
Nonprofits track thousands of gifts a year, but the question that actually matters — are we retaining and growing our donor base? — usually gets answered manually, in a spreadsheet, months after the fact.
DataEmbed built DonorMetrics, a web dashboard that automates the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s “Growth in Giving” methodology, turning a raw gift export into year-over-year donor insight in seconds.
What it does
The app ingests gift-level donation records (donor ID, date, amount) and automatically sorts every donor, year over year, into the seven standard donor-movement categories:
- Acquisition — new donors
- Same — retained at the same giving level
- Upgrade — gave more than the prior year
- Downgrade — gave less than the prior year
- Lapsed — stopped giving
- Recaptured — returning donors
- Growth — the combined year-over-year picture
For each category and year, the dashboard breaks results down by gift size — under $100, $100–249, $250–999, $1,000–4,999, and $5,000+ — showing total dollars raised, number of gifts, average gift, and donor count for each band.
Why it matters
Growth in Giving is a respected, well-established framework for measuring fundraising health, but calculating it by hand is slow and error-prone. This app turns that process into a live, always-current dashboard, so development teams can see retention and growth trends at a glance instead of rebuilding a spreadsheet every reporting cycle.
Key features
- Automated year-over-year donor segmentation across all 7 FEP categories
- Gift-size band breakdowns for deeper analysis of where growth or loss is happening
- Interactive charts (stacked bar visualizations) alongside detailed data tables
- Multi-year trend view, generated directly from the underlying gift data
- Secure, login-protected access for internal fundraising staff
Built with
- Backend: PHP (CodeIgniter 4)
- Database: MySQL / MariaDB
- Visualization: ApexCharts
- Auth: Session-based login with hashed credentials