Learn About Fundraising Reports

One of the powerful perks of having MonkeyPod track all of your organization's financial activity is that it can also generate comprehensive reports to help you evaluate your fundraising efforts!

All of these reports can be found by choosing Reports from the main menu, and looking under the Fundraising & Sales heading there.

Top Donors

Use the Top Donors report to access a list of your donors for the year, sorted by amount given. You can also compare their current year's activity to a prior fiscal year, and view their total lifetime activity. For each supporter listed, there is also a link to a chart of their contributions to help you visualize their giving history.

Knowing who your top supports are can help you to focus on those key donors, and keep them informed and engaged! You can download these lists using the Download Excel and Download PDF buttons on the page. The Excel option lets you include other relationship fields (like addresses, custom attributes, and donor milestones), and can serve as a mail merge file for any print campaigns you want to send to this group.

Tip: if you want to target any of your top supporters with a specific email campaign, check out this article about creating email lists using the "Advanced Relationship Search" to find the subset of donors and add them to a list.

Donor Retention

This report tracks who’s sticking around—and who’s quietly slipping away.

The Donor Retention report examines the percentage of donors who give from one year to the next, as well as the amount raised from retained, reengaged or new donors.

On the main Retention Metrics page, you can specify the date range of interest and the report will display the relevant historic data as a baseline for comparison.

High retention means you’re doing a great job of keeping donors engaged—an essential part of sustainable fundraising.

What’s a “good” retention rate? A common nonprofit benchmark is 35–45%, but it varies depending on gift size, organization size, and donation opportunities.

In addition to the basic retention metrics, the Donor Retention report also provides tabs that highlight specific categories of retained or lapsed donors:

Monthly Donors: This tab lists all donors who have created monthly recurring donations. Be sure to give them recognition and thanks to let them know that you appreciate their consistent support! Monthly donors can provide a consistent and reliable income stream, so consider adding that option to your online donation forms if you haven't already.
LYBUNT and SYBUNT: The "LYBUNT" and "SYBUNT" tabs refer to two metrics commonly used to evaluate donor retention: "Last Year But Unfortunately Not This year" and "Some Year But Unfortunately Not This year". These reports can be incredibly valuable for segmenting your donors and developing targeted retention and engagement strategies for donors you've already worked to reach, but who might be at risk of disengaging.

Learn More! The MonkeyPod Knowledgebase has a full writeup about interpreting donor retention metrics, so check that out when you're ready to dig into those details.

Contribution Details

The Contribution Details report provides a complete list of all contributions received during a chosen time period. The list can be filtered by tag and/or contribution type (donations, pledges, pledge payments, and grants).

Contributions by Source

The Contributions by Source report provides a breakdown by supporter type (individual, corporate, government, foundation, organization and other) for all contributions received during a chosen time period.

Use this report to understand where your funding is coming from—and where to focus future outreach. The list is further segmented by contribution type (donations, pledges, and grants). The "Insights" tab provides charts to help visualize the data.

Fundraising Performance

Use the Fundraising Performance report to get a top level view of fundraising efforts for your chosen time period. The contributions are categorized here by type of gift, type of donor, and source (which fundraising page or donation embed)—with processing fees broken out. At a glance you can see where your donations are coming from, including the total, average, and largest gifts for each category.

Reviewing these data could help you gain insights into where your fundraising efforts are most effective! It's also useful for bookkeepers looking to have a list of all gifts with the transaction fees broken out.

Year-End Giving Summary

The Year-End Giving Summary report is intended for those organizations that send out end-of-year acknowledgment letters which also serve to help your supporters with their tax reporting. Since this report is primarily to help your donors with their taxes, it does not include soft credits, nor does it aggregate by household—it reports individual gifts as they were received during the chosen calendar year (not your organization's fiscal year). Non-deductible and deductible portions are reported separately.

To use this information in a mail merge document to create printed letters, simply choose the Year-end Giving Summary report from the Reports menu, select the appropriate calendar year, and export the resulting entries to a CSV file for use with a mail merge tool in your word processor.

Frequently Asked Questions

My bookkeeper wants to run a report of all donations, pledges and grants—with the processing fees separated out. Will one of these reports do that?

Yes! Use the Fundraising Performance report for that purpose.