How to Measure the Impact of Your Nonprofit Organization

As a nonprofit organization, measuring and providing an accurate model of your impact shows that you can generate results. Depending on your organization's mission, impact can mean many things - from funds raised to goods donated, hours trained, voters registered or volunteer hours served. That's why it's essential to have a range of tools available to track and analyze your progress towards each goal.

Here's how you can start measuring the impact of your nonprofit organization.

Identify Your Goals

Every nonprofit is different, so when measuring the impact of your work, start with the basics. Bring your team together to answer some simple questions:

• What work are you doing, and who are you serving?
• What kind of results are you hoping for?
• What resources do you need to gather to support this work? (This will probably include volunteers, donations and in-kind gifts.)
• What would success look like??
• How do you plan to bring your goals to life? How long will it take?
• Are there any particular circumstances to consider?

Using this set of questions as a reference gives you direction. You will know what you are working towards, how to achieve it and what challenges you may encounter. Once you're clear on direction, set some goals. Make these as specific as possible. For instance, you may want to have recruited 50 new volunteers by the end of your second quarter.

Monitor your progress against these goals over time and adjust as necessary. You'll be surprised at how quickly your organization grows when everyone is moving in the same direction!

Set Up Tracking Systems

Now that you have identified your goals, you need to set up a reliable way to measure your progress. Managing a nonprofit can be hectic, and it's easy to overlook the importance of a solid data management strategy. Luckily, deploying the right tools can help streamline this administrative work.?

A nonprofit customer relationship management (CRM) platform like GivePulse offers an all-in-one solution to manage volunteers, memberships, events, fundraisers and community engagement opportunities and measure impact.?

Invest in a CRM

Providing accurate data on the work of your nonprofit is crucial. Along with supporting a culture of continuous improvement within your organization, it helps you acquire new resources from granting bodies (like foundations) and individual donors.

Because it stores all of your data, from contact lists to volunteer schedules, a CRM makes it easy for your team to run reports and check you're on track to meet your goals.?

Our user-friendly, all-in-one platform streamlines data collection and analysis for nonprofits, making it easy and intuitive to measure your impact on an ongoing basis.?

Learn more by booking a demo with GivePulse today!

A longer version of this article originally appeared on the GivePulse blog. To read the full article, visit https://learn.givepulse.com/blog/how-to-measure-nonprofit-impact.