The platform
A donor and marketing analytics platform your team reads any day.
The product is one platform, built on your own data and open whenever a question comes up: more than sixty charts across contacts, donations, and campaigns, with marketing data read next to the gift file. An AI analysis layer is being added on top. Once a quarter, the same data produces a board-grade strategy review. Below is the whole platform, shown for a fictional organization.
Sample figures · Rivermark Relief · fictional organization
The platform
Sixty-plus charts across contacts, donations, and campaigns.
One platform, every chart built on your file and pre-computed, so a view is on screen instantly. Two dozen filter attributes narrow any chart to the donors you mean, and each one exports to CSV in a click. Row-level access keeps each organization to its own data.
Contacts
Lifecycle
Acquire, convert, retain, and reactivate, each as its own view
Segmentation
Every contact sorted into a lifecycle segment, filterable and exportable
Major-donor portfolio
Top donors, their giving flow, and the next ask
Donations
Income
Revenue by period, fund, and gift type, reconciled to the gift file
Retention and survival
How long donors stay, cohort by cohort, with confidence intervals
Recurring health
Recurring share, failed payments, and what recovery is worth
Campaigns
Campaign performance
Every campaign and appeal, with what it raised and what it kept
Marketing attribution
Which channels, sends, and promotions brought the gifts, read from Google Analytics and your email platform
Email performance
Opens, click-through, and click-to-open by campaign
Modeled lifetime value per donor
$0Across 42,000 active donors on the file.
24-month survival
Scorecard
- 24-month survival70%
- Net dollar retention104%
- Recurring share of revenue38%
- Median annual gift$95
- Reactivation rate9%
Illustrative — sample data for a fictional organization.
Marketing economics
True cost of acquisition, by channel and campaign.
Google Analytics and your email platform are read next to the gift file, so every channel, campaign, promotion, and appeal carries its real economics: what it cost, what it returned, which donors it acquired, and what they became worth over the following two years.
7.9×
return on the best-performing channel, counted on what its donors gave over two years
| Channel | CAC | 24-mo value | Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| $18 | $142 | 7.9× | |
| Organic search | $24 | $118 | 4.9× |
| Referral | $31 | $126 | 4.1× |
| Paid social | $52 | $96 | 1.8× |
| Paid search | $68 | $88 | 1.3× |
Illustrative — sample data for a fictional organization.
The AI layer
Ask the file a question, read the answer with its work.
New this year: an analysis layer on top of the platform. Ask a question in plain language and read the answer with the query and chart behind it. A monitoring agent watches the file between reviews and writes a short brief when a metric moves. Nothing is a black box.
Ask in plain language
Type a question the way a development director would ask it, such as which mid-tier donors slipped last quarter, and read the answer with the list and the query behind it.
AI briefs
A monitoring agent reads the file as new gifts land and writes a short brief when a metric moves, in plain language, with the query that produced it attached.
Traceable to source
Every number on every screen traces back to the gift that produced it. Click through and the record is right there, so a board member's question has an answer in seconds.
Which donors are at risk of lapsing?
Scanning 48,201 gift rows · 3 sources
3,140 donors are more likely than not to lapse in the next six months, about 7% of the active file. They gave a median of two gifts in the last 24 months, and their last gift was more than eight months ago. The largest group sits in the $25 to $99 first-gift band, where a second-gift ask was never sent.
Illustrative — sample data for a fictional organization.
What the platform produces
A quarterly review a fund manager would recognize.
Once a quarter, the same charts become a board-grade brief: twenty-five pages structured the way a fund writes about a portfolio. A steward's letter opens it, six numbered acts carry the argument, and a methodology appendix shows the work.
Act 00 · The file as a trust
Steward's letter
The cover states the size of the file in one number and frames the year ahead as protecting a base you already hold. Rivermark's file opens the review as a $48M trust, with three moves named before any chart appears.
Rivermark Relief — Donor & Fundraising Strategy Review
$48M
Rivermark's donor file is a $48M trust. Over the next four quarters, here is how we would protect the base you hold today and grow the giving it has earned. Six metrics tell the story. Three moves change it.
Act 01 · Situation, complication, question, answer
Executive summary
One page in SCQA form. What the file looks like today, what is quietly working against it, the question the board should be asking, and the answer stated as three moves, each sized in dollars.
- Situation
- Rivermark's file gave $10.8M last year across 42,000 active donors, with recurring giving at 38% of revenue.
- Complication
- Gross donor retention slipped to 64%, and net dollar retention sits just above 100%. The base is holding by a thin margin.
- Question
- Where does a year of effort return the most, without spending into donors who were going to give anyway?
- Answer
- Three moves: recover involuntary churn, re-sequence the second-gift ask, and open a mid-tier upgrade path. Together they defend an estimated $1.4M.
