Earn
EARN — the Evergiving Attrition and Retention Number
EARN is a new, simple, universal measurement for attrition. Get instant visibility of your attrition rate over the life of your donors. You’ll be able to see the areas where you have the greatest opportunity to slow attrition, and when and where your efforts could deliver the greatest returns in retention. Compare your retention scores against any other data dimension and uncover EARN’s true power to transform your fundraising strategies.
EARN + months since start date
EARN (Evergiving Attrition and Retention Number) is always shown with a number. By default, when you first look at your EARN data, the system will show you something called EARN 3. This number represents the number of months since a pledges’ start date. So, when are looking at ‘EARN 3’ data, you’ll see data based on pledges that are 3 months on since their respective start dates. EARN 7 would show you data based on pledges that are 7 months on from their respective start dates. EARN 13, 13 months on, etc.
Attrition is expressed as a number between 1 and 0.
The next big concept is how we show attrition. EARN measures retention on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0. 1 is the highest rating and 0 is lowest.
Let’s work though how this works on a single record. Let’s say we were looking at the records of a single donor, named “Sam”, who has chosen to donate monthly to our “Save the Earworm” campaign. At EARN 6, (6 months after Sam’s start date) let’s assume we have 100% success in processing that donation. Of the 6 times we tried to process the donation, we succeed 6 times. This record has an EARN 6 score of 1.0 (the highest). It looks like a lollipop on the charts, and when you hover over the bubble you’ll often see more information that you can drill down on.
The next record for the same campaign is for “Pia”. Pia signed up to the same campaign, donating monthly, but on the 3rd month we couldn’t process her intended donation. We’ve succeeded 5 times out of a possible 6. So what we measure is her commitment frequency against the amount of times the pledge has been paid. We calculate her EARN score as 5 times ⅙. She has an EARN 6 score of 0.83.
Let’s say Pia and Sam were the only contributors to this worthy campaign. We can see the average EARN 6 score for the pledges by simply averaging these two numbers. This gives this campaign an EARN 6 of 0.91.