Are you preparing MPD goals for the coming year?  One thing you should do every January is check the reports on the Staff Web. I keep a printed copy on file of the MPGA report and of the 13-Month report for each year in an MPD notebook (you could keep PDF copies on your computer). With these archived reports, you can look up past donor’s history or compare how your account looked last year to any previous year. If you use TntMPD or MPDx you may think you have plenty of information and history. Check out these reports and my suggestions to see if these reports would be a useful addition to your MPD toolbox. They are to me. The following are some MPD tasks I do every January.

The Ministry Partner Giving Analysis Report (MPGA)

Check the MPGA report any time in the MPD & Donations area on the Staff Web for a detailed look at your ministry partners and also for lots of helpful information, including graphs about distribution, frequencies, and more. I recommend you save a copy of your MPGA report at the start of the year even if you won’t look it over until later. Within the first week or so of January, the report most accurately reflects a previous calendar year. The MPGA report is a moving window looking into your current MPD information for any twelve-month period; it changes daily as donations come in.

Why not make it a habit to grab a copy of the report every year before mid-January? Right now is the time to get a snapshot of last year. Waiting a week or a month will not give you as accurate a look at a previous calendar year.

What to Do with the MPGA

The report is actually a collection of reports.  You might look at the “Current Partners” tab to see if you need to encourage any donors to sign up for EFT.  (Sort on “12 Mo. Gift Count” to find the monthly donors who give less than 12 times per year.) Also, look through the “Lost Partners” tab to see if you need to contact anyone.

I always use the “Top 50%” tab at the beginning of the year. Also, the “Giving Range Analysis” is helpful for further categorizing your ministry partner team. On the far right, under ” Monthly PCT” find a value close to 80%. Look along that row to the far left column. For us, 80% of our donations come from half of our financial partner team. These are your top donors. Plan for regular ways to acknowledge their contributions.(See Setting Communication Goals for the Year Ahead for more ideas for prioritizing your communications with these donors and ways to use more of the other MPD reports on the Staff Web.)

The “Giving Frequency Analysis” provides more clues on other plans you might want to make. I noticed eight ministry partners giving 7  – 10 times per year. Sorting on the “12 Mo. Gift Count” in the first report (Current Partners) lets me know who these folks are. I pop over to the Reminder System to add them, if needed, for regular reminders from Cru when they miss a donation.

The “Income/Expenses” tab will help you fill out the Support Goals Calculator. You’ll know what your typical annual expenses are so you can plan ahead for this coming year.

See a post from January 2015 for more details about the above suggestions.

The 13-Month Report

While you’re looking at your MPGA report online also go to and print the 13-Month report before February.  Look it over to see all the great information. I particularly benefit from looking at the graphs at the end of the report.

By printing the report now, you’ll have an overall look at the previous calendar year, including the December totals from the year before for comparison. (It’s not so critical when you print this report because you can retrieve it later, but why not print it now and keep the two reports together?)

See another post from January 2015 for more information to glean from the 13-Month report.

What Is Your Solid Monthly Base?

To determine what we actually have in solid monthly support, I “lookup” all contacts in TntMPD with at least $10/month average monthly giving and export the names to Excel with fields: File As, Monthly Pledge, and Average Monthly Gift.

In the Excel spreadsheet:

• I remove any names that should really not be included, then check the average amounts to see if they need adjusting. (For instance, a new donor’s average won’t match their pledge and it should.)
• I create a sum at the bottom of the two financial columns.

Depending on your situation and your financial team, one of those totals will reflect your solid monthly base most accurately.

Fund Appeal Habits

One more thing…. did you track your EOY fund appeal results? I wrote a tutorial a year ago, Tracking Your Fund Appeal Results in TntMPD with Groups, to encourage you to know how your ministry partners respond to appeals and then to act on this knowledge in an informed way. This post will give you the steps to get started if you haven’t done this before.

What do you do to prepare MPD goals for the coming year? Do you have anything else you do in January that would be helpful for us to know? 

NOTES:

• I recommend a detailed two-part post written last year to help you get all you can out of the MPGA and 13-Month reports…. and more.
• The links in this post will work if you are signed in to the Staff Web. Go to MPD & Donations if these aren’t working for you.
• Now that you’ve grouped your ministry partners, you might also want to read Setting Communication Goals for the Year Ahead for ideas how to regularly send greeting cards to all your donors. Also, I wrote a tutorial how to set up the correspondence plan in TntMPD: How to Make a Cultivation / Correspondence Plan in TntMPD.
• This image is available on Wikimedia Commons.