Don’t be a Fundraising Dumas
When we set metrics for ourselves and our work at the beginning of the year, it’s good to reflect on what makes for good metrics. I think of Alexandre Dumas.
Alexandre Dumas was paid by the line for his serialized works like The Three Musketeers. Enter the servant Grimaud, who spoke in short, profitable, length-stretching sentences. When Dumas’s editor said these sentences don’t count, Grimaud was killed off.
This is by no means the only death by metric.
In real life, doctors focusing on their success rate will not take hard cases that might hurt their metrics by impolitely dying. This makes people more likely to die.
And it infects nonprofit causes that could be saving lives. The Save Darfur Facebook movement garnered 1.2 million followers, but 99.8% didn’t donate, and most didn’t recruit anyone else per this study .
While this is rampant with vanity metrics like likes, almost any metric can lead you astray if pursued exclusively. Cost to acquire is important, but not if it causes you to acquire many one-and-dones. Average gift is important, but not if you give up a broad support base to maximize it. Open rate and click-through are important email metrics but can be gamed by sending to fewer people. Gross revenue is important but also needs to factor in the price you paid.
And so on.
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For every metric, you must think, “what would an evil version of my team member or me do to achieve this goal while also destroying everything we work for?” It’s possible with almost any single metric.
Emphasis on single metric.
Ideally, you will take two approaches. One is paired metrics. For every response rate, there’s an average gift. For every retention rate, there’s a file growth. By pairing metrics that usually work in opposition, you prevent metric gaming. Plus, you can see what’s success and what is deck-chair rearranging.
The other is to use composite metrics that incorporate opposing pairs. Revenue per communication is generally better than either response rate or average gift because it includes both. Net revenue per communication is even better because it further balances costs. Total net lifetime value of donors on file is a great metric because it balances revenues and costs, present and future, and retention and file size.
Anything else makes you a Dumas – tempted to take the shortcut for metric success but overall failure.