Learn how to read your donor program's real health using cohort analysis, NationBuilder filters, and Insights dashboards.
Here's the question that tends to surface before a board meeting or a year-end appeal: how is your donor program actually moving?
Not "how much did we raise?" Most teams can answer that. A slightly harder version is: of everyone who gave last year, how many came back? Of the ones who lapsed, what would they have been worth if they hadn't? Even more strategic: are you growing because you're retaining donors, or because acquisition volume is papering over the losses?
Those questions have a name in fundraising: cohort analysis. And most teams answer them once a year, under deadline, using a combination of filters, spreadsheet exports, and manual math. The results are high-stakes, error-prone, and can be stale by the time they're finished. There's a gap between tracking what happened and knowing what it means for where your program is headed.
Below are three questions directed at the health of your program your data can already answer. The first two you can tackle right now using filters in your nation. The third is where I introduce you to a new tool: NationBuilder Insights
Two filters that are worth bookmarking
Who gave last year and hasn't given this year?
Development teams call these folks LYBUNTs: donors who gave Last Year But Unfortunately Not This year. They're the warmest re-engagement audience you have, and the first names that belong on any prospecting list.
In NationBuilder > People, a single filter row gets you there:
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Donation history > Date of most recent donation > is between > Jan 1 – Dec 31 of the previous calendar year
Save it. And re-run it before any major appeal.
Once you have the results, you can strategically level up your outreach by segmenting the list by previous gift size before you write your appeals. A $25 LYBUNT and a $2,500 LYBUNT are not audiences of the same kind of campaign. The first can likely be converted again with a well-timed email ask. The second probably warrants a call from your leadership.
If you have time for one extra move, match the timing to the donor. Small-dollar givers respond to moments, not calendars — fold them into an annual appeal or match-driven push. For major donors who give on a predictable rhythm, time your outreach to the anniversaries of their past gifts.
How many of your first-time donors never came back?
These are donors who gave once and disappeared. You already paid the acquisition cost in staff time, ads, and event overhead. This is the cohort where the return on that investment is still recoverable.
In NationBuilder > People, this takes two filter rows:
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Donation history > Number of donations > is > 1
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Donation history > Date of first donation > is between > 3 and 12 months ago
Take note of the dates for the timing of each individual gift, it really matters. Donors who gave in the last 90 days are likely still inside your new-donor stewardship window. The 3-to-12-month range catches the ones who fell through the cracks while their first-gift context is still fresh enough to use.
Sometimes the best pitch is the most straightforward one: remind them what their first gift did, and invite them to do it again or increase their impact. First-to-second-gift conversion is one of the most predictive indicators of program health. If yours is below ~20%, there's likely some room to grow that figure.
A more difficult (and interesting) question
"How is my donor base actually moving year over year?" sounds like one question. It's four:
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Of the donors who gave last year, how many came back? (retained)
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Of the donors who gave the year before but skipped last year, how many returned this year? (reactivated)
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Of this year's donors, how many had never given before? (new)
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Of last year's donors who haven't given this year, what would they have been worth if they had? (revenue at risk)
You can build a filter for each of those. But reading them as a single picture, the cohort flow of your program, means exporting every filter, doing the math in a spreadsheet, and rebuilding the whole view every time you want a fresh read. Most teams do this once a year, when they have to, and not always before the moment when it would actually change a decision.
What NationBuilder Insights can show you instead
The work that used to take hours of spreadsheet wrangling is your prebuilt dashboard.
In the Donors view, the cohort question is the first thing you see. New, retained, and reactivated donors break out as three segments of the same report: in headcount, in revenue, and in average gift size. Beneath them, the revenue-at-risk figure for your lapsed cohort, calculated against last year's totals. It refreshes every night, built directly on your nation's data.
NationBuilder Insights organizes your nation's data the way fundraisers already think: by cohort, by retention, by acquisition source, by email performance. It answers the questions that filters alone can't quite reach, and it answers them continuously.
📌 Note: NationBuilder Insights is available as an add-on for Enterprise customers.
See it for yourself
If these workflows and questions sound familiar, we’d love to give you a live demo of NationBuilder Insights. We'll walk through the dashboards, show you the comparisons fundraising teams use most, and talk through what it could look like for your program specifically.
