As a not-for-profit organisation, you devote a significant amount of time and attention to each fundraising campaigns that becomes the oxygen for the organisationorganisation. It is critical that you have a method for effectively measuring your progress and the impact that these campaigns have on the organisation as well as the beneficiaries. To do this data need to be captured at each engagement point and recorded and evaluated. These results can be cross-checked with the Key performance indicators (KPIs) that is outlined at the start of the year.
If not-for-profit KPIs, also known as not-for-profit fundraising metrics, are measured intelligently, they may improve your non-strategy, profit’s programs, and, ultimately, fundraising results.
What exactly are not-for-profit organisation-wide KPIs?
Organisation KPIs are quantitative values that show how well a not-for-profit is meeting their goals and objectives. Not-for-profit KPIs are sometimes known as “not-for-profit fundraising measures” since not-for-profit success is intrinsically related to fundraising.
Not-for-profit’s utilise these indicators at many levels to assess their progress in meeting goals. “High level” KPIs are broad in scope and concentrate on overall performance, whereas “low level” KPIs are more focused.
Is it important to keep track of not-for-profit fundraising metrics?
It is critical to monitor at least certain KPIs since they:
- Provide a big amount of reliable information about your company.
- Give you the ability to make well-informed, evidence-based decisions.
- Take the guesswork out of determining success.
- Can tell you which techniques are effective, and which are not.
Since there are so many valuable KPIs and so many data points are needed to compute each one, it’s in your organisation’s best interest to employ software to track the KPIs you care about. While manually calculating metrics is doable, it increases the chance of human error and may call your metrics into question, not to mention eating up valuable time your team might be spending establishing connections with contributors.
It may be tempting to track as many KPIs as possible, but it’s best to focus your recorded KPIs on the goals and strategies that your organisation is adopting. A large number of data kinds has the potential to overwhelm your staff. It’s critical to choose a mix of leading and lagging KPIs to evaluate your not-for-profit’s success.
- Leading key performance indicators (KPIs) are rates or percentages that reflect trends in your not-for-profit’s performance over time. Donor retention rate, average donor growth, and average gift growth are a few examples.
- Lagging KPIs are metrics that describe performance in a single time period rather than across time. Some examples include average contribution size, secured gifts, and donor diversity.
General metrics of not-for-profit fundraising.
- Cost Per Dollar Raised (CPDR): One of the most widely utilised fundraising performance measures is cost per dollar raised. CPDR provides a straightforward response to a basic question: did we make money, lose money, or breakeven? CPDR is a valuable statistic to know not just for particular fundraising events, so you can understand how well certain campaigns performed, but also for your complete yearly fundraising endeavours, to give you an indicator of overall fundraising performance.
- Return On Investment in fundraising (ROI): Fundraising ROI, similar to CPDR, indicates the success or failure of a certain fundraising endeavour, but the calculation is the inverse of CPDR. That is, fundraising ROI is calculated by dividing revenue by expenses. The resultant figure indicates how much you made per dollar spent.
- Gifts are secured: Gifts secured is a metric that measures how many gifts your organisation received in a specific time period. It’s usual to remark that if you measure contributions secured over time, you’re tracking donation growth. You may sort this metric by gift kind to discover more particular data. You might categorise presents as follows:
- A significant donation
- Intended donation
- Presents at the mid-level
- Small gifts
- Annual fund contributions
- Monthly contributions
This helps you identify which audiences you are reaching out to and where you may need to conduct additional outreach.
- 4. Percentage of pledge completion: Pledges are money that are guaranteed to be paid to your organisation over a particular time period. Keep track of the proportion of pledges that are fulfilled to evaluate how many of your contributors are delivering on their promises. You’ll want to know whether or not your commitments are being fulfilled because the repercussions for your accounting staff are enormous. Pledged funds are accounted for as cash in your annual budget; if the cash does not arrive, you may be over budget. If contributors routinely break pledges, you may need to rethink your pledge-acquisition techniques.
- 5. Types of Donors: This measure, often known as fundraising diversity or variety of fundraising sources, informs you about the composition of your contributor base. The following “types” are often used for this metric:
- Individual
- Foundation
- Government
- Corporation
Understanding what sorts of contributors give to your organisation may help you discover areas for improvement and plan future fundraising efforts.
Why not depend on actual information regarding your progress rather than intuition about the strengths and shortcomings of your not-for-profit’s programs and strategies? Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and not-for-profit fundraising metrics enables you to make sound, objective decisions that will push your organisation in the correct path.
If you continue to calculate your KPIs manually usingspreadsheets, you run the danger of injecting human error into the equation. We’d suggest letting software handle the heavy lifting. Most dashboarding tools and reporting tools are able to help you analyse the retrospective events while more advanced technologies like, AI and Machine Learning-enabled models can give powerful predictive analytics. These type of tools will helpfreeing up time for you and your staff to focus on the mission focused work that advances the purpose of your not-for-profit organisation.