Donor Retention & Participation-Rate Scorecard
The 'measure what you keep' instrument for an advancement shop: computes donor-retention, participation rate, and young-alumni retention bands alongside dollars, and pinpoints where donors leak.
Draft: pending review
This starter document is signed off by a CFRE reviewer before it ships. The guardrails below define that review.
What’s inside
- Auto-calculating retention, new, reactivated, and lapsed metrics with prior-year comparisons
- Overall and by-segment participation-rate tracker
- Young-alumni retention curve by class-year band and the '0-5 years out' cliff view
- Board-ready dashboard framing retention as the leading indicator of long-term dollars
Legal & ethical guardrails
The sector-specific compliance points this document must honor.
- Cohort analytics must be built from fundraising/donor data, not FERPA-protected educational records
- Publicly reported retention rates should follow CASE counting definitions so figures are not misleading
- Individual donor data is confidential and subject to the donor Bill of Rights and privacy law
- Peer benchmarking must use permissible, properly licensed data sources
Held for professional review.
The native XLSX and full working text ship only after sign-off by a CFRE reviewer on this exact version. The summary and review requirements remain visible in the meantime.
Not legal advice. Not legal, tax, or accounting advice. The Fundraising Co. provides educational fundraising materials and is not a law firm; nothing here creates an attorney–client relationship or substitutes for advice from professionals licensed in your jurisdiction. Laws and IRS rules vary by state and change over time. Review every document with qualified counsel before use.