“How much will you raise?” The importance of benchmarking and Return on Investment fundraising data

"How much should we be raising for our investment in fundraising?" is a question I'm asked very frequently. I tend to bite my tongue and avoid facetious answers like "how long is a piece of string?" because it really can be very complicated. But it's an important question that needs answering, of course and (ever since Institute of Fundraising's Fundratios project hit the dust in 2013) there's not been enough good data to help fundraisers and charity decision makers (senior managers) to work out which areas of fundraising they should be investing in, and how they might perform. Not enough good data, that is, until fundraising consultancy LarkOwl stepped into the breach. This blog takes a quick look at their 2020 findings, recently published, but you should check them out for yourself, and definitely contribute to their research for next year, because the bigger the sample size the better. Return on Investment (often referred to as ROI) is a simple but important calculation loved but also feared by fundraisers and finance directors alike. Essentially, if you raise £10 by spending £1 on a particular activity or income stream, your ROI for that event or type of fundraising is £10. So, simply put, your ROI needs to be £1 if you're breaking even. It's easy to calculate retrospectively, but there are two questions that you need good data to answer: How well are we doing compared to other charities? Essentially, this is known as benchmarking.How much should we be