Track and Evaluate Peer-to-Peer Campaigns with Intelligent Reports and Dashboards

Erin Booker

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July 31, 2024

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4 minutes

Nonprofit Trends

P2P Fundraising

This article is part of a series

Keep learning with related articles.

What is peer-to-peer fundraising? (P2P Fundraising Tips, Statistics, and Guide)

How to plan and launch a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign

Nonprofit best practices to recruit P2P fundraisers and supporters

Best practices to create effective P2P fundraising pages for nonprofits

Peer-to-peer fundraising strategies to promote P2P campaign

You love peer-to-peer fundraising, your supporters love dipping their toes into the world of fundraising events through P2P, and your program managers definitely love the funds that y'all bring in.

But to really know whether these fun-draisers are worth the effort, you've got to do the dirty work of pulling reports, mathing results, and making pretty pretty dashboards to show off all your success. Let us illustrate how this "dirty work" is actually the most critical and interesting part of your entire peer-to-peer fundraising campaign.

The basics of measuring P2P campaign success

There are several ways to measure P2P campaign success. One of the most common yardsticks is simple funds raised. Take it a step further to deliver profit, which is just money raised minus expenses. And to round it out, make sure to include the cost of the hours spent on making this a successful campaign.

Beyond financial gain, look at the number of supporters who raised funds, the average number of donations per fundraiser, and the growth of your donor database.

What even is success? If you're looking at the numbers and feeling like you're not measuring up, all is not lost. There is some success to be found, believe us. Keep digging and don't forget that you're a bad-ass worldchanger.

What is the importance of tracking peer-to-peer fundraising?

Tracking your peer-to-peer fundraising metrics is important because it's the best way to know whether your peer fundraising strategy worked. Did you bring in the funds and get the support you expected? Would you do better by hosting a gala on Giving Tuesday? Tracking P2P metrics is the way you get better at changing the world.

What are the benefits of tracking P2P progress?

Getting better at changing the world is the main benefit of tracking your P2P fundraising campaign progress. Other benefits include showcasing your success to your board and supporters, comparing your achievements to last year or the previous P2P fundraising campaign, and discovering ways to increase the efficacy of your fundraising efforts.

4 Best practices for tracking peer-to-peer fundraising KPIs

Tracking and evaluating peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns is crucial. Peer to peer fundraising best practices for tracking P2P fundraising KPIs include: first, set a goal, or better yet, multiple goals. Second, choose a peer-to-peer fundraising software platform that has intelligent reporting. Third, keep your eyes on the nonprofit KPIs at all times, and last, build a report to express your success.

Set goals

Whether they're team fundraising goals or personal goals, financial or numbers-based... none of that matters. In order to see success, you have to define success. And goals are the way you do that.

Choose a P2P reporting platform

Unless you're reeeeeally good with an abacus, you want a peer-to-peer fundraising software platform that shines when it comes to reporting. Funraise is one of the shiniest. Like, polished-stainless-steel-robot-efficiency-brain fundraising tools.

Choose the best nonprofit online fundraising platform with the best peer-to-peer fundraising solution by Funraise and the best nonprofit reporting and donor management software.

Yes, thee bestest.

Track throughout the campaign

Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) while the peer fundraising event is going on is a matter of automating reports and dashboards so that they come to you instead of you having to gather all the data bits and bobs. Set up the reports you want and let 'em run—and save yourself time and frustration while you're at it.

Another tricky tip is to ensure that all of your campaign pages (and the campaign pages of your individual fundraisers have progress bars for tracking campaign progress.

Take a look to see how easy it is to make cool and useful progress bars for your peer-to-peer fundraisers.

Gather results for a post-peer-to-peer report

Once you've recovered from your P2P fundraiser, the real analysis can begin. Using Fundraising Intelligence to analyze post-campaign results and insights plus taking a critical look at the numbers is your best, most efficient way to get both basic results and instinct-driven insights. Take a look at how easy Fundraising Intelligence can be:

Another benefit to post-campaign communications is that you can send automated emails to fundraisers to provide them with feedback and appreciation.

10 peer-to-peer fundraising metrics to track

Tracking the right metrics to evaluate your peer fundraiser success is essential to assess the effectiveness of these campaigns and make data-driven decisions for future initiatives. Basically, if you want your future fundraising efforts to keep getting better, you gotta use past successes to make future gains.

