Donor retention is a supremely vital metric by which fundraisers determine success. Visualizing progress toward an organization's goal throughout the year with the proper context is critical to understanding your own donor retention. In this recipe, we roll up our sleeves to walk you through - step-by-step - the creation of a custom Report in the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack that will chart both that progress and that context.

For a full breakdown of other donor retention Salesforce recipes as well as a presentation of proven donor retention fundraising strategy, watch our webinar, Achieve Dynamite Donor Retention with the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack. A more productive 45 minutes focused on fundraising and the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack, you will not find.

Two essential metrics for measuring nonprofit fundraising success are a nonprofit's donor retention rate and donor churn rate. In this step-by-step recipe, we'll share a quick and easy way to calculate these vital statistics in the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack. In addition, we'll show you how to compare your current rates to your annual goal. What's more, we'll offer a method for dynamically calculating the number of retained donors needed to reach your annual goal, thereby providing a countdown to success for your development team to monitor.

For more on donor retention, watch our free webinar, Achieve Dynamite Donor Retention with the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack. We'll share key strategies for boosting donor retention as well as additional Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack recipes for informing and motivating success.

The cues are all around you. Kids are back in school. The Labor Day holiday is here. And the calendar begins its string of months ending in “...ber” as if to subliminally prepare your skin for the shock of seasonal cold ahead.

All of these cues signal that you’re in the backstretch of the fundraising year when the marathon pace picks up and you gather yourself for the final push. You can vaguely see the finish line ahead, Father Time and Baby New Year holding each side of the tape. And the strides in between here and there are the remaining opportunities you have to convince those who donated last year to donate this year.

Excellent donor retention is an essential element of successful fundraising. But how do you keep donors donating?

With our continued focus this month on avoiding fundraiser burnout, we were thrilled to chat with Ashima Saigal, Founder of Soapbox Engage Partner Database Sherpa, on how mindfulness and meditation inform her Salesforce work with nonprofits and what insight they can offer fundraisers.

For more on self-care and ensuring long-term success as a fundraiser, watch our free webinar, How to Raise More Money Without Burning Out, with special guest presenter Beth Kanter.

Having the right tools can make all the difference in both the end results of fundraising campaigns as well as the morale of the fundraiser. And the importance of morale shouldn't be underestimated. As we noted in a recent blog post, the average tenure for a fundraiser is just 16 months. Burnout plays a big part in that stat.

The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack offers a powerful platform for fundraising out-of-the-box along with an immense ability to further customize that platform to meet your own needs. Over the last several months, we've highlighted a number of ways to do so. As summer nears a close and we look toward the end-of-year giving season, we offer this list of 10 how-to recipes to make your job as a fundraiser easier and your work more effective. Each range in the time required to implement. Some require as few as 15 minutes. Some a little over an hour. Feel free to tackle one or two in your own Salesforce instance to prepare your nonprofit for the end-of-year fundraising sprint.

And, to prepare yourself for that fundraising sprint, watch our free webinar, How to Raise More Money Without Burning Out, with special guest presenter Beth Kanter. We discuss signs of burnout and strategies for self-care and organizational culture that promotes it - along with some other Salesforce-specific suggestions for staying fresh as a fundraiser.