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Your Nonprofit Survey Cheat Sheet

By Bryce Wilkinson, Senior Online Giving Specialist

It’s that time of year again. I’m not talking about setting resolutions. No, it’s time for the annual ColoradoGives Nonprofit Survey! We call it a survey, but it is more than that. We really consider it your grant report to Community First Foundation.

“A grant report,” you say, “I don’t remember getting any grants from Community First Foundation.” Many nonprofits actually did receive a grant from Community First Foundation because gifts made through ColoradoGives.org in the name of your organization are treated as gifts to the Foundation which we then grant to your nonprofit.

If your nonprofit has indicated on its profile that it offers Enterprise Zone and/or Child Care Credits, then Community First Foundation serves as a pass-through organization. In either case, Community First Foundation provides ColoradoGives.org to your nonprofit without any set-up charges or monthly maintenance fees, so we appreciate hearing from you about how this fundraising tool influences your nonprofit.

The questions on the survey are things we cannot pull from our data, so we need your help. Since some of the questions require you to do a few calculations, we like to provide you with those questions ahead of time and briefly explain how to arrive at the answer. That way you can have all the information ready to go and can quickly complete the survey when you receive it in mid-January.

Here are the questions we suggest you work on before trying to complete the survey:
Question:
How many Colorado Gives Day donors were first-time donors to your organization?
How to answer:
If the donor on your Colorado Gives Day 2014 donation report has donated to you before (i.e., the person is in your organization’s entire donor database prior to Colorado Gives Day 2014), then do not count him. If the donor has NOT given to you in any way before, then count him.

Question:
What percentage of Colorado Gives Day donors were first-time donors to your organization?

Use this formula:
(# first time donors / total # of unique donors on Colorado Gives Day 2014 donation report) * 100

Question:
What was the total dollar amount your organization received from first-time donors on Colorado Gives Day?

How to answer:
Sum all of the Colorado Gives Day 2014 donations for the first-time donors as calculated above.

Question:
How many Colorado Gives Day donors were lapsed (donors who had not given to your organization for two or more years)?
There are three steps to this:
  1. Use this formula: total # Colorado Gives Day 2014 donors - # first-time donors as calculated above = # of existing donors
  2. Check the donors identified as existing in your organization’s entire donor database to see when each of them last gave to you.
  3. If the existing donor last gave to you two or more years ago, then count him. If the existing donor last gave to you more recently than two years ago, then do not count him.
Question:
What percentage of total fundraising by your nonprofit comes through ColoradoGives.org?
Use this formula:
(total amount raised through ColoradoGives.org in 2014, including Colorado Gives Day / total amount raised through all sources in 2014) * 100

Thank you for all your hard work to make ColoradoGives and Colorado Gives Day so successful in 2014. We look forward to working with you again this year. 
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