Data is the secret weapon for unlocking success in fundraising events, from large nonprofit auction galas to online school auctions. And, with auction software that supports in-depth data reporting and visualization, your school can easily inform your auction strategy with past data.

In this guide, we’ll discuss three important areas of auction data and how you can use this information to boost your school’s fundraising results.

Audience Data

The success of your fundraising auction depends on how well you can appeal to your supporter base. Therefore, it is critical to plan according to your audience’s specific needs, interests, and preferences. Start by analyzing your attendees from previous years, paying close attention to the following categories:

• Demographics: Understanding your target audience’s average age, gender, geographic location, and family status will give you insight into how to best structure your event and market it. For example, you might note that families in your community with preschool age children come to your auctions less frequently. To help these families, you might explore options for making your auction more family-oriented, such as hosting it earlier in the day or partnering with the local high school to offer babysitting services.
• Previous engagement: Look into your audience’s previous event attendance and volunteer experience to get an idea of their familiarity with your school. As most of your guests will likely be the parents and family members of your students, consider how you can show off a different side of your school, such as by asking the school jazz band to perform or using student art projects as decorations.
• Donation history: To set optimal fundraising goals, research your audience’s frequency and recency of donations. Additionally, pinpoint their average donation amount to set reasonable fundraising expectations. Your school can also take your community’s average tax bracket into account to ensure you set reasonable prices for auction items.
• Interests and hobbies: What sort of activities or events does your audience enjoy? Use social media appending services to understand what types of auction items would appeal to your supporters. You can also get your students to help as kids often have more insight into their parents’ hobbies and interests.

With a clear picture of your audience, your school can improve its decision-making and put together an auction that maximizes attendance and engagement.

Auction Item Data

From gift baskets to sports memorabilia to concert tickets, how do you know which auction items will generate the most interest, bidding activity, and profitability? One very effective approach is to look at data from previous auctions.

Take special note of these pricing metrics from previous years’ bidding process:

• Starting bids: In addition to researching market value, your school should pay attention to the starting bid amounts that generated interest and adjust your beginning price points accordingly.
• Minimum bid increments: Typically, bid increments are set at 10% or 15% of an item’s fair market value (FMV), but if a similar item from last year performed better than expected, you might consider lowering the increment to closer to 10% FMV for this year’s auction to incite competitive bidding.
• Buy-it-now data: For particularly high-value items like a weekend getaway you might offer a buy-it-now option. Buy-it-now options can ensure you will receive at least a certain high amount for these prizes. However, keep in mind that a bidding war may drive up the price even beyond your buy-it-now option. Refer to your past data to see how these types of items performed and whether a buy-it-now option has the potential to earn your school more.

Prior to your event, arrange a time to meet in person as a group with your high-impact school donors. List out auction items that your school is considering procuring and ask them which ones are most appealing or if they have any other suggestions. Thank supporters for their time and recommendations, and then update your item data with their choices.

Event Data

Your school can learn more about how engaging your past auctions were by collecting and assessing the following event data points:

• Total funds raised: Don’t just focus on the number, focus on where in your auction the funds came from. Evaluate and track your silent auction, your live auction, special appeal, and raffles or games separately. When looking at your special appeal, note whether your school was raising funds for a specific initiative, since that can have a significant impact on participation at your auction.
• Attendance: How has attendance been trending? Again, the absolute numbers are interesting, but you also want to break them down. Divide the participants of each of your past three or four events into tiers based on how much they contributed to the event’s success. Then, examine the attendance record of each tier.
• Return on investment (ROI): Were your most successful auctions the most elaborate ones? Look at what your school spent money on in the past. Maybe you had live music for a few years, then stopped; was there a significant impact on the amount you raised?

Based on your school’s previous auction performance, you might identify new ways to save on event costs and generate more revenue going forward. For example, you might decide to focus on finding corporate partners to procure more one-of-a-kind, enticing auction items to engage attendees at your next event without straining your budget.

Bonus: Improving Your Auction Strategy

With past auction data at your disposal, your school can start brainstorming ways to improve your auction strategy. SchoolAuction.net’s silent auction guide shares these tried-and-true tips for boosting your auction success:

• Promote your auction on a variety of communication channels to attract as many guests as possible.
• Incorporate countdown clocks and text notifications to increase engagement.
• Provide a self-check-out option to make your auction experience more convenient.