Here are ten key digital fundraising metrics to track:

Total amount raised
Number of fundraisers activated
Number of active fundraisers
Average amount raised per fundraiser
Average number of donations per fundraiser
Average donation size
Recurring subscriptions from P2P
Repeat fundraisers
New donor acquisition
Donation conversion rate

1. Total amount raised

This sounds easy; sometimes it's quick, other times, it's a PITA. The key is keeping track of your incoming fundraising channels—don't forget offline sources, straight ca$h, and in-person donations. And figure out how you're going to record pledges, in-kind donations, and volunteer hours before they become a problem.

2. Number of fundraisers activated

Another easy one: You should just be able to count up personal fundraising pages created. Sometimes a couple or a family is all on one page, though... how do you want to consider those folks?

3. Number of active fundraisers

Active is different than total. Every successful campaign is gonna have a few fundraisers that never get that momentum going. It doesn't matter why; those folks don't need judgment. But you don't need them cluttering up your data, either, so make sure that you pull the numbers that include them as well as the ones that don't.

4. Average amount raised per fundraiser

Average Amount Raised per Fundraiser; this should be easy for a peer-to-peer fundraising software platform worth its salt. It's a good YoY number to look at, too.

5. Average number of donations per fundraiser

In the same bucket as Average Amount Raised per Fundraiser, pulling Average Number of Donations per Fundraiser is a great way to show YoY or campaign-over-campaign changes.

6. Average donation size

And then when you have Average Amount Raised per Fundraiser and Average Number of Donations per Fundraiser, bam! You've got Average Donation Size. Not only is this a good one to compare against previous campaigns, it's also great to compare to your org's overall average donation size metric.

7. Recurring subscriptions from P2P

This one's either gonna be exciting or a yawn. But when you put a contextual donation form in the middle of a truly compelling story and you use Funraise's Recurring Upsell feature, this could be a standout instead of an also-ran.

8. Repeat fundraisers

These are your champions, so heck yes include numbers celebrating the folks that have fundraised for you more than once! Especially if this after-action report is being shared with your board or the public, don't skimp on the kudos.

9. New first-time donors

One of the sweet spots and shining moments of an effective campaign (whether it's P2P or not), expansion to your donor base is a resultant stat that you should be looking at both during the current campaign and afterward.

10. Donation conversion rate

There's nothing worse than getting a new individual donor to your site and having them back out of supporting your mission with a gift. Funraise's donation forms have an industry-leading 50% conversion rate. When you get a successful peer-to-peer stat that blows it out of the water, we urge and entreat you to shout about it.

Tips to improve your P2P strategy through tracking

Compare time periods
Show growth with dashboards
Provide regular updates
Use intelligent reporting and donor management software
Avoid peer-to-peer pitfalls
Identify ways to improve

1. Compare time periods

Sometimes success metrics stand alone. More often, though, they need context. When you compare numbers year-over-year, or campaign-to-campaign, the progress really packs a punch.

2. Show growth visually

There are people out there that speak spreadsheet (your editor does not belong to that group), but for those in your audience who aren't fluent in P2P fundraising campaigns (board, supporters, fundraisers, random-but-welcome website visitors), providing a dashboard with simple graphs and colors will bring the message home in hardcore way.

3. Provide regular updates

You may be thinking that we mean you should provide regular updates to your board—and we do; you should—but we also mean that you should provide regular updates to your fundraisers during the current campaign. For both groups, the progress is essential to sustaining motivation.

For your fundraisers: peer-to-peer automated email campaigns for updates and encouragement. Scheduled milestone emails when you hit 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of the campaign goal.

For your board: regularly scheduled reports that get exported and emailed to them without you having to do a doggone thing.

And if you're running an ongoing, year(s)-long P2P campaign, take a listen to what Fundraising Specialist Dani Lockard has to say:

Dani says, "Of course, ongoing P2P campaigns require a careful balance of urgency and commitment, but nonprofits who keep up the thread of engagement and utilize multiple types of communications are winning at the P2P game."

Dani says, "Of course, ongoing P2P campaigns require a careful balance of urgency and commitment, but nonprofits who keep up the thread of engagement and utilize multiple types of communications are winning at the P2P game."

