Fundraising & Donations

November 4, 2025 · Last updated on March 14, 2026

Recipe: Analyse your Fundraising Appeal

# Fundraising

# Recipes for success

Makes: A thorough analysis of the effectiveness and impact of your outbound fundraising appeal.

Outbound fundraising appeals are an effective way to ask donors for support. The Fundraising Appeal Program template is available on your Dotdigital system and can be used to automate a multi-email outbound fundraising appeal.

This recipe will prepare you to report on the success of your fundraising appeal program and help you identify key metrics to measure success.

What you’ll need:

Fundraising Appeal Program Template

The Insights and Mailings User Role

An understanding of how to run reports

Time required

Prep: 10 min Cook: 60min

What will this help me achieve?

Identify how your prospects have responded to your donation asks.

Effectively analyse your fundraising appeal so you can build on your success and learnings for future appeals.

Benchmark the success of your fundraising appeal so you can measure future appeals against the same criteria.

Concepts we’ll be using

An outbound fundraising appeal. This recipe is designed to work with our fundraising appeal program template.

Customer lists: find customers who donated to your appeal.

Standard reports: analyse the behaviour of customers in your appeal.

Prep

Create a customer list with a marketing segment to identify customers who have received appeal email #1 from the fundraising appeal program. This list identifies customers who have entered the program.

Note down the date that the appeal began and the name of the appeal fund.

Activate

Combine the customer list you have prepared with standard reports to evaluate the success of your fundraising appeal program.

Donations made and average donation by customers in program

Run your customer list through the standard donations report. For the criteria set, use “By Fund & Accounting Date” to specify your appeal fund and the start date of your appeal.

This report will show all donations made with a summary of the total donations. This report will also show customer details per donation.

To find the average donation amount, run the same customer list through the donations analysis standard report with the same criteria set.

Number of new donors

Add two additional segments to your customer list:

One identifying customers who donated to your appeal fund.

One identifying customers who did not donate prior to the appeal launch.

Update the count to find the total number of new donors generated by your appeal.

ROI of Fundraising Appeal

Calculate the ROI of your program by comparing the total donations received with the cost of the number of emails sent. Find the total number of emails that have been sent by running the Dotdigital Program Report. Typically we use £/$0.003 per email as a default benchmark when estimating cost per email.

Lifetime Donation History of Appeal Donors

Add an additional segment to your customer list to identify customers who donated to the appeal fund. Run the customer list through the donor giving history standard report with the criteria set “Lifetime Donations (Use with Customer List)”. This report will show a line per donor, with their entire donation history with your organisation.

Try this twist

To understand how different groups of customers responded to different parts of your appeal, try reporting on the different stages of your program. For example, you might want to analyse which customers donated immediately after email #1, and which didn’t donate until email #3.

More to explore

Once you've analysed your fundraising appeal program, you'll be able to use the learnings to inform future fundraising appeals. Keep exploring our resources to fill your store cupboard with more ideas and insights to make best use of Spektrix.

Fundraising Appeal Program Template

Automate your outbound fundraising appeals by setting up this Spektrix-made Dotdigital Program.

Guide to standard reports

Browse our library of standard reports and extract valuable insights from your Spektrix system.

Reporting on email campaigns

Learn more about how to evaluate email campaigns that are sent through Dotdigital.

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