Funraise boosts fundraising 7x with nonprofit data analytics
Snapshot:
The challenge
Funraise, a leading nonprofit fundraising platform, faced challenges in efficiently delivering comprehensive analytics to its customers. For the Funraise engineering team, building custom reports for each request was time-consuming and resource-intensive. For nonprofits, it hindered quick access to vital data essential for optimizing donation generation.
The solution
Funraise deployed Sisense’s embedded analytics solution to enable what they named “Fundraising Intelligence”: Seamless in-app analytics that look and feel like their product, performance dashboards, and template reports. With Sisense, Funraise offers nonprofits access to invaluable insights and flexible dashboards and empowers them to self-serve their data needs in moments rather than days to weeks.
The impact
Not only is the Funraise engineering team freed up to innovate, but nonprofits can now instantly access actionable insights, improving their fundraising efforts and operational efficiency. The transition from manually building custom reports, which previously took weeks of back and forth, to empowering nonprofits to access data through custom dashboards that are always accessible to them, resulted in significant time savings.
For Funraise’s nonprofit customers, the impact is equally profound: Organizations using the fundraising analytics tool experience an average of a seven-fold increase in annual online fundraising, a 1.5x increase in recurring revenue, and a 12% higher year-over-year donor retention rate.
Redefining nonprofit growth: The rise of fundraising analytics
In the nonprofit world, fundraising analytics is fast becoming an indispensable nonprofit fundraising platform for driving success, in large part thanks to Funraise founders Justin Wheeler (CEO), Tony Sasso (CPO), and Jason Swenski (CTO). In 2016, they identified huge opportunities for nonprofits to leverage advanced analytics: deep insights into donor behaviors, campaign performances, and fundraising trends. Since 2016, Funraise has transformed nonprofit fundraising with its innovative technology, design, and strategic offerings. The analytics reporting that Funraise has been offering for almost a decade aids nonprofits in monitoring, measuring, and enhancing their fundraising programs.
- Funraise dashboards empower their nonprofits to quickly and easily access actionable data insights about fundraising KPIs that matter the most to them.
Today, at the core of Funraise’s platform is Fundraising Intelligence (powered by Sisense): A groundbreaking, vital, and, before Funraise’s partnership with Sisense, painfully overlooked pillar in the nonprofit space. Fundraising Intelligence empowers Funraise’s customers with nonprofit data analytics tools and actionable insights into fundraising efforts.
Building in-house: The challenges of custom reports
Before partnering with Sisense to deliver robust insights to nonprofits, Funraise relied on in-house custom reports. Nonprofits would submit tickets requesting performance analytics, prompting the Funraise team to manually create new reports and adjust internal processes to meet these demands. However, this approach lacked scalability and came with heavy downsides:
Heavy lifts
Creating custom reports for each request required extensive planning and execution. Sasso said, “It involved lengthy internal discussions to design processes to deliver. We invested heavily to meet these requests, which was demanding.”
The approach relied on exporting data and using tools external to the Funraise platform. It took maximum effort to create minimal charts and graphs. Sasso added, “It was using up engineering muscle. We had to go into the database and construct each report.” And after creating the custom report, there was too much back and forth. Sasso said, “Often, after receiving the report, nonprofits asked for it formatted differently.”
Lack of visibility
The custom-report building process didn’t lend itself to being prominently displayed on the Funraise site, as is the case with an analytics dashboard. This inherent lack of visibility hindered Funraise’s ability to communicate the high value of the custom nonprofit data analytics that was being delivered.
Hindered growth
Regarding how Funraise engineers used their time, Sasso said, “We wanted our engineers to build innovative new technology instead of putting out reports. We recognized that relying on in-house solutions was holding us back. The larger issue we needed to address was our inability to focus on developing innovative products due to the time spent fulfilling custom report requests.”
Lack of autonomy for nonprofits.
The custom-report-building method meant that nonprofits could not independently access the analytics they needed in real time. Instead, they depended on the Funraise team to create and deliver these reports and were bound to the vendor’s timelines. When additional questions arose about the reports, this process would repeat.
