3 Challenges of Donation Channel Attribution — and How to Solve Them

In the nonprofit world, fundraising success often boils down to someone making a donation.

But because nonprofits are constantly running fundraising campaigns — likely across multiple channels ranging from direct mail and connected TV (CTV) to paid media — it’s important to know exactly how that donor came to make their gift.

That’s where channel attribution comes in.

“We want to make sure that the campaigns are as effective as possible, and that's why it's so important to do this analysis — to ensure that the right investment is in the right place,” Nancy Eiring, senior vice president of fundraising strategies at Fuse Fundraising, said.

Channel attribution is something that nonprofits are struggling with — and for good reason.

“It's a hot topic because there's a big disconnect in where people are spending their time and where marketing budgets go,” Natalie Stamer, co-owner and managing partner at Streetlight Digital, said. “Platforms that have mastered the art of claiming the credit for a click- or view-based attribution end up being the platforms where nonprofits spend their dollars, but they're not necessarily where nonprofits are seen.” 

Challenge: Multiple Touch Points

In an increasingly interconnected world where donors receive your nonprofit’s direct mail pieces, watch your organization’s videos on Instagram and get your nonprofit’s emails in their inboxes, it’s hard to keep track of which campaigns are successful.

Eiring posed the example of a donor who both sees an Instagram ad for your nonprofit and receives a direct mail piece around the same time they make a $25 online donation.

“Which one triggered the donation?” she asked. “You don't want to double count that $25 in both places. You want to make sure that you know that the direct mail could have influenced the paid media donation — or [the donor] could have received the direct mail piece and then was served the paid media. You just don't know which one had the influence on the donation.”

Additionally, you can’t always see the exact touch points through which a donor has engaged. Someone might follow your nonprofit on social media, but not be on your organization’s direct mailing list, or vice versa. Or they could have donated directly through your nonprofit’s website after seeing a direct response TV (DRTV) ad.

One answer to these conundrums is multitouch attribution, which is a way to analyze donations that assigns value to each of the various touch points where a donor potentially or definitively engages. So, instead of giving credit for a gift made through a paid media campaign to just that campaign, you would also give credit to the direct mail piece your organization sent the donor a month ago and to a DRTV ad that played in their area last week.

Challenge: Unsourced Online Gifts

Another challenge that you’ve likely encountered is when someone types your URL into their browser or searches the web for your organization, going directly to your website to make a donation. While it’s obviously great to see those donations come in, these situations leave you with two unanswered, possibly related questions: where did these donors learn about you, and which campaigns — if any — did they come into contact with?

“A donor could hear about you on a podcast, they could research you on Reddit, they could see a Tiktok video, they could ask ChatGPT,” Stamer said. “... But if any of those people see all those things and then they do a search for your organization and they make a donation, Google gets 100% of that credit. There's no view of all those other actions.”

A good starting point to remedy this is to perform a direct matchback analysis, which helps you connect donation data to your donor file.

Eiring pointed to an example involving direct mail. 

“You take the mail file,” she said. “You're doing direct source — naturally — from your campaign-level analysis, but then you match back any unsourced gifts. So, any gift that's coming over the transom in the mail, as well as any gift that is coming in through stock, death, IRA [individual retirement account] — as well as, if you have a URL inside that direct mail campaign or QR code — you're attributing those donations back.”

You should also do what Eiring called soft attribution. As opposed to a matchback analysis, which is more direct, soft attribution is used when you can’t assign a donation to a particular campaign unless you look at the list of people who were on the campaign list. Eiring said this is often used with online gifts (e.g., donations given after a Google search for your nonprofit) made by donors who happened to be part of a direct mail campaign.

“That's what we do for most of our organizations, not only for acquisition, but for appeals and renewals, because we know those donors are not staying in lanes,” Eiring said. “They are giving elsewhere through other channels, and we want to make sure that when we're looking at campaigns and evaluating their performance, we’re looking at all of the channels involved.”

Challenge: Difficulty Tracking Direct Mail

Testing is a critical element for assessing the influence of different channels, Stamer said. For example, Streetlight Digital recently did a test for a nonprofit that involved serving digital ads to a portion of the direct mail group, comparing those donors’ behaviors to the rest of the direct mail group that did not see the digital ad.

The result? The digital ads did help boost the direct mail campaign’s performance.

“Had we run the ads and not done the A/B test, they would have just said, ‘direct mail did great this month,’ and you can't see the reason behind it,” Stamer said. “You have to think about where marketing is going to show up in your reports and your results. So, is there a direct traffic increase if you're running something that can't be measured? Is there referral traffic from some earned media source or word of mouth? Are social mentions increasing? Is branded search volume increasing?”

Incrementality testing is also great for determining the influence of campaigns run on channels to which donations can’t be directly attributed.

“For instance, you might want to run digital ads in only one small, finite location — or maybe it's a CTV spot — and you can get specific with your audience segmentation there,” Stamer said. “Maybe you have a direct mail program that hits three states, five states, 50 states. Choose to run your CTV spot in only one location, only for the times that the mail is going to drop — a little before and a little after — and then measure those results against the results in the other locations.”

Best Practices for Channel Attribution

Now that you’re aware of some of the challenges channel attribution presents and their solutions, here are some general best practices for your channel attribution strategy.

In terms of conducting matchback analyses, Eiring noted that you should only look within a certain time frame — and make that time frame standard for all the analyses you do. She suggested looking at gifts made within 120 days of a direct mailing campaign.

You’ll also want to set guidelines for what sources you do and don’t include in a matchback analysis.

Eiring also pointed to another practice that’s become increasingly standard for direct mail campaigns: QR codes. By including a QR code linked to a unique landing page, you can more easily determine whether a direct mail campaign led to a particular gift. As an added bonus, mail pieces with QR codes are eligible for U.S. Postal Service promotional discounts.

And, if you’re looking to justify investing in a new channel that isn’t easily attributable, Stamer advised that small-scale testing can be your avenue to clearer answers about the impact of that channel — without breaking the bank.

For instance, starting with a low-investment platform like Instagram Reels targeted to a particular audience can pave the way for bigger investments such as CTV down the road.

“I would encourage people to think about how to invest small — either in small audiences or small locations — then test and iterate so that you can prove the value, and then later on, create the case investment,” Stamer said.