RFM Donor Scoring Tool
Score every donor on recency, frequency and monetary value using quintiles of your own file, sorted into segments with a CSV to download. Runs entirely in your browser. Your donor file is never uploaded anywhere.
Paste or upload a donor export and get every donor scored on recency, frequency and monetary value, sorted into segments, with a scored CSV to download.
Your file never leaves your browser. There is no upload, no account and no server involved.
Check the columns
Detected from your headers. Change any that are wrong.
Your file by segment
| Segment | Donors | Share | Value | What to do |
|---|
What you need in the file
Four columns, in any order and under any headings. The tool tries to detect them and lets you correct it.
| Column | What it holds | Common CRM name |
|---|---|---|
| Donor | A name or ID so you can match rows back | Constituent, Account name, Donor ID |
| Last gift date | Any readable date format | Last gift date, Most recent gift |
| Number of gifts | Count over your chosen window | Gift count, Number of transactions |
| Total given | Sum over the same window | Lifetime giving, Total amount |
Use a consistent window, normally five years. Every nonprofit CRM will export these four fields, and if yours makes it difficult that is worth knowing about your CRM.
Why nothing is uploaded
A donor export is the most sensitive file a small nonprofit holds. It contains names, giving histories and, by implication, a great deal about people’s circumstances.
Every comparable tool asks you to upload one to try it. That is a disclosure of donor data to a third party, usually to sample a product, and it is difficult to justify to a board or to reconcile with most published donor privacy policies.
This tool parses, scores and exports entirely in your browser. There is no endpoint to send anything to. You do not have to take that on trust: open your browser’s network tab, run the tool, and watch nothing leave.
How the scoring works
Each donor is ranked against your other donors, not against a benchmark, and placed in a fifth. Best fifth scores 5, worst scores 1, on each of the three measures.
Quintiles of your own file are what make this meaningful at any size. A fixed threshold saying $1,000 is a high-value donor is wrong for most organizations in one direction or the other; the top fifth of your file is always the top fifth of your file.
The three digits stay separate. A 511 and a 115 both sum to seven and describe opposite donors: one gave recently for the first time, the other gave a lot long ago and vanished. Adding them together throws away everything useful, and it is the most common mistake in RFM implementations.
The segments
| Segment | Pattern | The action that matters |
|---|---|---|
| Champions | Recent, frequent, generous | Personal stewardship, not more mail |
| Loyal | Give often, still engaged | Upgrade candidates and your best legacy prospects |
| New | Recent, once or twice | Second gift conversion, the highest value action available |
| Big but occasional | Large gifts, low frequency | Find out what prompted the gift before assuming it repeats |
| Lapsing loyalists | Gave often and well, not lately | Personal contact, highest priority on the table |
| Slipping away | Falling on every measure | One contact with a question rather than an ask |
| Lost | Long lapsed, low value | Suppress from expensive mail |
Lapsing loyalists is the segment to act on first. These are people who gave repeatedly and stopped, which means something changed, and they respond to being asked what happened far more often than to a re-engagement appeal.
Frequent small givers are your legacy prospects
The pattern most organizations misread. Donors who give modest amounts very often score low on monetary value and high on frequency, and they are routinely deprioritised in favour of larger occasional donors.
Loyalty predicts bequests better than gift size does. A supporter who has given $40 every year for eleven years is expressing something a single $5,000 gift does not, and they belong on a legacy list rather than at the bottom of a value-sorted export. See planned giving.
What to do after scoring
Download the CSV, load it back into your CRM as a segment field, and use it to decide effort rather than only mailing lists. The point of a ranked file is that the top gets a person and the bottom gets an email.
Then keep it. Run this quarterly and keep every run, because the valuable output is direction of travel rather than a snapshot. A donor moving from 555 to 355 across two quarters is the alert, and no single scoring can show you that.
The limits
RFM is three numbers and it is blind to everything else. It cannot see that a donor complained, that their circumstances changed, or that they mentioned their will to a volunteer, and that information is frequently more predictive than anything here.
It also handles two groups badly. Major donors giving large amounts on a two or three year cycle score terribly on recency and frequency, so run them outside this analysis entirely. And recurring donors distort frequency, because twelve monthly gifts of $10 is not twelve times the engagement of one annual gift of $120.
The full method, including how to weight the variables for different purposes, is in our guide to RFM analysis. For the aggregate view rather than the segmented one, use the donor retention calculator.