Analytics: Getting kettle season off to a flying start

Legendary American aviator Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight in history on May 21, 1927.

This world-first was made all the more remarkable by the fact that his aircraft, The Spirit of St. Louis, had no front windshield, no radio, and only the most basic of instruments onboard. Navigating by dead reckoning over a featureless ocean and quite literally flying blind through dense fog for several hours, Lindbergh’s flight, an improbable success at the time, earned him the nickname Lucky Lindy.

Fast-forward 92 years. Technology and data sciences have provided aviators the ability to check, know, record and share their exact positions at all times and to make course corrections on the fly, quickly and even automatically, rendering transatlantic flight accurate, safe, and commonplace.

The point? When we make program decisions without analytics as a guide, we’re flying blind. For a nonprofit to remain viable, critical analysis is no longer an option – it is a necessity. While experience, instinct, and dead reckoning are still valuable tools, facts and figures must also be brought to bear to confirm our true positions, test our plans and correct our directions.

Summit Marketing supports The Salvation Army through Register to Ring™ – a platform that helps the organization manage and analyze almost every component of the bell-ringing season. The analytical tools inside Register to Ring usher in a digital transformation that will help ensure the success of your fundraising programs.

Running your program.

Fundraising campaigns are multifaceted programs that require tuning and adjustment to prioritize and apportion opportunities, resources, and workforces for maximum effect.

The features of Register to Ring let your command see where your time, energy, and resources are going – helping you optimize your volunteer forces, your kettle location traffic, and your donations while you cut operating costs and grow your base of supporters.

Two of the first questions a coordinator should ask when preparing for the kettle season are 1) where are the best locations to ring and 2) who are the top-earning volunteers? Knowing the answers to these questions helps your command implement a successful strategy and reap thousands in additional income.

Very few Corps can have a ringer at every location for the entire season. Strategy dictates ensuring your top-earning sites are covered as frequently as possible. Do you know where your highest earning locations are, and if they are staffed for the majority of the season?

In just a few clicks, Register to Ring users can track the performance of ringers by day, or by year, and collect data about the gross and net income of any location. Register to Ring data can help your command to forecast performance, choose new directions, or recall and replicate past successes. If a store isn’t experiencing a high volume of traffic, a coordinator may reach out to redirect a ringer to a busier location – adding an extra layer of optimization to their kettle strategy.

Register to Ring also simplifies your campaign logistics by automating day-to-day tasks like creating route reports and kettle slips or reminding volunteers to show up for their shifts.

Volumes of data can be overwhelming. Register to Ring offers control over the complexity and detail of results. Instead of spending hours each week poring over spreadsheets, Register to Ring allows you to select a few key metrics to help you benchmark your success. In seconds, users can pull up high-quality, well-governed information that is ready to be exported, printed or shared.

Knowing your ringers.

Are you able to identify your new ringers? Register to Ring removes the effort from that task and can group or segment your ringer database by aspects of their profiles – their contact information, when they became a ringer, whether and where they’ve rung before, and more.

According to Register to Ring data for 2018, the average volunteer bell ringer netted $60.32 per hour while the average paid ringer netted $21.97 per hour.

Many Corps of The Salvation Army consider paying their ringers a necessary expense – but fail to realize how much revenue is slipping through their fingers. It is not uncommon to see 20 to 40 percent of a kettle’s income go back to paid ringers. In some cases, Corps are losing money by paying ringers.

These figures reveal the importance of knowing how much each ringer brings to the table. Running this analysis in the past may have required nights of digging through records and calculating time sheets to discover the gross and net income of every paid bell ringer. Register to Ring pulls this data for the user in seconds.

Did any of your volunteers cancel their upcoming shifts? Register to Ring helps you to capture data on these ringers and understand the issues that kept them from fulfilling their shifts.

Strengthening your relationships.

But analytics isn’t all numbers. Another benefit of good data management is the ability it provides to engage on a deeper level with your volunteers and supporters. Part of retaining volunteers, groups, major donors or corporate partners is letting them know how much their efforts are appreciated—and how much good they’re actually doing. Register to Ring features capabilities that can be used to immediately tally and recognize volunteer support, significantly improving retention.

As soon as income is entered, volunteers can log in to registertoring.com to see how much they’ve raised. This technology removes the frustration of missed calls and connects volunteers to the information and positive reinforcement so vital to them.

In the past, you might have relied on employees to manually collect data from various sources to be compiled into reports for your stakeholders—a time-consuming and error-prone undertaking. Register to Ring streamlines corporate reporting, so your partners will know how valued they are.

Don’t fly blind through your most crucial fundraising season. The future of Red Kettle Campaigns is taking off now with the analytical power of Register to Ring.