4 Critical Fundraising Metrics For Nonprofits
Does your nonprofit currently have a way of keeping track of your fundraising metrics?
Your fundraising metrics are like the fortune-tellers of your organization – they can and should shape your future donor engagement and overall fundraising strategy.
The following are four critical fundraising metrics you should be focusing on and what to do with them.
1. Donor Acquisition Source
Where are your donors and donations coming from? Are they coming as a result of an email appeal, social media campaign, newsletter, or something else? Is your donor data all in one place?
If you don’t know the source of your conversions, you won’t know where to focus your energy for future planning.
2. Number of Transactions
Although setting an overarching monetary goal for a campaign is important, tracking the number of transactions made toward that campaign may prove to be more crucial for your long-term fundraising strategy than focusing merely on the total transaction volume.
The more individual transactions you have, the more individual donors who are interacting with your organization that you can potentially retain for future support.
3. Donor Retention
Your total number of donors for any given campaign is important, but keeping track of how many are repeat donors versus new matters even more.
Successfully retaining your donors is the most cost effective way to increase your nonprofit’s fundraising returns.
You need to identify who your repeat supporters are so you can continue to foster your relationships with them by providing proper stewardship and maintaining those giving relationships over time.
4. Lifetime Value
Do you know the lifetime value of your donors? How much do they give and how often? Do they contribute in other ways by acting as fundraisers or volunteers? How long have they been involved with your cause and what’s their staying power?
Knowing the potential lifetime value of your supporters in relationship to your nonprofit can help you tailor and shape your relationships with them to maximize that potential.
Maintaining a handful of higher value (or long-term) supporters is not only more lucrative to your cause than having several lower value (or short-term) supporters but also has been shown to have a positive ripple effect. Recurring donors tend to draw in more of their own personal connections to the causes they care about and therefore contribute substantially more than their monetary gifts alone.
Organizing Your Fundraising Metrics
There’s no point in measuring the above metrics if you’re not keeping track of them in an organized and readily accessible way.
The best way to do this is with a Donor Management System or CRM that provides you with all your valuable donor data, allows you to segment supporters, displays their giving and engagement history, and more, all in one convenient place.
A database of supporters organized with the help of your fundraising metrics and other data will help you set and implement effective fundraising goals moving forward!
