Email As Your Ultimate Year-Round Donor Stewardship Tool

Imagine this: You close a successful fiscal year, but your fundraising momentum moving into the next year stalls, and your year-end giving campaign shows a drop in donor retention. Seeing high initial engagement but limited future gifts is a common, but frustrating, scenario.

Supporters stop giving for many reasons, but a big one is a lack of understanding about their gifts’ impact. Donors view their contributions as investments, and to continue supporting you, they need concrete proof of measurable returns. So how can you strengthen donors’ belief in your cause and assure them that their support creates real change?

Impact reports steward donors by providing accountability, helping connect your daily operations to your mission statement, and providing an overview of how your work impacts your community.

To secure lasting relationships with donors, your nonprofit will need to create professional, reader-friendly impact reports. This guide outlines the practical steps for building a report that demonstrates your organization’s value to supporters. We’ll cover these key steps:

• Understand the core of a nonprofit impact report
• Identify key statistical and visual elements
• Streamline the creation process with technology
• Shift organizational perspectives on backend reporting

Follow impact report creation best practices

Impact reporting provides stakeholders with verifiable proof that your initiatives are achieving their promised results. These reports enable your team to turn complex data into concrete examples of impact that supporters can easily understand and engage with. To make the most of your nonprofit’s impact reporting, integrate these concepts into your strategy:

• Differentiate between report types. Impact reports are different from annual reports, which provide an overview of your nonprofit’s accomplishments in a single year, whereas impact reports tend to focus on a specific program or initiative. To connect with donors, your nonprofit should create both regular annual reports and unique impact reports for all of your major programs.
• Show donor impact. Impact reports help satisfy your donors’ desire to see the direct results of their gifts. Use your impact reports as an opportunity to explain how you used donors’ gifts to achieve specific outcomes, such as hiring new staff members who were able to then multiply your mission impact.
• Connect reporting to donor retention and acquisition. Track how your impact reports influence subsequent donor engagement. Use impact report delivery tools that let you see which donors are interacting with your report online and stay attuned to donor conversations about your impact data.
• Build donor trust through transparency. Impact reports should provide a frank picture of your nonprofit. While you should highlight wins, also be honest about places for improvement. Doing so helps build donor trust and can even be used to gather support for areas of your operation that are falling behind.
• Support long-term financial sustainability. Along with securing support from annual donors, impact reports are also often a core part of earning grants. Grantmakers will often request special reports about how your nonprofit used their gifts, and strong reports can help build long-term relationships, setting your nonprofit up to earn future funding.

By implementing these best practices, you can make impact reporting into a powerful tool for cultivating donor relationships and securing long-term funding. Build on these strategies with the insights you gather from tracking engagement with your impact reports each time they go out to your supporters.

Identify key statistics and visual elements

Create a document that helps donors connect with your nonprofit emotionally, while still providing them with the core data they need to understand your nonprofit’s impact. By using a mixture of important statistics and useful visuals, you can create a report that’s both professional and reader-friendly.

Effective reports will center on these components:

• Data-backed success stories. Combine statistics with narratives to provide tangible examples of what theoretical data points look like in on-the-ground work.
• Data visualizations. Replace dense blocks of text with digestible infographics to help supporters visualize complex data. Plus, pictures, photos, and graphics can help guide a reader’s eye through your report, creating a better reading experience.
• Program-specific financial metrics. Create a financial breakdown focused on the initiative you are highlighting in your impact report to give donors a clear view of how their gifts created change. When supporters see how you used their gift to fund a program they care about, it helps encourage them to support future initiatives.
• An outline of upcoming challenges. Detail the specific challenges your program still faces, and provide a concrete plan to address them. This demonstrates your team’s proactivity and keeps your supporters updated on the next phase of your work.
• A clear vision of your goals. Round out your document with an outline of upcoming initiatives related to the target program, and explain how current support can be a part of your vision.

Wrap up your report by creating a concise executive summary that highlights your program’s achievements, thanks donors for their support, and reiterates your nonprofit’s commitment to creating an impact.

Streamline the creation process with technology

Manually moving donor data into a report template slows down your team. Instead of fighting with spreadsheets, you can use reporting software to build and share your impact reports faster. Taking the manual work out of impact reporting shifts your team’s focus from administration to strategy. When your systems handle the formatting, your staff gets their time back to write better stories and engage directly with your supporters.

Let impact reporting solutions handle the heavy lifting by:

• Connecting your database to your templates. Your nonprofit’s team can save time by moving financial data, donor records, and program updates into a single hub. Reporting software pulls this information directly into your design layout. This lets your team skip the copy-and-pasting and focus on communicating your program’s success.
• Matching donors to specific programs automatically. Donors want to read about the initiatives they fund. Reporting technology lets you segment your supporters and connect individual gifts to targeted initiatives. You can create hundreds of customized reports in a single batch, giving each donor a relevant summary without adding hours to your week.
• Sending direct links instead of attachments. A PDF attached to an email limits how you share your results. Delivery tools let you send a direct link to a secure digital landing page. This lets donors skip the login screens and go straight to their report. You can also embed a video message from your leadership next to the metrics and include a button for supporters to request a physical copy in the mail.
• Using read alerts to guide your follow-up. Stop guessing if donors open your emails. Delivery platforms notify you when a donor views or revisits their digital report. Once you get an alert that a major supporter is reviewing their summary, your team can reach out to thank them and answer any questions.

Adopting the right software shifts your focus from managing data to stewarding your donors. Skip the manual formatting and deliver the personalized updates your supporters expect.

Shift organizational perspectives on backend reporting

Viewing impact reports as an opportunity for donor engagement helps reorient your team’s thinking, leading to better reports and more creative uses of them.

To encourage internal perspective shifts, you should:

• Encourage leaders to view impact reports as a communication tool. Impact reports are ultimately a marketing tool. In addition to sharing your report with your donor community online, by mail, or via email, use key data points and compelling stories from your impact report to reach new donors. This can encourage new supporters to download your report and start getting involved with your nonprofit.
• Share impact metrics internally first. Distribute your finalized impact report to your own staff and volunteers before launching it to the public. Internal circulation builds team morale and keeps your strongest ambassadors updated about your various programs’ progress.
• Choose the right timeline and tools. Building a good report takes time, so let your team collect data, stories, and photos long before the deadline. Combining a thoughtful schedule with impact report creation software helps keep your nonprofit from scrambling at the last minute.
• Free up staff for relationship building. Centralizing your data within your impact reporting platform lets you stop juggling external spreadsheets and folders. Have your team log photos and metrics into the system while your initiatives are still running. Collecting this information as it happens prevents extra manual effort when it’s time to build the report, giving your development officers those hours back to steward donors.

Share each impact report internally to engage team members spread across different departments and initiatives within your nonprofit. Communicating these updates across your organization helps show everyone how different programs work together to advance your overall mission.

Craft your impact report strategy today

Impact reports let your nonprofit highlight the outcomes of specific programs. Using dedicated reporting software to build these updates saves your team members time from manual tasks, freeing them up to build relationships with donors. Sharing what a particular initiative achieved demonstrates the value of a donor’s gift and shows your wider team how different initiatives support the mission. When you pair these efforts with tools that monitor reader activity, you can learn who to contact for your next campaign.