4. Use intelligent reporting

Why go with a donor management software or peer-to-peer platform that does one or the other? Or one that hasn't invested in truly intelligent, innovative reporting, data analysis, and dashboards? Funraise has Fundraising Intelligence that covers all the bases and more.

5. Avoid pitfalls

There's no way around it. Your social fundraising campaign and the marketing and recruitment and tracking will have you troubleshooting issues and challenges right and left—nothing new for a professional nonprofit fundraiser such as yourself. But in order to leave yourself energy and time and resources (aka $$) to address any little thing that pops up, set some automations in motion at the outset of the campaign. Build and schedule emails and social media posts before you start, consider the time of year for your audience, integrate time-saving software, and set reports to run so you can focus on the things that you didn't have on this year's bingo card.

6. Identifying areas for improvement

This is (hopefully) the most fun part of the tracking process: Implementing changes for future peer-to-peer fundraising efforts. Now is when you get to see what you got right and what you got wrong, and put plans in place to kick this year's butt next year.

Fundraising Intelligence: Your key to P2P success

Funraise's Fundraising Intelligence delivers the nonprofit industry's most advanced configurable nonprofit data reports and the most valuable toolkit for data-driven strategies; in short, Fundraising Intelligence is the intelligent peer-to-peer fundraising platform you need.

When you need all the eyes on all the parts, turn to a peer-to-peer fundraising platform that leverages intelligent insights to refine and optimize every single future campaign within your platform.

AI explanations

What's The Why beneath your data? AI explanations help you uncover unexpected patterns that are contributing to growth or decline in your fundraising progress. The big benefit of AI explanations is that you get to understand the logic supporting your data and unearth new nonprofit fundraising strategies.

Data alerts and pre-scheduled reports

Send pre-scheduled PDF reports to your board via email or set up automatic reporting for your team. Receive automatic email or Slack alerts to notify your nonprofit of revenue thresholds and performance anomaly detection.

Report templates

Stop building and re-building the same reports. Fundraising Intelligence helps you save time and step up your reporting game by using ready-made reports built by fundraising experts.

Custom formulas and reports

Dive into reporting without limits! Build completely digital fundraising metrics and dashboards with cross-object reporting, formula libraries, conditional formatting, and more. Construct custom formulas that support highly specific and strategic reports—without having to export any data.

Conditional formatting

But what is conditional formatting? It's how you increase the legibility of your reports and highlight important details. Trust us.

Editable permissions

Manage permissions and keep data secure by controlling access to and editing permissions for each report.

Cross-object reporting

Ok, what's cross-object reporting, then? Oh, just lil' ol' reports that balance average donors, donations, fundraising pages, registrations, and more. Again, trust us.

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Fundraising Intelligence FAQ (from AI)

How do you measure nonprofit success?

Through impact, of course! Measuring nonprofit success is taking into account more than just money—it's called a nonprofit, remember? While for-profits may count their successes in dollars and cents, nonprofits often focus more on the impact they've made in their community or the wider world.

What are KPIs for nonprofit organizations?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential metrics for nonprofit organizations to track and evaluate the success of their peer-to-peer campaigns. These indicators help measure elements of your peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns like: donation conversion rate, average donation size, fundraiser activation rate, total amount raised, and number of new one-time donors.

How to measure the performance of a non-profit?

Key metrics to measure the performance of a nonprofit include financial indicators, program impact metrics, and organizational efficiency measures. One important aspect is financial health, but many nonprofits would say the most important metric is the organization's impact on its audience, specifically the organization's effectiveness in fulfilling its mission and making a difference in the community.

What are the three commonly used metrics to measure nonprofit efficiency?

When it comes to measuring nonprofit efficiency in peer-to-peer campaigns, there are three commonly used metrics that organizations often rely on: Return on Investment (ROI), cost per dollar raised, and potential donor retention rate. These can be combined to discover all sorts of other insights and make data-driven decisions for the nonprofit.

What is KPI strategy?

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) strategy is a crucial component of any peer-to-peer campaign evaluation process. KPIs are specific, measurable metrics that help organizations track progress towards their goals and objectives. These metrics provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of a campaign and can help identify areas for improvement.