Finally, an effective and important way to invest in the success of future auctions is to make sure you thank guests after every auction. NXUnite by Nexus Marketing recommends retaining your donors by following up promptly about the impact of their contributions, so they know exactly how they made a difference in your school’s success.

Data is the key to informing your auction planning process. Reference previous audience, auction items, and campaign data points to discover your baseline metrics. From there, you can supplement your data with new insights to refine your strategy.

Remember to follow data hygiene best practices, such as standardizing data inputs and scheduling regular data back-ups to keep your auction information accurate, reliable, and useful in the long term.

Donors want to hear about the story of your nonprofit, its beneficiaries, and its work. In fact, 42% of donors indicate that stories from beneficiaries influenced their decision to donate. The best way to tell your organization’s story is through cohesive, effective marketing campaigns—but how can you know that your campaigns are having the impact you intended?

In this guide, we’ll explore some of the top metrics you’ll need to track to accurately assess your marketing campaign’s success, whether your goals are to boost donor acquisition, grow your social media following, or drive revenue. Let’s get started!

Why Analyzing Marketing Data Is Important

As GivingDNA’s guide to data analytics for nonprofits explains, tracking your organization’s metrics involves “collecting data and analyzing it to uncover trends, patterns, and insights that will help guide fundraising strategies.” In other words, you’ll understand your donors and each campaign’s strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to create a roadmap to marketing success.

Tracking and analyzing your marketing metrics is a critically important step, since it allows you to:

• Get a 360-degree view of your marketing efforts. Use your data to follow donor journeys, see which strategies are most effective, identify gaps that lead to abandoned donation forms, and more.
• Refine your strategy to enhance campaign outcomes. By tracking progress during the campaign, you can alter your approach to yield better end results.
• Establish benchmarks. This will help you accurately predict the results of future campaigns.
• Efficiently allocate resources. For example, spend more on the channels that generate the most conversions.

As you collect this data, remember to effectively manage your donors’ information. Integrate your technology to eliminate data silos and house all information on one platform. Additionally, protect any sensitive donor data, such as payment information, by limiting access to your database, leveraging data encryption, and requiring two-factor authentication to log into the software.

4 Types of Marketing Data

There are many different types of key performance indicators (KPIs) that your nonprofit may choose to track to gauge its progress. Select these metrics based on your goals for the campaign and which communication channels you’re using. For example, if your goal is to increase donations, it’s more important to focus on conversion metrics and total fundraising dollars than social media follows.

Here are four common types of KPIs to help you get started:

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics indicate how and when users interacted with your campaign. They reveal how well-aligned your content is with the audience’s interests and preferences.

This category can encompass many different metrics across a variety of communication channels, but some common examples include:

• Click-through rate, which indicates whether a supporter clicked on the link in your marketing messages. For example, if you use digital donation cards, you would track the number of clicks from the card to your donation form.
• Time spent on page, which reveals how long a user engages with the campaign landing page after clicking through. The longer they spend, the more interested they are in your content.
• Donation form abandonment rate, which shows what percentage of those who click through to your form abandoned the page before completing their donation. Ideally, this metric should be as low as possible to indicate that most of your supporters are donating once they land on the page.

Your nonprofit should carefully track these metrics as soon as your campaign launches. Just remember that high engagement does not always equate to more conversions (e.g., donating).

Audience Metrics

These metrics demonstrate who is interacting with your marketing messages and how far your campaign is spreading. Some of the key metrics related to your audience will include:

• Reach, which refers to the total number of unique users who were exposed to your campaign in some way.
• Frequency indicates how many times those users see your ad. For example, each person might see a post an average of three times, making your frequency three.
• Impressions denote the number of times your campaign was displayed. Impressions are typically higher than reach because one user could have multiple impressions. If you reach 10 users and have a frequency of three, impressions would equal 300.

Tracking demographic data such as the user’s age, gender, location, occupation, and other socioeconomic factors can also be helpful, especially if your campaign taps into new audiences. Learning about these new audiences can help you cultivate deeper relationships with them by tailoring your communications from the very first thank-you message or welcome email.

