Data? Metrics? Analytics? It doesn’t have to be scary-hard to deal with, even if you’re a small nonprofit’s part-time fundraiser who’s just kind of figuring it all out as you go along. 

Analyze This: A Nonprofit's Guide to Event Fundraising Analytics is a truly useful free ebook for nonprofit event fundraisers, written by Jono Smith (formerly of Network for Good) for Convio and Event360, that shows, step by step, how you can use the data collected from your fundraising events to create more successful events in the future.

Break down that overwhelming pile of event data into five categories, the guide suggests, and you'll be much better able to extract useful insights:

• Event
• Participants
• Donors
• Gifts
• Revenue
• Mission

That’s logical. Start with a numbers-based assessment of the overall quality of your event, then dig down into participants/donors and the financial data, not just income but net revenue, growth, and benchmarking. For example -- how many participants did you get last time? Did they register early enough to get in lots of fundraising time? How many of those participants were active fundraisers or made a donation themselves?  And so on...

Key metrics in predicting event revenue are "donors per participant" and "number of gifts," both of which are influenced by how well your fundraising tools are being  to solicit donations. In the guide's case study, for example, average dollars raised jumped from $22 to $337 when participants sent out consistent call-to-action fundraising emails.

(Yes, there's a case study.)

The Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in Washington, DC, has a 20-year history, hefty attendance, good press, and a high public profile... but, in 2008, more than 30,000 of the event's 50,000+ participants didn't raise any money for the cause! And of those who did fundraise, the average was just sixty dollars. Clearly, there was room for improvement.

Analyze This: A Nonprofit's Guide to Event Fundraising Analytics explains how the organization used analytics to take build on that growth opportunity, to convert participants into fundraisers, and to transform a well-attended event into a strong fundraising event. The results were impressive -- a 17% increase in funds raised the next year, for example, despite a slight drop in registrations and a global economic recession! -- and make a compelling case to "Analyze This"!

Download the guide (PDF) at http://www.event360.com/assets/files/jointheracerwr2010.pdf