Growing up, my elderly next door neighbor was Mrs. Goodrich, a retired English teacher. She spent hours teaching her niece and me to play Gin Rummy and frequently corrected our grammar. Though her admonitions seemed to have no effect in the short term she always said "if the water drips long enough on the stone, it will make an impression." Well we've certainly heard enough times that Segment-O-Matic does a great job of segmenting data on just about any criteria anyone could want to use, but it should also analyze the results of the segmentation after the marketing effort... and the water has finally made an impression on the stone! We recently hired an extraordinary report writer and developer with a wealth of real world appeal analysis experience, and his first charge is simple: write the best appeal analysis report the planet has EVER seen. And so far he's just about done it, but now we need your help. First, we'd like to ask what do YOU want to see on the best appeal analysis report ever? Do you have an example of an excellent report that you'd be willing to share with us? (By the way, you WILL be able to use this report with any appeal or group of appeals, it does not have to be a SOM appeal.)

We also have a specific question for one of our report fields: how does your organization calculate ROI on a marketing effort or appeal? We started to do it as a simple percent of net/cost, but if cost exceeds net, do you express it as a negative? We're just wondering if there is an industry standard that folks use to calculate ROI that we should follow.

Thanks, we look forward to seeing any samples you can share and hearing what you think would be included in the best appeal analysis report the planet has EVER seen. :)

Cost per dollar raised
Net/Cost--Yes, it is negative for most acquisition and some lapsed appeals.
Net/Donor--This is key for acquisition. how much am I losing to acquire each donor. Some do Cost/Donor and don't consider the first gift. I like to do Net/Donor to take into consideration the first gift.

I don't know that this qualifies as the best report ever, but it is something that I can't get to right now. I'd love a report that showed the same RFM grid I used to create my mailing reporting in the same grid with various views. So for instance I could instantly see the CPDR or net/cost my 0-12 month $10-99.99 2+ group. Then I could change the view to see the response rate of that group.

Hi Laura,

Great field ideas, and - Ooooooooooo! - Love the segment-level reporting! I'll talk to the reporting wizards over here and see what can be done. That probably won't be in the first version (unless you've selected the "Use segment as package" option), but would love to see it in the next.

By the way, some performance improvements for running segmentations with split gifts included are on their way very soon!

Jeff

Attached is the Excel export of "the best appeal analysis report EVER" (so far) that is to be included in our forth-coming version of Segment-O-Matic. I would ~love~ to have feedback from our current Segment-O-Matic users... Whatcha think?

EDIT: Please note that you cannot drill-down to a list of donors per package in the export as you can in the regular report view.

I am newer to using SOM and have not figured out what report I should use/view to see the response rate per package. We sent out 5 different letters and would like to see a breakdown of response per package. Is there a report that shows that? Thanks!

I am sorry - I just realized I did not clarify that clearly. Within each package, using SOM we have certain criteria selected. Like people who only gave between $15-$30 in 2016 or people who have only given to a particular event (like our cancer walk). We would like to use SOM to tell us the response rate for these segmentations. We want to see if it is worth the effort to mail to them. I can't figure out how to see the response per segment, I only see the number of people who were in that mailing. I know I must be looking at something wrong here....shouldn't we be able to look at the response for a certain segment of the appeal?