DonorPerfect
Welcome to Nonprofit Expert, presented by DonorPerfect.
Mallory Erickson
Hello, and welcome to Nonprofit Expert, presented by DonorPerfect. I’m Mallory Erickson and I’m here for a little podcast takeover, a mini series of episodes where we’re going to dive into fundraising strategies that make your life easier and your organization stronger. Today we’re diving into tracking key performance indicators, KPIs, that strengthen connections and deepen donor engagement. I’ll share some practical strategies with you that you can start using today, But first of all, I want to talk about why it’s so important that we’re doing this. One of the biggest challenges fundraisers face is measuring what really matters in relationships. We tell fundraisers not to be transactional, but then money is the only thing that we track in all these different ways, but it’s all, at the end of the day, about money. Traditional KPIs do often emphasize dollar raise or number of donors, but they miss the depth and authenticity that sustain long term relationships. And I will often say to organizations that I work with, don’t tell me what you care about, but show me what you track, because when we’re only tracking the money, it leads to transactional fundraising, no matter what we say or what we tell our fundraisers to prioritize, and it also leads to burnout and ultimately donor disengagement. So we’re missing out on the real power of fundraising, which is all about human connection. So to create deeper relationships we have to start measuring relational KPIs. In my book With the Fundraising, I outline four critical relational metrics that actually transform donor interactions. So one is relational depth, tracking the quality and authenticity of donor relationships. Here are some ways to measure it. You can conduct regular surveys asking donors to rate the the quality and depth of their relationship, you can ask them directly on a scale of one to ten how connected do you feel to our mission or to our team, and so you can use any survey tool to do this and you just want to be able to track conversations in your CRM in some way. Donor Trust level is another area that I talk about my book, understanding how confident your donors feel about your organization. Again, here you can distribute short trusted specific surveys with questions like, how confident are you that your donation is being used effectively? Here you could use a question like, how confident are you that your donation is being used effectively? And you can use the same survey for both things, so they don’t have to be different, but I want to give you an idea of what types of questions indicate that. Right? So you want to track repeat giving as an indicator of trust, absolutely, even though that’s a metric related to money, but you also want to start to track other information that gives you a better look inside the trust and confidence of your donors. And again, you can use inside your CRM, CRM analytics that track retention and repeat donations, but you definitely want to be tracking engagement on those surveys as well and the scores that they give. Another piece that I talked about my book is engagement consistency. So monitoring the frequency and meaningfulness of donor interactions outside of financial asks. So here is where you can track event attendance, volunteer hours, again responses to communications, participation in community forums, regularly ask for feedback on the quality of these engagements as well. Right? So you’re both both tracking whether or not they were involved in that activity and then how they felt about that activity. And again, you can use different survey tools, but a lot of those metrics should be tracked in your CRM as well, and you can also use analytics from email platforms. If you’re using DonorPerfect, you might have a Constant Contact integration as well or social media tools if you want to be tracking engagement on storytelling and social media posts also. The last thing that I talk about is around impact awareness. So evaluating how well donors understand the tangible outcomes of their support. So again we’re looking at surveys to regularly measure how donors understand the impact of their donations and their involvement. You could ask questions like can you clearly articulate the impact of your donation, or you could see how donors do talk about your work when you ask them in meetings, you know, what has been the most meaningful thing about being involved, or what’s your favorite thing about the impact of our organization. Monitor how they’re answering that question, and you might need to create an internal rubric for how you evaluate whether or not they really understand what you do. All of this is about creating a better understanding of engagement in your impact focus communications. So you can also measure engagement around impact reports, success stories, all of those things will give you a better idea of how aware your donor base is in the impact. So, I give you a lot of ideas there but I wanna just give you one simple action you can take right away. So, it’s gonna be a survey. Surprise. But I want you to send a short focus survey to your current donors this week. Ask them just two questions about relational depth and trust. I think you’ll be amazed at how much clearer your path forward becomes when you start to measure the critical aspects of your relationships, and if you are going to tell me yeah but Mallory nobody responds to our surveys or we only get thirteen responses or we only get three responses, send out the survey. First of all surveys alone, even regardless of the response rates or the responses that you get, surveys alone make people feel more connected and feel like they matter more to your organization. So you should always be creating opportunities for two way dialogue with your donors, but aside from that even if you get three responses or thirteen responses or a hundred responses, you’re still gonna have a lot more information on these KPIs than you would if you didn’t do it. So I just wanna remind you that when we focus on relational KPIs, fundraising moves from transactional to transformational. It starts to deepen those donor relationships and it actually revitalizes our work as fundraisers because we start focusing on the things that feel better to us that are ultimately gonna feel better to our donors too. And so this has impact on our mental well-being and burnout. There are so many implications when we start to shift our focus into connection, into building deeper relationships and deeper engagement. So thank you for joining me for today’s short and impact full dive into KPIs that truly matter. I’ll see you soon.
DonorPerfect
Thank you for listening to Nonprofit Expert presented by DonorPerfect. For more information and a special offer, visit donorperfect.com/podcast.
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