Platform-Specific Metrics

While some marketing metrics are relatively general—or even considered to be universal across all communication channels—some are hyper-specific to certain platforms. As more digital and social media platforms are established, this list will likely grow.

For example, the following digital platforms each have unique metrics you’ll need to understand and analyze to chart your campaign’s performance:

• Social media: Most social media platforms measure engagement through metrics like views, likes, comments, shares, saves, and follows. Some have unique actions that count toward engagement—think of TikTok’s Stitch feature or reposting on X (formerly Twitter).
• Email: Measure your email campaign’s performance with metrics like delivery and open rates to see how many of your messages reach their intended recipients.
• Website: See how many visitors your site receives from your campaign, as well as the quality of those visitors. Monitor total website traffic, number of sessions, page views, time spent on page, bounce rate, and more.

Additionally, confirm that your organization is tracking data from its fundraising tools. This important information can sometimes fall through the cracks, particularly if you’re using a more niche tool like silent auction software or a gift card fundraiser platform.

Conversion Metrics

A conversion happens when a user interacts with your campaign and takes the intended next action. The way you measure the number of conversions depends on your campaign’s goal. For example, a user might convert by:

• Donating
• Subscribing to your email newsletter or direct mail list
• Following your social media accounts
• Purchasing merchandise to support your mission
• Joining your sustainer program
• Apply to be a volunteer

Your conversion rate is then calculated by dividing the total number of conversions that occurred during the campaign by the number of clicks or visits to your website. Aim to boost conversions as much as you can, but don’t stress about reaching an unattainable number. For instance, the average online donation conversion rate for nonprofits in 2023 was 16% for desktop users and 10% for mobile. Using these figures as a benchmark, you can determine what’s feasible for your nonprofit and start there.

Remember that data insights will only be as accurate as the file you’re pulling them from. This is why it’s so important to practice data hygiene and ensure that your data attribution is correct and up-to-date. A nonprofit marketing agency can help you analyze, understand, and protect the quality of your data to promote continuous improvements and take your campaigns to the next level.

Although less flexible than monetary donations, in-kind donations are still valuable to nonprofits for various reasons. For instance, the non-financial nature of these donations may lead to increased generosity, as donors unable to make monetary gifts may be happy to donate items or services instead. Some fundraising organizations even offer the opportunity for your nonprofit to raise funds through the collection of in-kind donations by hosting events like a clothes drive collecting recyclable clothes.

To maximize any donation type, regardless of whether they’re major gifts or matching gifts, you must start with data. In-kind gifts are no exception, as you’ll need to collect information on key metrics to determine the best path toward increasing the support your nonprofit receives. But which data points do you need to track to do so?

In this guide, we’ll cover the four types of data to track when accepting in-kind donations. By collecting and assessing this information, your nonprofit can grow the support it receives and more conveniently fulfill its mission. Let’s dive in!

1. Donor Data

When it comes to securing recurring donations or support, donor data is key. With this information, you can segment your supporters into groups with shared characteristics. This allows you to send out targeted messages that are more likely to secure future support.

Key information you should collect on your in-kind donors include:

• Name
• Contact information
• Demographics
• Engagement history
• Giving history
• Interests and hobbies
• Communication preferences

For instance, let’s say that a woman named Sarah drops off canned beans at your nonprofit’s food drive. You have her fill out a form that asks for the information above, and you learn that:

• Sarah has donated canned food at your nonprofit’s past three food drives.
• She hasn’t participated in any other in-kind donation drives or made a monetary donation.
• She prefers to be contacted through email and text.
• She usually finds out about your food drives through neighborhood flyers.

From this information, you can gather that addressing food insecurity is important to Sarah. You may be able to secure a larger in-kind donation from her in the future if she’s given more time to prepare.

With that in mind, you can group Sarah with other donors who share her views and preferences. Before your next food drive, you’ll send out an email to this group letting them know about your upcoming event and inviting them to donate. By doing so, you’ll secure these donors’ repeated support and may even increase the number of items they donate.

Be sure to store your donor data in a secure location to ensure that their privacy is respected. Kindful recommends using a constituent relationship management (CRM) system for this purpose. A dedicated nonprofit CRM allows you to easily access donor information, segment donors into groups, and send personalized messages requesting support.

