Analyzing Online Giving For Better Results

Online giving has dramatically improved how congregations solicit and manage donations. In fact, research shows that organizations that offer donors a digital giving option raise an average of 13% more in donations annually. With online giving expected to increase 3.9% in 2025, churches have a significant opportunity to improve online donations, but that requires analyzing efforts to optimize what’s working and direct resources accordingly. 

In addition to making it easier for congregants to give and create recurring gifts, online giving has also provided church administrators with a wealth of information with which to make better business decisions. But all too often, this information goes unexplored and can languish, and a rich trove of data and information isn’t used to better understand donors, patterns, or areas for improvement or cultivation. 

Let’s look at how to analyze online giving and key metrics to yield better results. 

Start with online traffic. Understanding your monthly web traffic is key to analyzing giving trends. When are visitors most active: After a service or ministry program? On the weekends? In the evening? Before a holiday? When do you see the average gift size increase? Once you know the number, timing and value of monthly website sessions you can begin to determine the correlation between user behavior and donation levels. By understanding when donors have the greatest propensity to give, you can adjust the content of your site accordingly to drive a higher conversion rate for online visitors. 

Look at digital giving channels.  Email campaigns and text-to-donate fundraisers create even more digital options to reach congregants and encourage giving. And these digital giving channels all provide data for analysis. Open rates, click through rates, forwarding rates…all give you valuable insight to optimize your online giving program—who responds via each channel? What messages drive the most donations? What drives the highest value donations? Examining the data from your digital giving channels can greatly boost your ability to drive better giving results.

Once you have analyzed your website performance, visitor behavior, and digital giving channels, and established correlations with online giving behavior, dive deeper into the data to understand your congregation’s giving trends and provide insights to improve giving levels. Areas to look at include: 

Year-over-year/month-over-month giving. Analyzing year-over-year and month-over-month giving data helps congregations identify which areas are experiencing growth (increased donations from specific demographics, more recurring gifts), as well as areas that may be experiencing a decline and in need of more focused attention. A few metrics to evaluate include:

• Total funds raised
• Number of donors
• Average donation amount
• Frequency of donations
• Most supported giving funds

Giving by segment. Your congregation consists of members with different needs and preferences, which is why you need to look at the donor characteristics that can affect giving, including age, gender, family status, and interests, to name a few. If, after analyzing the data, you discover that a particular demographic is more likely to give during specific times of the year, for example—such as year-end giving or during awareness months—your congregation can tailor campaigns accordingly. By analyzing giving by donor characteristics, you can refine your outreach, identify new opportunities to appeal to congregants, and tailor fundraising strategies. 

Trends. By tracking trends and comparing performance to previous campaigns, you can gain valuable insights to improve online fundraising efforts. Are you maintaining a consistent donor retention rate, or are you seeing a decline that needs to be addressed? Is the average donation value increasing among families? This might be the time to conduct targeted appeals or create special events that are meaningful to those donors during peak giving times.

An all-in-one streamlined management platform can help you analyze giving and optimize your campaigns. With the ability to manage all of your members’ giving information in one place, you can quickly and easily run automated reports to analyze giving across a wide range of parameters. By leveraging the data analysis capabilities in the Servant Keeper platform, church administrators can go beyond guesswork to develop more data-driven fundraising strategies that improve fundraising efforts. 

Explore how to analyze online giving for better results with Servant Keeper. Learn more about Servant Keeper’s online giving here: Servant Keeper | Platform | Online Giving

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