Challenge
Nonprofits take donations through fundraising platforms and payment processors that each report differently. Deposits arrive in batches that do not line up with individual gifts.
Finance teams spend days every month matching the two by hand. Meanwhile marketing cannot say with confidence which campaigns brought supporters in, because the website tracking has been added to by several agencies over the years.
Approach
We treated it as one measurement problem with two audiences: finance needs figures that reconcile, and marketing needs to know where supporters come from.
- Automated the monthly reconciliation: reports are pulled from each system, matched and assembled in the format finance already uses.
- Listed unmatched records separately for a person to review.
- Audited every tag and conversion event on the website against what each platform reported.
- Corrected the tracking and documented what is measured and where.
- Built attribution that follows a visitor from campaign to completed form.
Result
The monthly finance report now arrives ready to review, and marketing and finance work from figures that agree.
- Days of manual matching removed from each month-end.
- A written map of the website's tracking.
- Campaign decisions made on data the organization trusts.
Our advice
If two departments keep arguing about numbers, the fault is usually in how the data is collected. Fix the collection once and the argument ends.
Related service: Web analytics.