Attributing revenue to the campaign that earned it

Two campaigns sit side by side on the planning slide (the figures are invented, but the shape is a familiar one). The spring appeal raised $3,200 from 40 gifts in the month it ran. The regular-giving drive, which went out to a similar list a few weeks later, raised $450. The board has budget for one of them next year, and on that slide the decision makes itself.

It is probably the wrong decision. A report that counts only the gifts made in a campaign's own month undervalues every campaign that recruits regular donors, and an organisation that budgets from it will keep funding the appeals that look busy over the ones that built its income. The fault sits in where many reports stop counting, and it is fixable.

What the $450 turns into over a year

The regular-giving drive recruited 15 donors at $30 a month. Its first month is 15 times $30, which is the $450 on the slide. Suppose five of those donors stop after four months, which is a pessimistic assumption for illustration rather than a sector figure, and the other ten give for the whole year. The ten bring in $3,600 over twelve months and the five bring in $600 before they stop. The drive raised $4,200 in its first year, against the appeal's $3,200.

The appeal's $3,200 was also mostly finished on the day the report was written. Some of those 40 donors will give again, and a good welcome sequence lifts that number, but each repeat gift has to be asked for and earned. The drive's ten remaining donors carry into the second year without another campaign being sent at all. That predictability is why one recurring donor is worth more than several one-off gifts of the same total, and a first-month report leaves it out completely.

Where a renewal loses its campaign

Many organisations can attribute the first gift. The donor clicks a link with a tracking code, lands on a form, gives, and the code is stored on that donation. The renewal is where the trail goes cold. A monthly charge is a new payment created by the payment processor on a schedule, weeks after the donor last saw a campaign email, and in many setups it arrives carrying no campaign at all. The code lived on the first transaction or in the URL the donor clicked, and nothing copied it forward.

In those setups, month two of the drive's income lands as untagged regular giving. By month six it is part of the general regular-giving line, and the campaign that recruited those donors is credited with its first $450 and nothing after. Rebuilding the link afterwards means matching each renewal back to the first gift of the same regular gift by hand, a spreadsheet job that someone has to remember to repeat every quarter.

The fix is to store the campaign on the regular gift itself rather than on its first payment, so that every renewal inherits it. Together does it this way for campaigns on the Raise plan: every gift made through a campaign's link is attributed to the campaign, and when that gift is a regular one, each later renewal carries the same campaign. The campaign's raised figure and its target both count those renewals, net of refunds, so the drive's number keeps growing on its own page in month two and in month twelve. A donation form's own target works the same way, counting renewals from recurring donors who started on that form. One limit: a donor who saw the campaign email and then gave from the website, without using the link, is not attributed to it.

Following the gift forward by campaign also changes which donors a team watches. A drive whose recruits mostly stop in month three has a different problem from one whose recruits stay, and the first-month report shows both as $450. Once the decline is visible by month, a team can ask whether those donors were offered a pause before they cancelled, or whether the drive recruited the wrong people.

Email clicks are weaker evidence of what a campaign raised

Not every attribution is as clean as a gift made through a campaign's own link. Together's report on a bulk email send shows what the people who clicked went on to give: every confirmed gift a donor made within seven days of first clicking a link in that email, through any form or link. That catches the donor who clicked the appeal, closed the tab, and gave from the website two days later, which link attribution misses.

It also counts some gifts twice. A donor who clicked two emails in the same week can have one gift credited to both sends, so the column across several sends can add up to more than the organisation actually raised, and the report says so plainly.

A team should budget from link attribution, renewals included. Click attribution helps decide which subject line or story to run again. Added across sends and presented as a campaign total, it makes the email programme look more productive than the bank balance shows.

Why the busy appeal keeps winning the budget

First-month reporting rewards whatever produces the biggest early spike, and an appeal tends to produce one. Regular-giving recruitment shows up as a small first number that only becomes large later, which on a first-month report reads as a campaign that did not work. A segment is only worth building if it changes what the team does next, and the same test applies to attribution: a figure that follows the regular gifts forward will sometimes reverse a decision, as it would on the planning slide above.

Checking your own reports before the next planning round

A team can test its own setup with one regular gift. Take a donor who started a monthly gift through a past campaign, find their sixth renewal in the CRM or the payment processor's export, and see whether it still names the campaign. If it does, the campaign report can be rerun on income to date rather than income in the campaign's month, and the comparison on the planning slide changes. If it does not, the attribution stops at the first gift, and that is the gap to close before the next drive is judged against the next appeal.

The rerun itself is modest work: last year's campaigns, the gifts each one recruited, and everything those gifts have paid since. It will not settle every budget argument, and some appeals will still come out ahead. The regular-giving drive, though, gets judged on the same twelve months as everything else.