GUEST POST // How to Measure Impact With Metrics From Your Nonprofit's CRM
By Dave Martin of CharityEngine
Collecting data is one of the most important things a nonprofit can do to be successful. But that’s only half the job!
Your nonprofit runs various initiatives and has a lot of data to track, whether it’s about your donors (giving frequency, volunteering, giving amounts) or about your nonprofit’s growth (success of initiatives, new member growth, donor retention). That’s one advantage of using a comprehensive constituent relationship management (CRM) system.
Your nonprofit’s CRM can track data to help you see your organization’s impact and progress over time. Measuring the impact your efforts are making is crucial to maximizing your nonprofit’s effectiveness and growing as an organization.
In this guide, we’ll cover three ways your nonprofit can measure its impact by tracking metrics from its CRM:
Analyze donor data
Track revenue and expenses
Examine engagement metrics
By using the right technology, you can make the most of your data and use it to grow as an organization. Let’s take a closer look at how your software can measure your success!
Analyze Donor Data
While your fundraising software will support donation collections, it should also offer robust reporting and analytics to help you understand what those gifts mean for your nonprofit.
It’s important for you to focus on the right metrics to analyze. They include:
Gift type: How many major gifts and in-kind donations did you receive? Were donations given through text-to-give campaigns, your website’s donation portal, or another channel? Multiply donations by evaluating the most popular gift types and repeating those fundraising initiatives.
Number of donors: The sheer number of donors matters, but the right nonprofit CRM can help you break those numbers down into actionable information. Do you have hundreds of donors giving a small amount sporadically? Maybe focus on moving them to monthly donations or upping the amount by just a few dollars. How many of your donors could be potential major gift sponsors? Categorizing the total number into subsets can clearly show you the steps to take to engage them further in a personalized way.
Volunteer data: Volunteers are critical to the success of your nonprofit, and particularly to the success of your events. It would take a big bite out of your fundraising if you had to pay those people for their time and talent! Use your CRM to track your volunteers and discover important insights. For example, is there a certain demographic group or geographic area that accounts for more volunteers? You’d know to double down on both recruitment efforts there as well as other areas of focus. When you can track your volunteers, you can ensure you’re thanking them promptly, and perhaps even entering them in a sequence to turn them into financial donors.
Understanding the ways in which your donors give can help you see the source of your impact.
For example, if you receive a significant amount of corporate support, you might invest more in matching gift advertisements. According to Double the Donation, donors must be aware of their match eligibility to submit a matching gift, which is why it’s crucial that you promote giving opportunities accordingly.
Track Revenue and Expenses
The whole point of your nonprofit’s mission is to make an impact, which is largely influenced by the funds you’re able to raise and the way you allocate them. This handling of funds drives your ability to launch programs, contribute to beneficiaries, and build your marketing efforts to raise more donations.
Your CRM will help you do this by tracking your nonprofit’s:
Revenue: Where is your revenue coming from? Perhaps events are big drivers, or peer-to-peer campaigns raise the most. Is your revenue seasonal? Does it lean heavily on one group of donors?
Expenses: What does your nonprofit spend its revenue on? Are all of these expenses necessary, or is there room to get rid of a cost you don’t need? Without tracking, you might miss important information, such as the increase in overhead expenses. Identify ways you can save or wisely reallocate your costs.
Budget: What is the roadmap for applying your revenue to your expenses? Your CRM can help you stay on track and ensure that your fundraising revenue is maximized and your expenses are smart.
All-in-one CRMs include payment processing for nonprofits, combining payment processing with online donation tools to aggregate and analyze donor data. And payment processing options vary! Do your research so you can feel confident that you have the highest level of security and the lowest fees. An effective budget is the key to funding your strategic plan, and these metrics are crucial to establishing a budget that will help you maximize your impact.
Examine Engagement
According to CharityEngine, a key feature of the best nonprofit CRMs is communications management. How you engage with your donors is key to the health of your nonprofit, so knowing how and where your engagement is happening is important to measure.
Of course, your CRM should simplify communications for your organization. However, it should also track metrics to help you gauge the effectiveness of your communications efforts, such as:
Views: How many people are visiting your website? How many are landing on your donation page, and where is that traffic coming from?
Clicks: Once you get a user to your website, where are they clicking? Ideally, you have different calls to action (CTAs), on your site. Are visitors using these CTAs to donate, sign up for your newsletter, or offer to volunteer?
Conversions: The conversion metric is a critical way to measure your ability to garner support from your audience. What’s your conversion rate? In other words, what percentage of people who visit your donation page actually donate? Knowing this number can highlight areas for improvement—and thus, increased donations.
With this information, your nonprofit can gain better insight into how its messages are received. Then, your nonprofit can use this data in its marketing strategy to adjust communications as necessary and reach a larger (and more receptive) audience!
The underpinning of all this tracking, measuring, and analyzing is robust technology. The right CRM will further enhance your metrics and analytics by producing customized reports. That way, you can report back to your board with organized data that clearly explains your impact.
Plus, you’ll clearly see which of your efforts work, on which segments of your audience, and where you can tweak your process to increase engagement. Your fundraising will increase and your impact will be much more significant, so it’s important to know what to track…and then start tracking it!
This guest post was written by Dave Martin.
Dave Martin is the VP of Marketing for CharityEngine. He is a digital marketing expert with a unique combination of nonprofit and for-profit experience. Earlier in his career, Dave worked in global telecommunications marketing, product management, and product development both in the United States and Europe. Dave has a BA from the University at Buffalo, an MIA from Columbia University, and an MA from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Leuven, Belgium.
