3 Metrics Your Nonprofit Should be Tracking

How intentional are you about the data your nonprofit is currently gathering, both internally and externally? Building data collection and reporting into your workflow is important so that you can continue to improve and streamline your processes over time.

• Data can help you budget more efficiently and forecast more accurately.
• Internally, data can serve as evidence to show your stakeholders why and how something is or isn’t working.?
• Externally, being able to show data about your nonprofit’s impact is an especially important gateway for donors who are new to your organization.

Keeping a realistic sense of your team’s capacity in mind, here are three metrics you should be tracking, organizing, and regularly assessing.

Quick Tip: Consider how you can collect and share qualitative data, such as written or verbal feedback, stories, and other descriptive information. This is often just as important as collecting quantitative data (e.g.: numbers, charts, and graphs).

Fundraising Metrics

The most important metric your development team should be tracking is your annual donor retention rate. How many and which of your donors gave last year and this year? Carve out some time every year to compare data from this past fiscal year with any data you have from two years ago (or older).

Retaining your donors is a much more cost-effective strategy than gaining new donors. Ensuring that your retention rate remains high allows you to build on a strong foundation of supporters. You can also consider diving deeper into this data by looking at donation amounts or your donors’ giving history. The more you can analyze your donors’ patterns of giving, the more you can develop better ways to engage them and the easier it will be to predict their responses to your efforts.

If you can: Track your lapsed donors over time. How many and which of your donors gave last year but not this year? Prioritize re-engaging supporters who previously gave over multiple years and have not donated in the last two years (or less), as they are the likeliest to respond to a renewed call. Don’t forget to also track your outreach to these lapsed donors and understand how many choose to re-engage with you.

Other metrics to consider:

• Average donation amount, especially for first-time donations
• The largest gift made to your organization (Together, these two metrics can help you determine the minimum amount you’ll consider a major gift.)
• Annual number of new donors and, if possible, how they found your organization
• Annual number of major donors
• Your top-performing fundraising campaigns by total donation amount and unique number of donors

Communications Metrics

The most important metric your communications team should be tracking is your engagement rate. Prioritize gathering this information for the channel you use most often to engage your supporters. If you primarily communicate by email, track your click-through rates both over time and by campaign. If you use more than one social media platform, choose the platform with your largest audience size and track your engagement rates by post.

Assessing this data regularly can help you identify patterns of engagement, determine A/B tests that you want to try, and optimize your communications strategy. Is posting or emailing on a certain day or at a certain time particularly successful with your audience? Do they prefer text, photos, or graphics? You can even dive deeper into your email data and look into any correlation between unsubscribes and the frequency or timing of your emails. Diving deeper into social media data can also look like understanding which hashtags get you the most number of new follows or what types of information shared correspond with preferred types of engagement (shares versus saves, comments versus profile views, etc.).

If you can: Track your event attendees and compare them with your donors lists. From one-on-one meetings to small coffee chats to large galas, who are your repeat attendees and what events motivate them to give or get more involved?

Program Metrics

Programming looks different for each nonprofit, but the two equally important “buckets” of data to collect are your scope and impact. The metric you should always have on hand is the number of program participants you serve from year to year. This helps you communicate the scope of your work.

Just as critically, your organization needs to define and clarify what impact means for your programs. This is where you should differentiate between short-term and longer-term outcomes. A larger scope doesn’t automatically mean a bigger impact, and more donors now recognize this. Who are your program participants and how does your program fit into their stories? Illustrating their journey is how you can communicate your organization’s impact. To show the non-tangible impact you make, consider surveying your participants to gather their perspectives and feelings as well.

Quick Tip: Position your yearly program metrics within the greater historical context of your organization. Have you just served your 1000th meal or mentored your 30th student through graduation? Sharing these milestones over the lifetime of your nonprofit demonstrates the patient, long-term, and often generational work that creates impactful change.

Your Next Steps

1. Prioritize the area that you want to gather more data for.
2. Evaluate the data you currently have and assess the processes you now use to track this data.
3. Choose a total of 1-3 metrics to track and implement or improve your process for doing so.
4. In a couple months, update your staff and other stakeholders by sharing some results!

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