2. Donation and Inventory Details

Since in-kind donations are usually goods or services, your nonprofit will want to create an inventory of donated items. This ensures you don’t use your hard-earned funds on an item you already own and helps you keep track of donations for bookkeeping purposes. Keeping an updated inventory is particularly important for any donation that you plan to keep long-term, such as livestreaming equipment, computers, or furniture.

When recording in-kind donations, be sure to include the following information:

• Description of items or services
• Estimated value
• Quality and condition
• Date of donation
• Method of delivery, such as a drop-off delivery or pickup by staff members
• Location

Additionally, depending on the number of in-kind donations you usually receive, you may need volunteer help to process and inventory these items. In that case, you may want to track volunteer metrics as well to ensure that you’re providing a great volunteer experience for your supporters.

3. Marketing Metrics

Donors can only make gifts to your nonprofit if they know that your organization needs support, making marketing a key aspect of your nonprofit’s operations. Therefore, tracking the success of your marketing efforts is crucial to securing future in-kind donations.

To assess the effectiveness of your nonprofit’s marketing, keep an eye on these metrics:

• Conversion rate. This metric refers to the percentage of users who complete a desired action. In the case of in-kind gifts, this means dropping off a donation, scheduling a donation pickup, or pledging a service. For example, if you have a call-to-action (CTA) on your website to schedule an in-kind donation pickup, you can assess the conversion rate of this CTA to see how effective it is at getting web visitors to click and complete the pickup form.
• Donor acquisition rate. If you’re hoping to secure new donors through in-kind gifts, the donor acquisition rate is key. To calculate this, you’ll divide the number of first-time donors by the number of all donors. For instance, let’s say you spent the entirety of last month focusing on requests for in-kind gifts. If you had a total of 200 donors and 47 of them were new donors, you’d have an acquisition rate of 23.5%.
• Engagement metrics. Gauge the interest surrounding in-kind gifts by tracking metrics related to engagement. This includes website traffic, email open rates, and social media engagement on messages that feature in-kind gifts. If you have a lot of engagement with these messages, you’ll know that your supporters are receptive and open to making in-kind donations.
• Referral sources. To determine which marketing channels are most effective at garnering in-kind donations, track referral sources to your key in-kind donation landing pages. Common referral sources include on-site CTAs, email newsletters, and social media posts.

By examining these data points, you’ll have a better understanding of the effectiveness of your marketing messages, which marketing channels are best for requesting in-kind donations, and how successfully you’re attracting new donors.

4. Donation Impact

Much like with monetary donations, donors want to know how you use their in-kind gifts to positively impact your beneficiaries. By collecting information related to donation impact, you’ll be able to answer their questions and alleviate concerns with quantitative data.

Metrics that you can track for donation impact include:

• Cost savings. If you’re already tracking the estimated value of in-kind gifts, you can easily translate this metric into your nonprofit’s cost savings. For instance, let’s say that you recently requested donations of livestreaming equipment for your next hybrid event. You could let your donors know that their generous in-kind donations helped you save $5,000 in video equipment, lighting, and microphones.
• Beneficiaries helped. If you’re collecting in-kind donations to directly give to your nonprofit’s beneficiaries, you can track exactly how many beneficiaries your in-kind donations helped to show your impact. Let’s say your nonprofit’s mission is to aid people experiencing homelessness and you host a clothing drive to collect warm winter clothing. In your thank-you letters, you could mention that your drive allowed you to provide warm clothes to 500 beneficiaries.
• Environmental impact. According to Donate This Recycle That, in-kind donations of goods are a great way for supporters to recycle and give new life to old items. If your nonprofit deals with environmental issues, let donors know the positive environmental impact of their donations. For example, you can tell supporters that together, they donated over half a ton of clothing, saving these textiles from landfills.

These metrics are especially important when it comes to your donor recognition efforts. In particular, you can feature relevant information in your thank-you messages. By doing so, you’ll demonstrate the impact your donors have on your beneficiaries and show that your organization is trustworthy and deserving of support.

If you’re serious about maximizing the number of in-kind gifts you receive and the impact you create with them, it’s essential that you track these four categories of metrics. To streamline your data collection and analysis, consider looking into a partnership with a data analytics company. These organizations can help you get started and set you up for in-kind donation success!