Booking Khabib for $50k to fundraise is the easy part.
The hard part is answering the one question nobody wants to ask.
Was it worth it?
Most charities don’t know. The gala raised money. So did the ads. So did the email blasts. But when you’re juggling a Ramadan campaign across ten different channels, connecting the dots is pretty tricky. You have to link what went out to what came back.
Four Ramadans building data infrastructure taught me that every charity’s operations come down to three questions.
1. How much am I spending?
Most orgs have a rough sense of what’s going out. But can you break down what that influencer partnership actually cost versus the gala versus the Facebook ads? That requires clean financial systems. And when you’re growing fast, those systems often lag behind.
2. How much am I getting back?
This is the Khabib question. You spent $50k on that keynote. The room was electric. Donations poured in. But how much came from that night specifically? Did those donors return the following Ramadan? Answering this requires a complete picture of your donors and how they’re giving over time.
3. How many lives did that money change?
You raised $10M. Where did it go? How many families did it actually reach? This requires visibility into your supply chain. And most partners send a PDF with a single line: “100,000 meals served.”
Three questions. Three different data systems.
Charities raising $5M to $25M have the budgets to spend big. But the ones pulling ahead are investing in answering these three questions, not just raising more.
If this is something you’re wrestling with ahead of Ramadan, happy to compare notes.