Sisense partnership: A fundraising analytics game-changer
The Funraise team spent several months researching and vetting new tools before deciding on Sisense. They were looking for a long-term partner, and Sasso said, “Upfront, we knew our vision would require a lot of our time and energy to build. So, we spent a lot of time making sure we chose the right partner—that we were investing right, because it’d be so much to clean up and redo if we got it wrong.”
Broadly, Funraise chose Sisense for its ability to scale and deliver the best in-app embedded analytics solution for its audience of nonprofits. Specifically, Sasso and his team decided to partner with Sisense for the following reasons:
Seamless embedding
Funraise placed utmost importance on an analytics tool that would seamlessly integrate with their existing app. This integration directly into their platform, rather than having to access external data sources, would create a unified experience where analytics dashboards seamlessly blend within the Funraise platform. Their goal was for nonprofits to effortlessly access insights through a single sign-on experience. Sasso said, “We wanted this to be Funraise’s data analytics tool, where our nonprofit can sign on once and access it, and it’s not visible to them that in reality, it’s separate from our platform.”
- Funraise’s fundraising intelligence tool enables its nonprofits to quickly and easily pull the most relevant report template, and build self-serve their customized report.
Easy build and export for nonprofits
Funraise wanted a tool that not only integrated into their existing platform but also empowered nonprofits to create and export reports effortlessly. “We needed something that let our nonprofits build their own custom reports, whether it was a dashboard with charts and graphs or a pivot table. And they had to be able to easily export their data. The whole thing has to be intuitive for them to use, no matter their skill level with data.” This approach aimed to alleviate the time and energy Funraise’s internal team spent on custom-built reports and allow nonprofits to self-serve in real time.
Ability to create complex analytics reports
Funraise needed comprehensive reports capable of cross-object reporting, enabling detailed insights into interactions and transactions across their platform.
Sasso said, “We’re talking about supporters, donations, recurring subscriptions, events, fundraisers, and more. We needed all that to work together. Our nonprofits needed to be able to export data as granular as which person has a ticket for which fundraising event, as well as summary and aggregate data at a higher level.”
Elegant data visualization: A must-have
Finally, Funraise wanted a tool that provided high-quality, visually compelling data visualizations. Sasso said, “The visual piece was huge. We wanted our nonprofits to have first-rate data visualization in the platform to bring those KPIs to life for them.”
Nonprofit data analytics reimagined: Funraise’s leap forward
The Sisense dashboards implemented on Funraise not only empowered nonprofits to easily self-serve complex data cuts but also freed up the Funraise team from creating custom reports, reducing report times to nonprofits from several days to moments after clicking “export.” Sasso said, “With Sisense, our nonprofits can pull unique, sophisticated data that helps them understand their fundraising efforts more effectively. And they use that data to guide their strategy.”
Specifically, Sisense allowed Funraise to provide an optimized nonprofit experience with:
New, interactive dashboards for self-serve insights
Accessible to all their nonprofits, the embedded dashboards enable user-friendly data visualizations. Nonprofits can export the data quickly and easily. Dashboards deliver insights that enable nonprofits to query the data in dynamic ways, which previously wasn’t possible for nonprofits. The self-serve nature of the dashboards lets nonprofits customize their dashboards independently. Sasso said, “We like that Sisense lets our users create highly customized queries based on related datasets, allowing them to visualize and format data in a manner that meets their specific needs.”
High-performance analytics database
Additionally, Sisense provided Funraise with a high-performance analytics database with super-fast data stores that are specifically designed to withstand extensive querying. Sasso said, “Sisense’s ElastiCube functionality stood out to us. Given the vast amount of data we manage, ElastiCube’s capability to ingest data using highly optimized hardware and software allows for complex queries to be executed efficiently. This minimizes the impact on our primary database cluster, aside from the high-speed ETL processes, ensuring performance and scalability.”
