At its core, the Goals and Initiatives feature set is a way for your team to set targets for your fundraising and monitor your progress towards achieving them. There are two goals you can keep track of: Internal and External.
Internal Goals
The Internal goal is only visible to your team, and should be used to keep track of your fundraising goals across various pages.
External Goals
External goals allow you to display a thermometer widget to donors visiting your page, showing in real-time what their support means to the overall organizational goal.
There are two ways to ensure a donor action (donation, petition signup, etc.) counts toward your goal totals: Pages and UTMs.
Page Goal types count all actions made on designated pages toward the Initiative’s Goals.
UTM Goals allow you to set UTM parameters that, when included in the URL a donor uses to navigate to a landing page, will group that donor’s donation/petition signing, etc. under the UTM Goal.
Initiatives can track the following things:
Revenue (charges made across page/upsell types),
Donations
Subscribers (donors who sign up for a recurring donation subscription)
Petition Leads
Merchandise Sales (landing page and upsells)
Event Ticket goals.
Used in conjunction with an effective marketing strategy, an external-facing goal will lend to a developed sense of urgency and donor buy-in by increasing the donor’s feeling of involvement with your organization’s overall fundraising efforts.