u/RallyUp_fundraising

GA4 for nonprofits? you should think of it like ecommerce tracking, just swap "purchase" for "donation" and "cart" for "donation form." Once that clicks, everything else makes more sense! Quickly breaking it down for fellow nonprofits.

The setup stuff-

If your donation form lives on a different domain or third-party platform, you need cross-domain tracking. Without it, donations show up as referrals from your payment processor and your UTMs lose credit.

Fix it: Web stream → Configure your domains → add your donation domain. Also add your payment processor to "List unwanted referrals."

Two more quick wins: change data retention to 14 months (Admin → Data settings → Data retention) because the default is too short, and filter internal traffic so your team's visits don't skew your numbers.

Donation tracking: where it actually gets useful

Firing a "donation complete" event is just step one. You also need to pass the gift amount as an event parameter, otherwise you can only see click counts, not actual revenue by campaign. Also tag recurring donations differently from one-time gifts so you can tell them apart. (:

The reports worth checking-

• Traffic acquisition: which sources are sending people to you
• Pages and screens: are people reading your donation pages or leaving immediately
• Monetization: revenue by campaign, device, and source
• Funnel exploration: where people drop off before donating (lives in Explorations)

UTMs (most skip it, you should not)

Without UTM tags on every email and social post, everything shows up as "Direct" and you learn nothing.

Keep it simple: source = where it came from, medium = how it was sent, campaign = which campaign. If you use Google Ad Grants, turn on auto-tagging... it handles the Google side automatically.

Mobile being most ignored!

Most nonprofits have 50%+ mobile traffic but never check mobile conversion rates separately. Desktop might convert at 3% while mobile sits at 0.8%!! that gap is your biggest opportunity.

Check it under Monetization → filter by device category.

Common mistakes we'd advise your nonprofit to avoid -

• Never re-testing tracking after a site update, it breaks silently
• Building dashboards nobody opens won't help. Stick to 5-6 key numbers
• Treating GA4 as a CRM replacement is not a good idea at all, they do completely different jobs
• Never opening Explorations! that's where the real diagnostic work happens

Let me know if you want to know more in detail, happy to help in comments!

YES, but not in the way most people expect.

A lot of orgs come in thinking Twitch itself will drive donations. In reality, it's more of an engagement layer, the actual donations usually happen through a charity tool or external page.

There are basically 3 setups we've seen:

• Twitch Charity (cleanest for viewers, but less control)
• External donation pages (better for tracking + data)
• Tip links (used a lot by creators, but kinda messy for nonprofits)

Where it usually falls apart:
Most orgs treat it like a static fundraiser. No real interaction, no momentum, just a link sitting there. That doesn’t really work on Twitch...

Where it does work:
When the stream actually feels like a stream!! live reactions, donor shoutouts, milestones, challenges, etc. The giving tends to happen in those moments, not passively.

Also, having one clear donation link matters a lot! We’ve seen streams with 3 different links and it just kills conversions.

And if you’re a nonprofit trying this: you might not be able to use Twitch Charity immediately (depends on status + listings), so a lot of orgs end up partnering with existing streamers early on.

Overall, it’s less “set up a donation button and you’re done” and more “build a stream people want to participate in.”

If anyone has any questions, happy to help!