Week 2 Update...

Wrapping up Week 2 of fundraising, we've added another $350 for a total of $1275! Thank you! That puts us at 26% of goal, which is down a bit from last year at this point - but a very nice amount for this early in the fundraising cycle! Let's keep it going! I've noticed some interesting differences from last year's fundraising, though...

I keep a detailed spreadsheet of fundraising activity. Here's an example of my "scorecard" page from last year's Bike MS fundraising...

Bike MS 2012 Scorecard

I track weekly fundraising totals, along with the weekly average I need to hit fundraising goals (recalculated weekly), and a trend line. There's a lot more that I track including:

• A list of donors and projected donors - people whom I can reasonably expect a donation from (last year's surprise donors are on this  year's list as projected donors)
• "What-if" modeling - fundraising predictions if my projected remaining donors contribute a minimum amount, average amount, or median amount
• Activities by type (facebook, email, face-to-face, etc) and dollars raised +1 day after the activity
• And a few other miscellaneous things...

After two full weeks of fundraising, I have found some interesting comparisons to last year:

• Fundraising amount ($) is down 36% from last year so far - but it's still early, and I also have some key activities that I have not yet done (such as a presentation to my coworkers)
• Number of donors is down 78% (!) from last year

These things tell me that I've gotten much fewer donations, but the average donation size if quite a bit higher than at this point last year. So, something is different this year, and I'm working on figuring out what that might be. Then again, it's so early in the fundraising cycle that this data may be completely useless :) 

Anyway, I thought that was interesting, and just wanted to share that with you...please let me know via comments if this kind of information is interesting to you, and if you'd like more details about any other aspects of my tracking/fundraising management...Thanks!