This article seeks to explain in detail the meaning of the data displayed on your Kindful dashboard.
Overview
The Kindful Dashboard was designed with multiple goals in mind.
The goals of the Kindful Dashboard are to:
- Provide simple recommendations
- Inform users how their organization is doing overall (at a “high level”) with respect to donor lifecycle management and fundraising.
- Give users easy “jumping off points” to where they can view more detail, ask more questions of the system, or take action.
- Inform users about recent transactions.
Note that only users with the following types of Roles will have access to the Dashboard:
- Account Owners
- Staff
- View Only
Basic Data Entry users do not have access to the Dashboard because it contains financial information.
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Dashboard Components
The components of the Kindful Dashboard are:
- Recommendations
- Donor Lifecycle Analytics
- Contacts Info block
- Acquisition Info block
- Retention Info block
- Upgrade Info block
- Recent Transactions
- Transactions Year over Year (trends) graph
- Donor Pyramid
- Recurring Transactions Info block
This article will continue to explain the contents of each of the Kindful Dashboard components in detail.
Recommendations
Depending upon the status of your account, and your organization’s specific needs, Kindful may present one or more recommended actions at the top of the Dashboard. These recommendations are focused on helping you get the most value out of your Kindful account, as well as increasing or capturing revenue so that your organization can be as successful as possible.
Donor Lifecycle Analytics
This area includes four sections:
- Contacts Info Block
- Acquisition Info Block,
- Retention Info Block
- Upgrade Info Block
Please note that throughout this section, we use the terminology “Donor” to refer to a Contact with one or more transactions, regardless to the tax deductibility status of their transaction(s).
Contacts Info Block
The contacts info block displays 3 key metrics about your database:
Recurring Donors
This is the number of contacts in your database that have an active recurring transaction (whether the recurring transaction was created through the Kindful donation plugin, the Kindful donation pages, or imported through another process.
It includes only Active Contacts. Archived Contacts are not included.
It includes both Contacts with an Active Online Recurring Transaction (typically paid via Credit Card or ACH), and Contacts with an Active Offline Recurring Transaction (typically paid via a paper check mailed into your organization.)
Side note: By default, Offline Recurring Transactions is not included in your Kindful account. If you are interested in utilizing this feature (for example, because you have Donors who have committed to mailing you a check every month), then please talk to support@kindful.com about how to gain access to this feature.
If you don’t have any active contacts with an active recurring transaction in your database, then this metric will be zero. Otherwise, you will see the relevant contact count, and you can click on the number to view a list of the relevant contacts.
Total Donors
This is the number of active contacts in your database that have at least one successful transaction. It does not include archived contacts. It’s based upon the “Has Transaction: Yes” contact filter, which, if you’re familiar with it: does not include contacts who have only soft credits but no transactions, or only non-cash gifts but no Transactions.
If you don’t have any active contacts with at least one successful transaction in your database, then this metric will be zero. Otherwise, you will see the relevant contact count, and you can click on the number to view a list of the relevant contacts.
Total Contacts
This is the number of active contacts in your database (regardless to whether or not they have ever made a transaction (or any other activity type). It does not include archived contacts. If your Kindful plan includes a number of contacts, this is the metric that number is based upon.
If you don’t have any active contacts in your database, then this metric will be zero. Otherwise, you will see the relevant contact count, and you can click on the number to view the list of all (active) contacts in your database.
Acquisition Info Block
The contacts info block displays 3 key metrics about your database:
New Contacts This Month
This is the number of contacts created in your database this calendar month who have not donated.
This metric references the “Join Date” Contact field (sometimes referred to as the “Created Date” contact field) in order to determine which contacts are considered “new” this month. This metric also references the “Has Donated” contact filter, therefore, in this context, only a “hard money” transaction factors in. If a new contact has been soft credited, but has not given a “hard money” transaction, they will appear in this metric. Similarly, if a new contact has given a non-cash gift, but has not given a “hard money” transaction, they will appear in this metric.
If a contact is new this month and they have donated (meaning they have given a “hard money” transaction), then they are not included in this metric; in that case they would be included in the “New Donors This Month” metric instead. Archived Contacts are not included in this metric.
New Donors This Month
This is the number of active contacts in your database who donated for the first time this calendar month.
If a contact has donated for the first time this month, they are included in this metric regardless to their “Join Date” (sometimes referred to as “Created Date”) in Kindful. This means that a new donor may have been created in your database this month or a prior month, and as long as their first donation was this month, then they are included in this metric.
Archived contacts are not included in this metric. In this context, soft credits and non-cash gifts do not count towards a “first” donation.
For example, Devin Dohner gave 100$ to the Sea Turtles Organization on April 1, 2018. This is the first record of any “hard money” transaction in Kindul for Devin Dohner, even though Devin was added to the database in January. Therefore Devin is counted as New Donor This Month in April 2018.
Note that on the first day of a new calendar month, this metric is cleared out / starts over. For example, your organization may have added 100 Donors in April as of April 30th. On May 1st, New Donors This Month will start over at zero.
New Donors Past 12 Months
This is the number of contacts in your database who donated for the first time within the past 12 calendar months.
