How You Compare

Your own reports tell you what you raised. How you compare tells you whether it was good, by placing your figures against organizations raising about what you raise. You will find it on the Recommendations tab of your dashboard.

This is the one thing in BetterUnite you cannot work out for yourself, however good your reporting is, because it needs everybody else's numbers as well as yours.

What is compared

Two of these are better when they are low

Reliance on your largest donors and recurring gifts lost read the other way round from everything else. Sitting high on either is exposure rather than an achievement, and the sentence under each figure says so in words so there is no chance of reading a high number as a good one.

Who you are compared against

Organizations in the same band of annual giving as you, based on what actually went through BetterUnite rather than on any figure anybody typed into a profile. The band is named under each comparison, for example "organizations raising $250k to $1M a year", along with how many organizations stand behind the figure.

Bands are wide on purpose. Narrow groups produce comparisons that are either unreportable or misleading, and the size of the group is what makes a percentile mean anything.

When it says there is not enough data

This is the most common question about this tab, and the answer is that the comparison was refused rather than failed.

A comparison is only shown when the group behind it is large enough that no single organization can be identified from the result. That means a minimum number of contributing organizations, a minimum number of underlying records, and no one organization supplying too much of the total. If any of those is not met, you see a sentence explaining it instead of a number.

It usually resolves itself. The most common causes are a comparison that needs a module most organizations your size do not use, or a metric where your own history is too short to place you. Nothing is wrong with your account and there is nothing to fix.

Why we refuse rather than show a smaller comparison. A percentile drawn from four organizations tells you about those four organizations. Showing it would be both misleading to you and unfair to them, so the guard is absolute and applies to every comparison on this tab, including yours to everybody else.

Reading the scale

Where your plan includes the full range, each comparison is drawn as a scale. The shaded band is the middle half of organizations like yours, the tick is the middle, and the marker is you. The numbers are printed under it as well, and the sentence beneath states your position in words, so the comparison reads the same whether or not the drawing loads.

The band is a position, not a verdict. Sitting in the bottom quarter on average gift is a thing to look at, not a failure: an organization built on many small gifts is supposed to sit there.

What your plan changes

Every paid plan sees the headline: your figure against the middle for organizations your size, which is the comparison itself. The Better.AI add-on and Premier plans add the range behind it, meaning the quartiles, where you sit within them, and your position named in words.

Where the numbers come from

These figures are calculated inside BetterUnite from organization-level totals. No donor information is involved on any side, nothing is sent to OpenAI, and no AI is used to produce them. That is also why this tab works whether or not Better.AI has been switched on.

Your own figures contribute to the totals other organizations are compared against, in the same way theirs contribute to yours, and always as part of an aggregate rather than as anything anybody can single out. If you would prefer your organization not to contribute, contact support@betterunite.com and we will exclude you. You will still see your own comparisons.

How often they change

The figures are recalculated when you open the tab, so they move as your own records change and as the organizations you are compared against record theirs. Most metrics look at the last twelve months; the event comparisons look back two years, and pledge fulfillment three, because those need completed cycles to mean anything.