At some point in every campaign, someone asks the question. A board member, a CEO, a head of fundraising who needs to report to a committee next week. How is it going? What is working? Are we on track?
For many fundraising teams, answering that question honestly requires hours of work. Pulling data from multiple platforms, reconciling figures that do not quite match, building a spreadsheet that approximates the truth and hoping no one asks a follow-up question that requires starting over.
The problem is not that nonprofit teams are bad at measurement. It is that the data they need to measure well is scattered across systems that were never designed to talk to each other. Your email platform knows about open rates. Your fundraising platform knows about donations. Your CRM knows about relationships. None of them know about everything.
Win 6 is about bringing all of that together into a single reporting environment that gives you, your team, and your leadership a live, accurate view of what matters.
The difference between a report and a dashboard
These two words are often used interchangeably, but they serve distinct purposes and it is worth being clear on the difference before building either.
A report answers a specific question. How many donations came in during October? Which email in our appeal sequence had the highest click rate? How many fundraisers reached their goal during last month's event? A report is precise, focused, and typically used to investigate or evaluate something specific.
A dashboard gives you an ongoing view across multiple questions at once. Rather than answering one thing in depth, it surfaces the metrics that matter most so you can see at a glance whether things are healthy, where attention is needed, and how performance is trending over time.
Both are valuable. The most effective teams use reports to dig into specifics and dashboards to maintain awareness without having to dig every time.
Why multi-source reporting changes everything
Most reporting tools show you one slice of the picture. Your email platform tells you about opens and clicks. Your fundraising platform tells you about donations. Your event tool tells you about registrations. But none of them can show you how these things connect.
Because Ortto connects to multiple data sources, your dashboards can pull in data from across your third-party platforms, not just your email campaigns. This gives you a single view that reflects everything happening across your fundraising ecosystem. You can see email performance alongside donation data alongside audience movement, all in one place.
This is what makes the difference between a dashboard that confirms what you already suspected and one that reveals something you did not know.
What to measure and why
The metrics worth tracking vary depending on your role and what you are responsible for. A campaign manager cares about different numbers to a head of fundraising or a chief executive.
For campaign managers and digital marketers
These are the metrics that tell you whether your day-to-day activity is working and where to adjust.
Email performance by audience segment. Open rates and click rates are useful, but the more important question is whether different segments respond differently to the same message. If your lapsed donor segment has a significantly lower open rate than your active donor segment, that is a signal about either your subject lines, your sending frequency, or the relevance of what you are sending to that group.
Journey completion rates. For each automated journey you have built, what proportion of supporters complete all steps? Where do people drop off? A high drop-off after a specific email suggests the message or timing needs revisiting.
Audience growth and movement. Are your active donor and active fundraiser audiences growing or shrinking? Are supporters moving from lapsed back to active after your re-engagement campaigns? Watching these audiences shift over time tells you whether your programs are working at a structural level, not just in individual campaigns.
Capture conversion rates. For each form, pop-up, or survey you have deployed, how many people are completing it? Low completion rates on a preference centre or sign-up form often point to friction in the design rather than lack of interest.
For heads of fundraising
These metrics connect marketing activity to revenue outcomes and program health.
Donor retention rate. The proportion of donors from one period who gave again in the next. This is one of the most important numbers in fundraising and one that is often tracked too infrequently. A dashboard that shows retention trending week by week makes it possible to act on early warning signs rather than discovering problems at year end.
Regular giving health. How many active recurring donors do you have? What is the average gift value? How many failed payments occurred this month? How many cancellations? A regular giving dashboard that shows these figures in real time gives you visibility into a revenue stream that is often managed reactively rather than proactively.
Appeal performance against target. During an active appeal, a dashboard showing cumulative donations, average gift value, donation count, and performance by audience segment tells you whether you are on track and which segments are driving results. Mid-campaign insight means you can redirect effort while there is still time to make a difference.
Fundraiser performance for peer-to-peer events. Total amount raised, average amount per fundraiser, proportion of fundraisers who have received at least one donation, and top performer highlights. Combined with the fundraiser engagement scores from Win 2, this gives you a complete picture of event momentum.
For leadership and boards
These are the high-level indicators that tell the story of organisational health and program effectiveness.
Total revenue by channel and program. How much came from appeals, regular giving, peer-to-peer, and events respectively? How does this compare to the same period last year?
New supporter acquisition. How many new donors, fundraisers, and event participants were added this period? Where did they come from?
