Principle 2: The Fundamentals of Messaging & Attribution

This is the second in a series of blog posts about digital organizing and data management best practices using Frakture. You can find Principle 1: The Value of a Data Warehouse here.

You’ve taken the first step, and all your digital organizing data is in one warehouse. Let’s start digging into your data with the foundation of any good digital program: email.

Start With Your Data Fundamentals

Most email platforms will give you the basics: opens, clicks, and maybe conversions. (Of course as we’ve seen with the recent iOS changes, even those metrics aren’t as reliable as they used to be.) Some platforms will also try to provide revenue - a few of them do a decent job, but in our experience the only foolproof way to properly attribute revenue is by using the trusty source code. A source code added to the URL of your donation link lets you see that message’s performance, even when pixels, cookies, and other methods fail. And that goes not only for email but for fundraising asks on every channel you use: ads, social media, SMS, and everything else. You’re probably already source-coding these links. With Frakture, those codes activate a powerful reporting engine.

Messages & Donation Attribution

The reality is that most CRMs commonly used by political campaigns and advocacy orgs are still using outdated methods to report on revenue by message, methods premised on a vanishing model where the CRM itself must be the hub of all activity. Source coding is just better. At Frakture, our clients commonly see attributed revenue totals of 30-percent or more higher than the totals reported by the platform. These donations should have been counted towards messages, but were missed because of a break in the attribution chain that your CRM couldn’t account for.

Our attribution algorithm scans every single message on every one of your platforms – old platforms, new platforms, future platforms you don’t yet know you’ll use – for possible source codes in any embedded links, and matches them to the donation source code. Of course, we also count the number of transactions as well as the revenue total. We display these attributed revenue and attributed transaction fields in our database alongside the platform-reported revenue, so you can see the difference for yourself.

Reporting Achievement Unlocked

With message and transaction data in your warehouse, you’ve unlocked the first set of Frakture’s native reports - message persuasion and fundraising. Our out-of-the-box analytics reports include:

• An all-inclusive Message Summary report, covering total audience size, revenue by platform, and top performing messages and campaigns for both email and digital ads across all platforms.

• Fundraising reports for both email and digital ads, including message counts, opens/impressions, clicks, transactions, revenue, avg. donation amount, revenue by date/month, and detailed message breakdowns.

• Performance reports for both email and digital ads, covering impressions/clicks by channel, spend, key metrics like CPM/CPC, and performance data over time.

Next Level Source Codes

Basic donation attribution is just the first step. With Frakture, you can do so much more. In the rest of this series we’ll explore things like advanced source code formats, which Frakture can use to extract metadata on your cross–channel engagement campaigns, unlocking effectively unlimited reporting dimensions. No more wrestling with your CRM to force it to segment your data the way you need it; just add an element to your source code and we’ll do the rest. And wait until you see what’s possible when you move beyond “basic” donation attribution. What if I told you that you could see the impact and value of every marketing touch you made with a supporter, whether it resulted in a donation or not? Keep following us here to learn how.