Soapbox Engage Blog

Conversion rates (aka response rates) are the holy grail in fundraising metric tracking. Getting at this elusive figure can give you incredibly valuable insight into how much your appeal, well, appeals to donors. The calculation is simple, yet determining the true tactic behind the conversion can be more challenging.

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To calculate the conversion rate of an appeal, you simply divide the number of actions like donations, newsletter signups, social media follows, etc by the total number of asks sent and multiply by 100:

So if I sent an appeal to 1,000 prospects and 475 responded with a gift, my conversion rate would be 47.5%:


Pretty simple, right? The calculation itself is easy peasy. However, you and I both know that we do not simply send one thing at a time to a prospect and then sit on our thumbs and wait for them to come back to us. This is where tracking conversion rates can be a little trickier because donors often see multiple appeals by mail, email, social media and so on. Ultimately, the winning appeal to correlate to your conversion is the one that makes the donor act. So how do you determine the appeal that actually made the donor or prospect give?

For your direct mail appeals, it's typically pretty straightforward. You can track direct mail appeals because donors responding likely give through a response envelope. I would also recommend a 'special' URL or donation form that's only included in your direct mail. This way you'll be able to get an idea of online donations that are in response to the direct mail.

For your online appeals through email and social media posts, UTM codes are your best friend. You can define Campaign, Medium and Source for the links you include in an appeal. Just remember that each post or email needs to have its own specific variables. This means no two posts or emails should have the same values for those different options. Do you know what's really awesome here? These will be automatically tracked in your Google Analytics. And, if you're using the Soapbox Engage Donations app, when someone completes their transaction after clicking on a URL that includes these UTM codes, that date will populate in the Opportunity record in your Salesforce instance. Instant conversion metrics at your fingertips.

There you have it. Happy converting! Ready to learn more? Check out our webinar, The New Tax Law and Smart Nonprofit Fundraising in 2018, where we dive deeper into how the new tax law is changing the nonprofit fundraising landscape in 2018, what strategies you can use to respond, and how you can leverage the power of Salesforce to aid in that effort.