifts from.  The most powerful way to solicit gifts from your audience is by showing them how much you have raised so far and push them towards a goal - think Comic Relief or Children in Need and their totaliser.  Without realtime access to the data you can't do that.  In fact having a Totaliser or Totometer there would be a great tool...

Finally when you have a successful night like our client in the first paragraph you want to be able to know who gave, when, how much and if you have a relationship with them already?  With integration to your back end database such as the Raiser's Edge you could link both areas together. This way you can take those mobile numbers and contact those who you have had no contact with before, update those you have and ask them all for a Gift Aid declaration (which would be auto sent to them anyway). 

So the success of any campaign is based around data and how quickly you can take the data and work out success or failure rate.  Make sure you can tweak things on the fly but most of all test and tweak, test and tweak!