Rolling 12-Month Donor and Giving Trends
This dashboard-format analytic tracks rolling 12-month donor counts, gifts, and giving plus per-segment gift benchmarks, drawn from analysis QX71.
How to use the Rolling 12-Month Donor and Giving Trends
This is a dashboard-format analytic that smooths out seasonality by looking at your results on a rolling 12-month basis over the last three years. It is built on the data from analysis QX71, which produces one row per rolling-12-month month, so every point already contains a full year of activity and month-to-month swings from seasonal appeals disappear.
The Engagement Trend tab tracks active donor counts, total gifts, and gifts per donor over time, which together tell you whether your base is growing, giving more often, or quietly thinning. The Giving Trend tab tracks total giving and the median gift, and reading those two lines side by side tells you whether revenue changes are coming from gift size or from donor volume. The Segment Gift Benchmarks tab shows the 75th-percentile gift for the Top, Middle, and Bottom tiers, giving you a stable reference for what a strong gift looks like in each segment.
These measures matter because rolling figures reveal the underlying direction of travel that monthly numbers obscure. A rolling active-donor line that is bending downward is an early warning that no single strong month will show you.
You should refresh this monthly and review it with your development director as a health check on the overall program. Watch the rolling active-donor and gifts-per-donor lines for early inflection, and use the per-segment 75th-percentile benchmarks to set ask amounts and to calibrate what an upgrade looks like in each tier.
Measure success by a rising or stable rolling active-donor count, steady or growing gifts per donor, and per-segment benchmark gifts that hold or climb over time.
Analytic ID: QX259
Analytic Name: Rolling 12-Month Donor and Giving Trends
Focus: 3.3: Dashboards; 1.1: Year-over-Year Donation Trends
Type: Dashboard Style
Segments: Top, Middle, Bottom | Scope: Organization, Segment
Description: Dashboard showing rolling 12-month donor counts, gifts, and giving, plus per-segment 75th-percentile gift benchmarks over the last three years.
Key Question: How are donor engagement and giving evolving on a rolling 12-month basis, and how do gift-size benchmarks differ by segment?
Action: Watch the rolling trend for early shifts in donors, gifts, and per-segment gift size.