With the constant deluge of change combined with the increasing needs of the communities we serve, metrics can act as a north star for nonprofit strategy and bring some calm to the chaos around us. They help your organization be more agile, uncover powerful currents of success, and see choppy waters to avoid stormy waters. Hope you like the seafaring theme thus far, it could be replaced with any journey analogy though.

With limited resources, measurement is foundational to benchmarking different options, helping you prove and improve your mission. Nothing speaks louder than objective data in making decisions. Measurement is also the basis for Return on Investment (ROI), which you need to justify the resources you need to run your nonprofit.

In the sea of data, there’s an unlimited number of metrics to track. Be ruthless in the prioritization ofKeyPerformance Indicators. There shouldn’t be more than your organization can digest.

To help you, we’ve created a simple way for nonprofits using any CRM or marketing technology to export their data to better understand their KPIs, below. If you are using Salesforce for Nonprofits and the Nonprofit Success Pack, you can scroll down to use Tableau for this analysis.

• We know that most nonprofits professionals care about this topic of measurement through our own data-driven research. This is one of the areas we research, and people consistently respond feeling they could be doing a better job.

There are endless use cases for metrics and the underlying data that supports them. Let’s focus on a few categories, with specific examples of how you can shift your teams to be more data-driven.

• Strategic Prioritization: With every decision, focus on a single north star by making data-driven decisions.
• Justification:Get leadership and board members to see the brightness of your new north star
• Investment Asks: Get more rowers/oars, a better boat, or new engine (aka technology)
• Tactical Direction:Show marketing teams how to row faster in the right channels, or fundraising teams how to focus on the right donors
• Motivation:Energize your fundraising and marketing teams by illustrating how their inputs ladder up to overall goals, so they row in the right direction
• Trust:Build transparency with all employees with access to good data that lets them stop guessing
• Hygiene: Get your teams to swab the data-deck by showing them how dirty it is

Each use case has different stakeholders, requirements, and levels of detail they need. So for each dashboard, you create, think of the end-user, and how it will be presented in a talk track, or digested later.

Saying we’re in “unprecedented times” now sounds like a broken record. Change has accelerated in climate, politics, war, health, technologies, regulations, privacy, security, stakeholders, staff skills, communication channels, and everyone’s expectations. All these winds of change are gusting in different directions, so if you change your course to try and catch every gust, you might end up with baffled sails and staff or just end up going in circles with staff throwing up.

Here are three dashboards with metrics you can use tomorrow, with real-time data at your fingertips through any of Salesforce’s analytics capabilities.

There are a whole host of metrics and KPIs you could use to better understand this supporter view. Across our customers from both the nonprofit and the corporate worlds, the most successful ones know the financial and strategic value of each step of their supporter’s or customer’s lifecycles, along with the KPIs that underpin them. This acts as the foundation of their decision-making, and most take a long-term multi-year approach to measurement, ideally 3, 4, or 5 years, but sometimes longer.

Prioritizing 3 to 5 primary KPIs will give you a valuable guide to inform decisions and communicate successes to stakeholders. A good start would be to set as your KPIs Revenue per Donor, Donor Acquisition Cost (DAC), Retention Rate, and Attrition Rate. These metrics provide solid signals of whether your strategy is going in the right direction. It is also important to understand the interplay between metrics. For example, a decreasing DAC is not necessarily a good sign if your retention rate and your revenue per donor are also decreasing. You could just be recruiting a poorer quality of supporter or it could be a sign your retention activity requirements improvements.

this critical long-term supporter value view. Good examples include:

• Revenue per Donor calculations
• ROI calculations by cohorts of supporters recruited each financial year via your acquisition channels, and what value each cohort will achieve over 3 – 5 year time frames

Tip: Use historic performance of a cohort to inform forecasting models to project what the latest fiscal year’s cohorts will achieve over the next 3-5 years.

Some high-performing teams have objectives tied to metrics such as the number of key interactions or key conversations they should be having with prospects each week, month, and year to move these supporters through the classic moves management approach.

All of these metrics can be grouped by campaign or channel.

The more rigorous you are in using metrics to guide your decision-making, the more you will be able to prioritize your time, effort, and marketing spend.

