In our previous post, we sang the praises of Lifetime Value as a powerful metric that can guide fundraising success for your organization. As we noted, to calculate Lifetime Value, you'll need to know your average donor lifespan, ideally for up to five years back. If you happen to be using the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack, you're well on your way to getting that number. In this how to recipe, we'll walk you through a few steps that surface this on the Contact record for easy calculation.

For a full overview of all steps in this series as well as a presentation of the strategy behind them, watch our power-packed 45-minute recorded webinar, Boost Donations with Data-Driven Fundraising: Lifetime Value and the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack.

A consistent string of beautiful spring days in DC. An evening celebrating progress towards equality. It's been a pretty good past week in the Salesforce non-profit world in Washington! Before I wrap up my wire story for tomorrow's newspaper, here's an evening edition of the PUB Crawl!

Don't forget, you can have the goodness of the PUB Crawl delivered into your inbox each Monday morning by subscribing today!

Return on Investment, Acquisition Rate, Conversion Rate, oh my! These and so many more fundraising statistics are helpful in their own way, dear nonprofit fundraiser, but so many can tempt one into simple snapshots of the past, leading to short-sightedness in the future. How can one avoid the temptation of the myopic and rejoice in clear-eyed, future-focused fundraising success?

Lifetime Value. (Cue angel choir).

Lifetime Value (LTV) transforms all of the donations you receive and the money spent acquiring them into a single, powerful number. That number can predict the future and, more importantly, grant the foresight to inform strategy so you can change that future, and raise more money at less cost to do more good.

But how does Lifetime Value help inform, and how do you find that powerful number for your own organization?

In our series of Salesforce how tos for increasing monthly gifts, we've detailed tactics you can implement within the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) to convert one-time donors to sustaining supporters. We presented recurring donation information directly on the Contact record using User Defined Rollups. We then used those new fields to create Levels that track recurring donor status and drive effective engagement strategy. And, most recently, we created User Defined Rollups and Levels that explicitly target one-time donors giving in the last 90 days as potential recurring donors. Today, we'll finalize the process by creating an Engagement Plan Template to be used for cultivating donors.

For a full overview of all steps in this series as well as a presentation of the strategy behind them, check out our recorded webinar Convert One-Time Donors to Sustaining Supporters: Strategy, Tactics, and the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack.

With the fantastic NPSP Sprint in Baltimore, and the Nonprofit Technology Conference in DC, It’s been a crazy past week. There's nothing better than sharing ideas and knowledge with members of our open source community, hitting the streets for 7am runs, staying awake into the late hours talking governor limits (all of that actually happened).

With more than 100 penguins now adopted in new homes, I'm able to refocus my energies back to the taps of knowledge here at the PUB Crawl. Grab a barstool and join me for a round of Salesforce news!

Don't forget, you can have the goodness of the PUB Crawl delivered into your inbox each Monday morning by subscribing today!