Nonprofit leaders and their Board members are united by cause-driven initiatives that aim to deliver social impact. One of the most essential initiatives, if not the most important, is the organization’s fundraising strategy. Fostering a culture of fundraising and identifying ways to measure program effectiveness are critical to your nonprofit’s success.
We recognize that you don’t always get the time to analyze fundraising campaigns and set a course for what you can do differently for the next campaign. That’s why we recently polled fundraising professionals and Nonprofit Board members to glean insights on what key metrics demonstrate impact (beyond the dollars raised) and how they can help inform the delivery of progress towards ongoing fundraising and donor engagement goals. Here are the top 5 metrics:
1. SROI (Social Return on Investment)
A relatively new and more insightful way to measure the impact that a nonprofit has on a community, SROI involves a double bottom line that takes into account both the financial performance of a campaign and the resulting social effects of the dollars delivered.
2. Impact Growth
Growth in impact over a specific period (month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year) requires proactive goal setting and ways to measure the change. Having a record of the number of benefactors and a list of support factors (i.e., monetary, goods, and services) provides a measurement base to easily build impact growth models.
3. Engagement
Engagement factors can be measured by the number of activities and behaviors such as newsletter sign-ups, social media followers and sharing, peer-to-peer fundraising participation, event attendance, and advocacy awareness building, among others.
4. Influence
Boards are now asking, to what degree does the organization influence the solution of issues compared to others? To answer this question, progressive nonprofits are using a Klout score, ranging from 1 to 100, to measure the influence of their organization in addressing a specific issue.
5. Scale
How do you grow fast enough to meet the growing societal needs? The power of fundraising software technology enables you to scale up quickly, reach a larger audience, and tell your story in more dynamic ways.
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