When selecting metrics, make sure they are relevant to your goals, and organized with the end in mind. For example, if budgeting for End of Year, you might want to dig into historical performance, benchmarks, and return per channel  (in Salesforce this is Campaign Type) last year versus this year. End of Year campaign has many moving parts, so using campaign hierarchies can help you keep track of all aspects of a campaign and channel performance.

Where should you measure these metrics? CRM? Marketing System? Business Intelligence? Yes to all, depending on your need. Marketing systems will typically hold more engagement data than your CRM, but most data should be passed through to your CRM, making it easy to track conversion to dollars. Your CRM data can also be visualized using a Business Intelligence tool such as Tableau. Here’s an example:

The world is heavily unstable, and no one can say what will happen tomorrow, other than it won’t be today. We want to help you spot future funding risks or opportunities with less foggy glasses, to make that leadership or board meeting a bit more of a breezy sail. At the same time, you can also use this data to drive team productivity and actions based on a clear future vision.

Forecasts help you predict future performance and revenue as best as humans can, with the help of good processes supported by technology of course. Forecasting long term can spot macro trends, like annually planning with the board, or drive short term results, like a monthly forecast combined with an inspection of your fundraising team’s activities.

An effective forecast not only plans for the future but also ensures you are heading in the right direction at any moment, and small enhancements here can return drastic results.

Like with all metrics, a structure of how you measure, and when you do this is critical. Make sure every opportunity is connected to a single fiscal year/quarter and use campaigns to organize these gifts into more detailed categories.

You can forecast top-down where you say “we need $1M for a new program” and spread the revenue needed over a forecasted period of funding time. It’s a great way to outline what you need to manage and expand your mission but can be difficult to achieve, and sometimes projects feel more like hope casting.

Top-down thinking doesn’t help you think through 1) how you will get that funding or 2) if you can achieve that goal with bottom-up forecasting on historical data.

That’s where a bottoms-up approach can be helpful. Visualize last year’s major campaigns’ and appeals’ start and end dates on an X-axis, with corresponding revenue on the Y-axis. Discuss what worked, what didn’t, and what you will do differently this year. What can you lean into to get that $1M? Can you run a successful campaign twice, or do you need a new revenue source like a grant? Some major KPIs to look at here are your revenue projections over any period of time, forecast goals, and variance.

The people who can best judge whether a gift will close are the ones closest to the relationship. During annual planning:

1. Review a in software or a spreadsheet of last year’s gifts and mark those you believe will be renewed in the next fiscal year
2. Enter in potential new gifts from new and existing supporters
3. Review list of all expected gifts for the next fiscal year

Note: Often there will be some gap that you should expect to be covered by unplanned gifts so the forecasting process can be balanced based on this or left to fill out over time.

Planning can be a challenge when your marketing and fundraising efforts are not forecasted together. For example, can you forecast what you’ll bring in from your Gala in online fundraising via live stream, in person at the event, sponsorships, and major giving? Do those teams know what they will contribute to that forecasted amount?

If you have set up a campaign hierarchy properly, you should be able to produce a forecast that shows everyone their respective metrics for the expected results of the event, with each group knowing the underlying activities that will get them there. If you did it last year or for similar events, you now have benchmarks to discuss if you might see similar results.

We know this is a lot of information, but we hope it does a lot to help you move in a more metric-based approach to performance.

You have data today. Start with what you have….and take a step at connecting data. That could be across the use cases we spoke about or others like:

• Team Management & Productivity
• Employee Satisfaction
• Recurring Giving & Upgrades
• Data & Forecast Cleanliness
• Donor Retention
• Donor Purpose & Trust (survey)
• Volunteer Engagement
• Program Clients/Beneficiaries
• Impact Measurement

Your ship can be lost at sea without a north star based on data and metrics. Without common KPIs, you risk organizational friction, finger-pointing with uncomfortable meetings, and slower decision-making. As we started this piece by talking about the human side of data, we can never forget that supporters are real people, and look at data through that relationship lens.

Well, you’ve read through the entire article, you must be a data-do gooder or hungry for this type of content. We want to help you and others on your voyage, so please reach out if you need advice, comment to leave your perspective on data, or share this article if you think others will find it useful.

Writers were aided by AI to draft these FAQ questions.