Act 02 · Six metrics, red-amber-green
Scorecard
Each metric carries its value, its trend, a benchmark, a status light, and the single first move it points to. A reader sees the whole health of the file before turning the page.
- Gross donor retention64%
- Net dollar retention104%
- Recurring share of revenue38%
- Payment-failure rate6.8%
- Top-decile revenue share58%
- Reactivation rate9%
Act 03 · Opening to closing, reconciled to the dollar
Revenue bridge
A waterfall walks from last year's revenue to this year's, splitting the change into new donors, reactivations, upgrades, downgrades, and lapse. Every bar sums back to the closing total.
Act 04 · Kaplan-Meier curves and churn hazard
Retention and survival
How long donors stay, month by month, with confidence bands that widen honestly as a cohort thins. The hazard view shows the months where the risk of leaving spikes, so the second-gift window is easy to see.
Act 05 · Lifetime value by tier, concentration risk
File economics
Each giving tier gets its own lifetime-value estimate. A Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient show how much revenue rides on the top few donors, and what one departure would cost.
Lifetime value by tier
Concentration
Act 06 · Where giving is, and where it could be
Geography
Revenue by state and metro, ranked against population and past response. The gap between the two is the map of where a campaign has room to grow.
Revenue by state — sample
- Texas18%112
- California15%88
- Florida11%121
- Georgia8%104
- Ohio6%96
- North Carolina5%118
Share of giving, and an opportunity index against population and past response. Sample data.
Act 07 · Three scenarios, sequenced by impact and effort
Forecast and roadmap
A base, low, and high projection for the next four quarters, then the moves that separate them, plotted by expected impact against the effort to run them. The low-effort, high-impact moves come first.
Three-scenario forecast
Impact by effort
- 1Dunning + card updater
- 2Second-gift series
- 3Mid-tier upgrade path
- 4Win-back at month 14
- 5Major-gift pipeline
The analysis workbook
Twenty-three sheets under the twenty-five pages.
The review states the conclusions. The workbook shows every cohort, band, and reconciliation behind them, so a skeptic on your team can check the arithmetic.
23 sheets of working analysis
Cohort survival matrices
Every signup cohort tracked month by month, with Kaplan-Meier survival and Greenwood confidence intervals per cohort. The matrix shows which acquisition periods produced donors who stayed.
| Cohort | M1 | M6 | M12 | M24 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 Q1 | 94% | 84% | 79% | 70% |
| 2023 Q3 | 92% | 81% | 74% | 66% |
| 2024 Q1 | 95% | 86% | 80% | — |
Renewal by price point
First-year renewal split by the amount of the first gift. Low-band and high-band donors renew at very different rates, and the sheet names the bands where a small ask change moves the most donors.
| First gift | Renewed | Median 2nd gift |
|---|---|---|
| $1–$24 | 31% | $20 |
| $25–$49 | 44% | $35 |
| $50–$99 | 58% | $60 |
| $100+ | 67% | $150 |
Campaign-cohort economics
Each acquisition campaign followed as a cohort: cost to acquire, first-year revenue, and the survival-weighted value it is on track to return. The sheet ranks campaigns by what they actually kept, not what they raised on day one.
| Campaign | Cost/donor | Yr-1 rev | 3-yr value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spring appeal | $38 | $61 | $148 |
| Matching campaign | $52 | $74 | $121 |
| Year-end | $29 | $48 | $132 |
Reactivation economics
Winning a lapsed donor back against acquiring a cold one, compared on cost and expected value. For most files the lapsed donor is cheaper and worth more, and the sheet says by how much.
| Path | Cost/donor | 12-mo value | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Win-back (lapsed) | $21 | $84 | 4.0× |
| Cold acquisition | $46 | $58 | 1.3× |
Benchmark reconciliation
Your retention and recurring metrics placed next to the M+R Benchmarks and the Bain and Reichheld retention research, with the definition each source uses spelled out so the comparison is honest.
| Metric | This file | Benchmark |
|---|---|---|
| Gross donor retention | 64% | 63% (M+R) |
| Recurring share | 38% | 31% (M+R) |
| Yr-1 new-donor retention | 39% | 40% (M+R) |
Every row above is sample data for a fictional organization.
Sources
We read the systems you already run on.
Contacts and gifts come from the CRM and payment tools you use, and the marketing side comes from Google Analytics and your email platform, so giving and campaign data land together. Most files are read from a CSV export, so there is no integration project to schedule.
Across the organizations we serve, gifts and marketing data arrive from nine or more CRMs, payment systems, and analytics tools. New sources are added as organizations bring them.
See the review rebuilt on your own file.
Send contacts and gifts, and a strategist walks through the analysis the same day.