This is Charitology’s proposed workflow, not a tested intervention or a claim that this method is best. Adapt it to your mission, audience and capacity. The sources below offer context and further reading; they have not validated this playbook.
Goal and fit
Choose one job: reach an audience, acquire permissioned contacts or invite donations. State which result justifies the spend; do not switch the goal after seeing a cheaper metric.
Consider a small test only when the organization can absorb the full loss, maintain the destination and review the provider setup. An advertising credit does not supply staff capacity, donor permission or evidence of return.
Count the full costs
- Include media spend, creative work, agency or management fees, landing-page maintenance and payment charges.
- Allow time for moderation, consent handling, reporting and reconciliation. Set a cash ceiling that someone is authorized to stop.
Before you start
- Check provider eligibility and current policies in the provider account. Confirm who can spend, change targeting and pause the campaign.
- Document the proposed audience and avoid targeting that exposes sensitive personal circumstances. Review tracking and data sharing before enabling them.
- Choose a primary outcome, attribution window and stop date. Record the existing baseline and the uncertainties it cannot settle.
A proposed workflow
- Write one truthful offer or request and create a matching, accessible landing page with a clear organization identity.
- Test the destination, donation route and consent choices. Check that refusal and cancellation work as clearly as acceptance.
- Approve the budget, creative and audience as one version. Keep the provider campaign identifiers and a screenshot or copy of the approved material.
- Launch within the agreed cap and review spend and operational problems on a fixed schedule. Pause broken routes or inappropriate placements.
- At the end of the window, obtain actual charges and reconcile gifts. Record cross-channel duplicates and refunds before calculating results.
What to measure
- For contact acquisition, define a valid permissioned contact and its full acquisition cost; a submitted address alone is not a qualified relationship.
- For donations, show confirmed attributed revenue and all included costs. Report provider attribution separately from any independent comparison.
- M+R advertising budget relative to online revenue is a spending ratio. It is neither return on ad spend nor proof of incremental fundraising.
Keep the uncertainty visible
Try a bounded experiment
Hypothesis: this message can reach an appropriate audience at an acceptable full cost. Where feasible, plan a valid holdout or randomized comparison with qualified help. Otherwise label the trial descriptive and do not call attributed revenue a causal return.
Write the decision rule, spending limit and review date before you begin. Keep negative and inconclusive results. An improvement in fundraising is a separate question from an improvement in the outcomes of the work funded.
Follow through
- Welcome contacts only for the purpose they chose, and carry withdrawals and suppression into later audience selections.
- Retain creative, spend and reconciliation references so a future reviewer can reproduce the calculation.
- Decide to stop, revise or repeat against the original rule, including staff burden and complaints.
Watch for
- Click volume can grow while confirmed gifts remain flat. Cheap reach can also reach the wrong audience.
- A platform dashboard, a credit balance or another charity’s results cannot establish that more spending is justified here.
Fundraising evidence
Results from practice
See who was included, what changed and when the team measured it. Each result describes one setting.
Editorial draft Randomized field experiment
Facebook video ads and gift revenue
The analysis covered 7,686 postal codes across Germany.
Comparison. Postal codes were assigned to a fundraising video ad campaign on Facebook or to a control group without those ads. Researchers counted gifts to the featured charity across donation channels and adjusted for past donations and local characteristics.
Observation window. 52 days, including the 14-day campaign and 38 days afterward.
| Comparison | Gift revenue |
|---|---|
| Average in control areas | €129.30 |
| Adjusted difference from control | +€17.65 |
The authors estimated €47,726 in extra gifts across the areas assigned ads. Their 90% confidence interval, a measure of uncertainty, ranged from €4,892 to €90,571.
Costs. The authors reported €33,700 in direct campaign costs. Full cash and staff-time costs are unknown.
Limit. The estimate is imprecise. The study also found signs that some giving shifted away from similar charities. This comparison covers one campaign and its 52-day window.
Share a de-identified result. The form opens a public GitHub issue. Include only aggregate results you have permission to publish, with the comparison and limits. Disappointing and inconclusive results are welcome.
Sources and their limits
These are starting points for your own review. Benchmarks describe particular cohorts; practice guidance and provider experiments answer different questions. No named-charity rating or universal return forecast is supplied.
M+R Benchmarks 2026: advertising
Describes nonprofit advertising budgets, channels and measurement practices, including the difficulty of attributing fundraising results.
Limit. Advertising budget relative to online revenue is not return on advertising spend. Platform attribution and reported channel revenue do not establish incremental or causal return.
M+R Benchmarks 2026: glossary
Defines benchmark measures and denominators, including delivered messages, click-through rates, fundraising response and donor categories.
Limit. A shared label does not guarantee that a provider export uses the same definition. Check the numerator, denominator, time window and exclusions before comparing.
NextAfter: fundraising experiments
A provider-run library organizes fundraising experiments by the element and outcome tested, alongside its research overview.
Limit. The library includes negative and inconclusive results. Individual designs, sample sizes, validity and effects were not independently reviewed here; a headline is not a transferable result.
NTEN: nonprofit peer community
Offers nonprofit technology community groups and local connections; the community platform requires a free account.
Limit. Peer discussions can help frame implementation questions. They are not controlled fundraising evidence, verified vendor performance or a guarantee that advice fits your organization.
Tried an approach and learned something? Share a public learning note with its context, costs and limitations. Keep donor identities and unpublished stories private.