Supporter lifetime value trends. Are supporters giving more over time, or less? Is average gift value increasing or declining? These trends speak to the long-term health of the program in a way that single-campaign metrics cannot.
Building your reports first
Reports are the building blocks of your dashboards. Before you assemble a dashboard view, you need to create the individual reports that will sit inside it.
Three reports that give you immediate visibility into appeal performance:
Email campaign performance. A column chart tracking sent, opened, and clicked email activities across your appeal. This tells you how your appeal emails are performing at each stage of the engagement funnel and whether supporters are taking action beyond just opening.
Donations by source. A pie chart showing donations received, grouped by UTM source or campaign source. This tells you which channels are driving the most gifts during your appeal, so you can invest more in what is working and reconsider what is not.
New vs. returning donors. A column chart showing donations received, grouped by total donation count (one donation vs. two or more). This tells you whether your appeal is bringing in new supporters or re-engaging existing donors, which has real implications for your acquisition and retention strategy.
Once each report is saved, switch it to dynamic so it collects data going forward rather than showing a static snapshot. Dynamic reports start collecting data from the moment you switch them, so creating them early means you will have meaningful trends to review as your campaign progresses.
Then bring them together in a dashboard
Once your reports are saved and set to dynamic, bring them together into a single view. A dashboard is where individual reports become a story about what is happening across your campaign.
Ortto provides dashboard templates for appeals and peer-to-peer fundraising to help you get started quickly. These templates are fully customisable: you can add, remove, and rearrange components to reflect what matters most for your specific programs.
A practical approach to building your first dashboard:
Start with a question, not a metric. Rather than adding every available data point, identify the two or three things you most need to know on any given day. For an appeal campaign, that might be total donations to date, email click rate, and which audience segment is performing best. Build the dashboard around those questions first and add depth over time.
Separate operational views from leadership views. The dashboard your campaign manager checks each morning does not need to be the same one you share with your board. Building separate views for different audiences means each one contains exactly what that person needs, nothing more and nothing less.
Set it up before your campaign launches, not after. A dashboard built during a campaign is built under pressure. The metrics you add in a rush are often the ones easiest to find, not necessarily the ones most important to track. Setting up reporting infrastructure before a campaign launches means you capture data from day one and can act on it throughout.
Your end-of-year appeal dashboard might show real-time donation numbers, email performance, audience engagement, and which segments are responding best. Instead of waiting days for manual reports, you can see immediately what is working and adjust your approach mid-campaign if needed.
Sharing reports across your organisation
One of the practical benefits of a centralised reporting environment is that it removes the bottleneck of one person producing reports for everyone else.
When dashboards are live and shared, a fundraising manager can check appeal performance without asking the digital team. A CEO can review regular giving health without requesting a data extract. A board member can see program outcomes before a meeting without a last-minute manual preparation exercise.
This shift from reporting on demand to reporting by default saves time across the whole organisation and raises the quality of decisions at every level, because everyone is working from the same current data rather than different versions of it pulled at different times. Reports can be shared with leadership and used to inform next steps without hours of manual preparation.
Closing the loop on the six wins
This final win completes a cycle that begins with data and ends with insight.
Win 1 unified your supporter data so you could see the full picture of every person in your community. Win 2 gave you scores to understand where each supporter stands. Win 3 built dynamic audiences so you could reach the right people without manual effort. Win 4 launched journeys that respond to supporter behaviour in real time. Win 5 added the communication tools to support your fundraisers, volunteers, and participants throughout their journey.
Win 6 closes the loop. The reporting and dashboard layer is what lets you see whether all of that activity is working, where to improve, and how to demonstrate impact to the people who need to understand it.
Each win builds on the ones before it. And together, they represent a shift from guesswork to growth.
Try it in your 14-day trial
In the 6 Step Guide to Ortto at the end of the playbook, Win 6 has two phases. First, you create three reports that give you visibility into your tax appeal performance: email campaign performance, donations by source, and new vs. returning donors. After saving each report, you switch it to dynamic so it collects data going forward.
Then, you bring those reports together into a single Tax Appeal Dashboard. Create a new dashboard, add your three reports, and arrange them in a layout that makes sense for your team. You now have a single view that shows email engagement, donation channel performance, and donor acquisition at a glance. Share it with your team or check it daily as your appeal progresses.
This is the final article in the Win series. To explore all six wins together, download the full Ortto for Fundraisers playbook or book a conversation with the Ortto nonprofit team to discuss how the platform fits your organisation's specific needs and goals.
