Your organization sent out appeals, posted your story to social media, and you reached out to your supporters for contributions to continue your mission. Now what?
First, stop and congratulate yourself and your team. Then, keep working. Now is the time to take a look at a number of data points and learn from your campaign. These data points are often called KPI (key performance indicators). The KPIs that should be reviewed may be different for each organization based on their respective goals, but there are a few that are key to understanding the health of your fundraising program.
- “Lagging KPIs” assess the current performance.
- “Leading KPIs,” help you predict future performance
Lagging Key Performance Indicators
First let’s focus on Lagging KPIs. Your organization will want to know how much you raised. To do this, for example, you can run a report of your end of year total contributions (tip: try and keep your start and end date consistent for campaigns that repeat annually), from this report you can assess your average donation size (total amount of contributions divided by total contributions). Next look at your donors who are recurring or repeat donors, identify who contributed multiple times in the year as this will tell you who your most ardent supporters are (make sure to reach out and cultivate these people). Now that you have a grasp on how your campaign did in relation to contributions, now you can look at where these donations originated. Which gifts came from online and offline giving? This will help you determine where your constituents are engaging and this will allow you to determine where you should focus your efforts in your next campaign. There is one more KPI that straddles Lagging and Leading KPIs and that is new donor acquisitions (number of new donors for the year divided by total number of donors from the year before). Try and get a sense from this KPI why these donors began to contribute, what motivated them, and where they came from for example, were they a referral or did they sign up for a newsletter etc.
Leading Key Performance Indicators
Next, let’s focus on Leading KPIs. These will begin to show you the health of your fundraising efforts. Year over year donation growth and year of year donor growth, to find these percentages take this year’s total contributions and last year’s contributions and subtract them, then divide that number by this year’s total and multiply by 100. Do this for your total number of individual donors. You can calculate your nonprofit’s donor retention rate by dividing the number of repeat donors this year by those that donated last year and this will tell you your retention rate percentage.
Marketing Key Performance Indicators
While the donation and donor information is important, don’t forget about other KPIs such as Marketing KPIs. If you engage people through emails, take a look at your open and click through rates. This will help you understand which email messages engage your supporters. Also take a look at your email subscribers, did you grow your email contact list? If not them you might need an acquisition strategy in 2021. Review your social media engagement, which posts did well, what topics were of interest to your community, etc. An important metric to understand is your donation page conversion rate, to do this, take the number of unique visits to your online donation page and divide by total donations processed by that page. This information can help you understand if you need to do some work on the page. One more marketing KPI is your fundraising ROI (return on investment), to calculate this take your total donation amount divide it by total dollars spent.
Nonprofit KPIs will change the way that your organization plans and executes future fundraising plans. Tracking and understanding your KPIs will not only help you understand whether you are on track to meet your fundraising goals but will also help you have a clear picture of where you stand in relation to your goals, and they will help you adapt and make decisions. Taking the time to look at this data will make your organization stronger.
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