There’s a painting in my office that I bought it at Holly’s wedding back in 2019. It’s a portrait of a woman gazing wistfully into the distance.

The work is almost abstract. All the individual swoops and swooshes of paint come together to make her face. If you look too closely, the portrait is lost. You need to take in the whole thing to see that there’s a person there.

Your fundraising program is a lot like that painting.

Hear me out: In today’s multi-channel fundraising, each channel is a brush stroke. Each touchpoint is a hue. It all comes together to make one beautiful, complicated portrait of a donor experience.

And that’s a picture we value – when it comes to planning, ideation, and execution. But then we get to results, and suddenly, out come the microscopes. Instead of looking at the finished work in its entirety, we pick apart every brushstroke to see if it ‘worked’ on its own.

We’d helped a client integrate social and programmatic ads into their year-end campaign for the first time. At the end, they looked at the results on the unique campaign donation form, which were low, and deemed the entire campaign a failure.

Until we invited them to look at the results of their integrated campaign in an integrated way – and showed that revenue was up 23% year-over-year. Response rate and average to their mailings at year-end had climbed 17% and 16%, respectively.

Not to mention that on the day the ads launched, web traffic jumped, to exceed the year prior and held steady until the campaign wrapped.

When we looked at the big picture, we found that the digital ads reached a ton of people, kept the campaign top-of-mind, drove organic traffic to the website or prompted folks to fill out reply coupons, and raised money. It just doesn’t read like that if you only look at a single channel.

This ‘what channel worked best’ philosophy usually hides under the guise of ROI. Did your Facebook ads drive gifts? How long will your prospect mailing take to break-even? What’s the return on every 1,000 emails you sent?

And to take it one step further, the true motivation tends to be: what can we cut? The scarcity mindset in this sector is real. At the core, the question here is really – which channels can I attribute gifts to, and which ones can’t I, so we can stop doing the ones that don’t raise money, do a lot more of the ones that do, and magically segment our way into a lower Cost Per Dollar Raised.

Never mind that you can only do so much of the high-performing channels before your audience gets too small or too diluted.

Never mind that the touchpoint that triggered the gift is not always the same as the one where the gift comes through (take, for example, our finding in Good Works research that 66% of mail-triggered gifts are made online).

Never mind that tracking for digital channels has become unwieldy due to changes in privacy law.

This approach to measuring success can lead to incredibly costly strategic decisions.

Here’s an example: a colleague was trying to understand why their digital fundraising results were down significantly year-over-year (this was pre-COVID, for context!). Their program was carefully optimized through well-designed tests, and nothing had changed. It made no sense to her.

Until it came out that the organization had cut the direct mail budget that year. The data showed that it just didn’t drive revenue like digital did, so it got the axe. That meant one less acquisition mailing went out that year.

Tens of thousands of people who would have gotten a mailing, and hopped online to give – didn’t get that mailing. And the digital revenue suffered because of cut costs in the mail.

Or to put it another way, there’s no such thing as digital revenue. Or mail revenue. There is just revenue.

Every stroke of the brush needs the ones around it to give it context and placement within the work. Every fundraising and marketing channel is impacted by the others in-market at the time, not to mention what your competition is doing and what’s going on globally.

That’s why, when we make cuts in the name of cost-savings without seeing the bigger picture, it’s the wrong move. What good are cost savings in the short-term when they drive down revenue, renewal, and retention that keep a program alive in the long-term?

That kind of myopic decision-making has ramifications on programs for years to come.

So what do you do instead? How do you actually know what’s working in your program?

You look at it all. You analyze at the big picture – overall revenue and file size, across the board. You bust out that microscope and look at the channels themselves.

As you run into results that surprise you – whether that’s delight or dismay – follow the thread of the data. Never assume that something worked, or didn’t, outright! If your email revenue is down, but your organic online revenue’s up, there’s probably a correlation – go find it.

Keep asking yourself: “What’s this connected to?” “What else did we have in market at that time?” “What changed year-over-year here?” Seek out the overlap where blue and yellow made green (or, mail and digital came together to drive revenue).

Integration is an art. And, your fundraising is a masterpiece. And the best fundraisers (hey, that’s you!) right now will step back, and treat it like one.