Funraise’s nonprofit analytics: The key to donor retention
For nonprofits, the benefits of using Funraise’s nonprofit data analytics tool Fundraising Intelligence are enormous. Sasso said, “Our data shows that those using our nonprofit data analytics tool raise 7x more online annually than organizations not using the tool, 1.5x more in recurring revenue growth, and have a 12% higher average year-over-year donor retention rate.”
- Since partnering with Sisense, Funraise has seen data showing that their users who use their nonprofit data analytics tool see significant improvements in donations and donor retention.
Nonprofits increase donations, as well as donor retention rate
The metric of “donor retention” is crucial for nonprofits and a key performance indicator that Funraise helps them track. For Funraise, donor retention data tells a compelling story: Their nonprofit data analytics tool, as Sasso explained, “is moving the needle. It gives nonprofits the information to guide their strategy. In this case, in re-engaging donors and increasing retention rates.”
On average, nonprofits industry-wide experience a 50% annual loss of donors. Sasso said, “Donor retention is like a leaky bucket. However, our data indicates that nonprofits using our analytics tool to track donors achieve a 12% higher donor retention rate. Why? They’re actively monitoring data, making informed decisions, and effectively retaining donors.”
Nonprofits self-serve with templates
Sasso said, “Now that we’ve built the dashboards and templates with Sisense, nonprofits can simply check our library for the report template they need, and they’re off and running.”
- Regarding this custom report created and exported by a nonprofit, Sasso said, “We have a section called “Intelligence” and customers can click into that section and build reports with their data without having to leave the platform — this is just an example. In this case, we are looking at peer-to-peer fundraising metrics, another fairly hard-to-track revenue channel.”
Advanced yet accessible tools democratize data insights
Sasso explained that people in the fundraising industry have diverse skills and knowledge, and while some have data analytics backgrounds, others do not. The nonprofit data analytics tools that Funraise now provides meet people of all skill sets where they are. The dashboards provide a cutting-edge fully intuitive and accessible way for them to significantly increase their fundraising.
In terms of value delivered to the nonprofit, Sasso said, “It’s incredibly valuable because it’s helping our nonprofits grow their knowledge of how to do analytics reporting, specifically for fundraising. They’re getting better at their role.” Ultimately, the elevated experience empowers nonprofits with actionable insights, fostering better decision-making and more effective fundraising strategies.
Sisense: Enhancing Funraise’s capabilities
More engaging demos
With self-serve dashboards, sales demos are more clear. Sasso said, “Now, on demos, prospects can view the dashboards they will use, the sophisticated reporting they can easily generate, and quickly recognize its necessity. Sisense has effectively showcased our platform’s capabilities and the huge value it’s offering: prospects see dashboards tracking donations over time, new donors, and recurring donors—all in one place.”
Funraise is freed up to innovate
Funraise’s daily operations have markedly improved. The introduction of dashboards and self-serve report templates has reduced nonprofits’ dependence on the Funraise engineering team for analytics. This shift not only enhances independence and efficiency for nonprofits but also allows the Funraise engineering team to (happily) dedicate more time to product advancement.
Easily servicing complex analytics requests
Sasso said, “There are significant benefits for our nonprofits in being able to independently explore and find answers when questions arise.” Nonprofits can now query their data and access insights right away. As a result, inquiries to the Funraise engineering team typically originate from users with data expertise.
And even though the questions are coming from data-savvy people, it’s now simpler for the Funraise team to respond. Sasso said, “Some nonprofits come to us with very complex requests. Before, it was a heavy lift. With Sisense, it’s great because now we’re able to say, ‘No problem. This is what you’re looking for.’”
Elevating nonprofit insights: The future of fundraising analytics with Sisense
With Sisense’s embedded analytics, Funraise now offers in-app analytics, customizable dashboard templates, and data-driven suggestions to improve nonprofits’ fundraising efforts. As Funraise continues to lead in the nonprofit space, its partnership with Sisense will remain a cornerstone of its commitment to delivering exceptional value to its nonprofits.
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