The Complete Guide to Nonprofit KPIs

Not really – your staff and stakeholders do – but metrics are your map. Metrics represent your community and the people you serve, your staff, and how they work towards your mission’s impact. No one likes being reduced to a number, so every time you’re looking at a graph, let the right side of your brain weigh in too.

Here are some examples of what metrics represent:

• Common definitions, democratized data, and universal access create a culture of performance measurement, trust, transparency, and accountability – data is a language.
• Supporter metrics or a simple survey can help create empathy for your team to move to a more supporter-centric mindset – data reflects your community.
• Team metrics can unlock insight into how your fundraisers are working (hopefully happily and productively) from home – data is your staff.
• Metrics can be shared in conversations/chats to innovate or to kick off a workflow that used to take you hours to complete – data works for and with you.

This article covers performance measurement in Nonprofit Fundraising & Marketing, with a goal to help nonprofits fund solutions to the ever-changing needs of our communities.

You might ask, why not write about impact measurement? We believe in the power of programs and impact data and have many other resources on that topic. There is already a history of “proof” in program outcomes due to its funder requirements and its operational nature, however we have heard from marketers and fundraisers they are being asked to prove their work.

Revenue-generating teams can also be treated differently if they use these metrics to grow. If you invest in overhead or top-line growth, you can be chastised as “not a not for profit”. However, fundraising is the lifeblood of the programs that drive your impact, and in a recession these funds are mission-critical.

• What should you track? Agree on goals/priorities then KPIs you should pay attention to
• What if we don’t have goals? Use metrics to create and test your hypothesis for strategy
• How are they calculated?  Usually simple equations consisting of multiple data points
• What can you do with them? Benchmark your progress, identify trends over time, kick-off workflows, etc.
• Who should track them? Everyone! But have a business analyst or go-to data person too
• Where do they get them?  Digitized in reports and dashboard, and hopefully not manually

Organizing metrics are also important, as every KPI is a metric, but not every metric is a KPI. The few KPIs that you measure should be tied directly to organizational strategy, typically through a goal-setting framework. At Salesforce, we have a process that is adopted by many other organizations, called V2MoM (Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Metrics). Other organizations use things like OKRs or objectives and key results.

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 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.

Many marketing experts believe Donor Lifetime Value is the one north star in stormy waters and a tool to guide everything. Think of lifetime value as the engine room that runs across fiscal years – the more you build the value of each supporter over their lifetime with you, the more sustainable your growth will be.

However, calculating LTV can be difficult. You can use the sum of a donor’s lifetime giving for historical data, but predicting future value can be tricky. Some of the most sage advice on this topic for nonprofits is provided by Adrian Sargeant, an academic who has contributed vastly to the development of the profession of philanthropy. See more resources of his in the appendix.

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.

Who doesn’t like the good news from the End of Year or Giving Tuesday campaign? These metrics are great team wins, as both marketing and fundraising teams play a part and therefore can share in metrics that roll up to KPIs.

Also, the costs associated with these campaigns can be easier to measure than with frontline fundraising activities (where costs primarily include staff time and compensation). This common view of how marketing and fundraising teams are working together can build trust and a culture of measuring success.

Atlanta Mission Marketing & Fundraising teams at Atlanta Mission collaborate on the experience for different donors, but also share measurement.

Learn more in the Trail Guide to More Personalized Communications Session 1 & Session 2.

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:

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.

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

Someone needs to have responsibilities for being the captain of your data and championing the education of its value across your organization. If you can, find someone internally that has the capacity and give them the training they need (see this great Data Analyst training). That can lead to a new role if it’s a good fit, or their work can help justify the ability to hire someone new.

Many nonprofits are either tethered to systems that only report on certain metrics in certain ways or may require you to export to a spreadsheet. Technology should support everything we spoke about in this article.

Example Use Cases: Learn More Here!