If a contact has donated for the first time in the past 12 calendar months, then they are included in this metric regardless to their “Join Date” (sometimes referred to as “Created Date”) in Kindful. This means that a new donor may have been created in your database in the past 12 calendar months or a prior prior to that, and as long as their first donation was within the past 12 calendar months, then they are included in this metric.
Archived contacts are not included in this metric. In this context, soft credits and non-cash gifts do not count towards a “first” donation.
Retention Info Block
Retention Rate
An Organization’s Retention Rate is defined as “the number of donors with one or more gifts in both periods 1 and 2, divided by the number of donors with one or more gifts in period 1”, where periods 2 is the past 12 calendar months, and period 1 is the 12 calendar months before that. Archived contacts are not included in this metric.
For more information about the Retention Rate metric please see this helpful article.
Last Gave 12 Months Ago
This metric is the count of contacts who have given 12 calendar months ago, but not since then. Archived contacts are not included in this metric. You may click on the metric to see which contacts are included. You may want to take action, such as add the contacts to group and email them using your integrated email marketing client (Emma, Mailchimp, or Constant Contact).
Upgrade Info Block
Upgraded Donors
This metric displays a count of all donors who gave during both the past 12 calendar months (period 2) and the 12 calendar months prior to that (period 1), and whose total giving during period 2 is greater than their total giving during period 1.
Please note that the Upgraded Donors metric is recalculated (refreshed) once an hour.
For more information about the Upgraded Donors metric please see this helpful article.
Updating Data
Having a donor management system like Kindful is essential when you have data in multiple source systems. Kindful does the hard work of keeping your data current and in sync with these systems. One thing to consider when looking at your dashboard metrics is that it may take a few minutes for these metrics to update after importing data from a csv file, or manually entering data, or from the point where Kindful receives data from a third party system. Of further note, the resulting metrics from contact merge may not be available until the next day. In other words, if you merge 2 contact records in Kindful, you may not see your relevant metrics update until the next day.
Transactions Year over Year Graph
The Transactions Year over Year graph shows 3 lines illustrating your organization’s revenue trends, totaled by month. Only successful transactions are taken into account.
Fiscal YTD Fund Distribution
The Fiscal YTD Fund chart displays the top 4 funds in your Kindful account, based upon total transactions for the current fiscal year.
Your organization’s fiscal year is determined by the “Fiscal Year End Month” field found in your Organization Details page. For example, if your Fiscal Year End Month is “12” and this is April 2018, then the Current Fiscal Year for your organization is “2018” and it started on 1/1/2018. Of note, on the first day of a new fiscal year, (assuming you have not manually entered any “future dated transactions”), this info block will not contain any data.
If your organization has 5 or more funds with transactions in the current fiscal year, then there will be an “other” line with the total of all of the other funds with transactions in the current fiscal year.
To understand the visuals (the lines with a gray background and colored foreground) know that the gray portion of each line represents 100% of the total transactions for the current fiscal year.
The sum of all of the displayed lines will add up to (roughly) 100%; note that due to rounding, the total might not be exactly 100%. Note: If you have deleted a Fund with transactions in the current fiscal year (typically this is not something you would do), then that Fund will still show in this chart.
If you disable a Fund, that will not remove it from the totals shown on the Dashboard.
Fiscal YTD Campaign Distribution
The Fiscal YTD Campaign chart displays the top 4 campaigns in your Kindful account, based upon total transactions for the current fiscal year.
Your organization’s fiscal year is determined by the “Fiscal Year End Month” field found in your Organization Details page. For example, if your Fiscal Year End Month is “12” and this is April 2018, then the Current Fiscal Year for your organization is “2018” and it started on 1/1/2018. Of note, on the first day of a new fiscal year, (assuming you have not manually entered any “future dated transactions”), this info block will not contain any data.
If your organization has 5 or more campaigns with transactions in the current fiscal year, then there will be an “Other” line with the total of all of the other campaigns with transactions in the current fiscal year.
To understand the visuals (the lines with a gray background and colored foreground) know that the gray portion of each line represents 100% of the total transactions for the current fiscal year.
The sum of all of the displayed lines will add up to (roughly) 100%; note that (due to rounding) the total might not be exactly 100%. Note: If you have archived a campaign with transactions in the current fiscal year (typically this is not something you would do), then that campaign will still show in this chart.
If you disable a Campaign, that will not remove it from the totals shown on the Dashboard.
Donor Pyramid
The Donor Pyramid is a chart with three tiers. Each tier represents a collection of contacts. All of the contacts within a particular tier have a transaction total that falls within a unique range, based upon the dataset.
For more information about how the Donor Pyramid is calculated please see this helpful article.
Recurring Transactions Info Block
This section of the dashboard gives you a forward looking view of upcoming scheduled recurring donations. If your account has enabled Offline Recurring donations, they will be included here.
First, you will see the number of remaining upcoming recurring transactions scheduled for the remainder of this calendar month.
Second, the total number of recurring transactions scheduled for the the next calendar month is displayed, along with the dollar amount.
Note that your ability to collect upon these recurring transactions depends upon the donor’s billing profile being “up to date”.
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