How to set and achieve goals easily with a fundraising goal tracker?

Are you tracking the progress of your fundraiser? Or do you think it’s enough if you create an online donation page? Setting a goal and tracking its progress is crucial to your fundraiser’s success. Many nonprofits that are raising money for various causes agree on one thing: defining goals and achieving them.

How do you set goals for your fundraiser?

Fundraising is a wonderful way to raise money for causes you love. But like all other tasks, set clear goals to achieve success. Let us see how to set fundraising goals to achieve the fundraising objective.

1. What is your fundraising objective?

Clearly, you create a fundraiser to raise money. The money you expect to raise from your fundraising drive should be realistic and achievable. If you need a higher amount of money, break the goal into smaller steps or targets so that it becomes easier to complete one goal and step into the next.

Another objective is the time in which you have to collect funds. For instance, if it is an emergency fundraiser, such as a life-saving surgery, you may have a time limit ranging from a few days to a week to raise funds.

Remember, your fundraising goal should pass the SMART test. It should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. Additionally, choose whether your aim is just to generate funds or to add a particular number of contributors in order to reach a given donation threshold.  

Knowing your objective helps you plan a clear target to work towards.

2. How are you raising funds?

To accomplish your fundraising objectives, you'll need the correct contribution tools that make launching fundraisers simple and quick. Also, the fundraising software should help the donors donate to the cause seamlessly. GivingX is a custom fundraising software that has all the necessary features to create a fundraising page or custom embeddable donation forms for your website. It has over 5,000 integration tools to help you manage your fundraiser. It provides more than 125 secured payment gateway options for donors to simplify their donation process.

The GivingX features & pricing make it the best choice for creating your fundraising campaign. Once you have decided on the fundraising tool, you can easily proceed further to make your fundraising campaign effective and reach your goal.  

3. Who is your target audience?

When setting fundraising goals, it is crucial to consider your target audience. Create donor segments to have an estimate of how much you can expect to raise from each donor segment. The custom fundraising software GivingX has features to segment your donor list based on your goal parameters. For instance, corporate segments can help you raise a good amount, but it is time-consuming. Start crowdfunding when you want quick funds. Set up a strong volunteer network when you want to raise recurring funds. You can contact religious organizations when you want money for emergency fundraisers.

Also, the donation history of your existing donors will help you strategize achievable and realistic goals. Utilize donor segments to create personalized fundraising campaigns.

4. How are you going to communicate with your supporters?

Collecting supporters for your fundraiser is not easy. You can use your donor base to see how many of them are interested in supporting your cause. Nudge them to help you with volunteering. They can share your fundraiser with their network, thereby helping you collect more funds.

Use custom fundraising software that has team fundraising features to help you collect funds. Add your team members and allow them to create their pages and share them on their social media channels. GivingX, a fundraising software, allows free unlimited integrations through Zapier to help you set up a team fundraiser and use tools to track its success.

Whether you love them or hate them, to raise funds, you must have fundraising goals. Once you have set them up, it is time to track them through a fundraising goal tracker.

What is a fundraising goal tracker?

A fundraising goal tracker is an essential tool to measure the progress and success of your fundraising campaign goals. It may be a spreadsheet, graphs, DIY pinboards, or something fun like a jar that you fill up that helps you track the fundraiser’s success. It may also be a virtual tracker like the fundraising goal thermometer or an analytics tool to track the KPIs of your fundraising goals.

What are the types of fundraising goal trackers?

Basically, there are two types of fundraising goal trackers.

1. Physical fundraising goal tracker

A physical fundraiser can take any form, like spreadsheets, graphs, charts, and even diagrams, to represent the progress of your fundraising campaign. Be creative when you want to motivate donors by designing DIY fundraising goal tracker thermometers and other progress bars.

While there is no limit to the customizations possible in a physical fundraising goal tracker, there are certain drawbacks.

It is bound by geographic limitations. It is not visible to donors in other locations.

You need to manually update the progress bar.

A physical tracker can definitely help you and your team track the progress of the fundraising goal. But it doesn’t do much to motivate the donors, especially when they are not present at the physical location.   

2. Virtual fundraising goal tracker  

A virtual fundraising goal tracker, or Help Us Reach Our Goal Thermometer, is a digital display that is visible to donors everywhere. Create an online donation page on GivingX and embed a free fundraising thermometer that automatically progresses as the donations are received.

What are the benefits of a fundraising thermometer?

The digital fundraising thermometers are automatic and help motivate your donors.

• You can set milestones on the fundraising thermometer and share them with your network when the levels are reached.
• Since it calculates the progress automatically, there is no scope for errors.
• It motivates the donors to donate more as they see the levels being reached.
• It builds trust among donors and increases your organization’s credibility.

A physical or digital fundraising goal tracker is important to track the progress of your fundraising goals.    

Why is a fundraising goal tracker important?

A fundraising goal tracker has many benefits. It helps you stay organized, communicates the tasks pending with your team, and motivates your donors. With the right fundraising goal tracker, you can essentially make your fundraiser a success.

1. Motivates donors

Create an online donation page on GivingX and add some funds to it with the help of your family and friends to start the campaign. A visitor who visits your donation page wouldn’t be motivated to donate if it had no or few donations. Similarly, setting up a progress bar helps donors see how their donation is helping the tracker move towards its end goal. This instant gratification assures them that their donation is accounted for and is helping the cause. Set shorter goals first and keep raising the levels as you reach the goals.  

2. Encourages volunteers

Create separate fundraising progress bars for your volunteers. It provides them with the motivation to do more to support the cause. You can set up a positive competition among the volunteers to see who first reaches a certain goal in the fundraising tracker.  

3. Tracks progress

Of course, the basic idea behind a fundraising goal tracker is to view the progress made in your campaign. Based on it, improvise your campaign goals to reach them faster. It also shows you which measures are effective and which are not. You can put in more effort to boost strategies that are giving you results and tweak your marketing efforts to raise more.

4. Engaging and fun

For a school fundraising event, draw a thermometer on a large poster. Mark different fund collection levels. When you reach a certain level, ask the kid who has last donated to color and fill in the thermometer level. Isn’t it a fun way of establishing a connection with your donors? There are many ways in which you can creatively use a physical fundraising progress bar. Similarly, set up a Help Us Reach Our Goal fundraising thermometer on your website or fundraising page and see how it adds up to the fun.

Achieve your fundraising goals on GivingX with a fundraising goal tracker

GivingX is a custom fundraising software that allows you to create online donation pages and embeddable forms to start your crowdfunding. It gives you free, unlimited integrations through Zapier to help you manage campaigns and track their progress.

GivingX’s features & pricing make it beneficial for nonprofits of all sizes to set up their online donation pages to raise funds. It is an all-in-one platform that helps nonprofits set up donor CRM tools, automate marketing campaigns, create embeddable forms, and access Zapier to get them closer to their fundraising target. Its pricing is just 1.45% for each donation received, which is much cheaper compared to other platforms.

Start your crowdfunding campaign on the custom fundraising software GivingX to achieve your fundraising goal with ease.