It is 1:00--I wanna go ahead and get started. I'm so glad that you all are talking to me in the chat because that is my favorite part of these sessions. Today, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about nonprofit KPIs, but more importantly,. I'm gonna talk about, what they are when like, why they're important and how you should use them. Now just to get it out of the way, when I say KPI, does that like, do y'all know what that stands for? Should you want me to define it? When I'm using the term KPI, I mean key performance indicators. You're also gonna hear me call them, like, metrics, and then I'll talk about data. Pittsburgh. Oh, I'm gonna be in Philadelphia in a couple of weeks. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and all that sounds very cold. Okay. If you're wondering who I am and why I'm talking to you, my name is Abby. I'm part of the team at Neon One. I've been in the nonprofit tech industry for around twelve years now, and I get really passionate about giving folks like you access to the tools and skills you need to make your jobs easier. So that's why I'm excited to talk to you today about tracking and using your data even though, tracking and, like, measuring metrics is actually not my favorite thing on the planet. So I'm gonna I'm gonna come to you from that perspective. I am talking to you, from a Neon One, team, but I wanted to tell you just a couple things. So I see some familiar names here. If you're a Neon One user, everything we're gonna talk about today is achievable using the tools in your instance. I'll mention a couple of things that you may wanna do that reaches kind of beyond the Neon One scope. But if you are here and you are not using a Neon One solution, everything we cover today is applicable to you too. So everything you learn today, regardless of what systems you're using, is applicable to you, and I'm gonna share some some insights into how you can start pulling the data that I'm gonna encourage you to measure. So, you all are already mastering this. I always ask people to please talk to me in the chat. I love talking to you. I love learning about what your day to day looks like. I love seeing where all of you are coming from. I feel like all of us probably have cold toes right now regardless of where we are in the country. But I do want to say you may have noticed the chat is moving pretty quickly. If you have questions for me throughout this session, please try to drop them in the chat or in the Q and A box. I do keep an eye on the chat as I'm talking, but the chat can move really fast, And, putting any questions you have in the q and a box will make sure it a lot more likely that I'll, like, see them and be able to answer them. Okay. Before we get started,. I wanna ask you a question. How do you feel when you actually think about measuring your key performance indicators and tracking your progress and using that data, to make decisions? On a scale of no to it's my favorite thing, where do you fall? I definitely fall on the left side of the spectrum. Every time I sit down and run reports, like, it feels like a huge bit oh, we got a mix. I love the idea. I'm not sure how to handle it. We're great. Okay. I love this. So I love data, but. I hate pulling data. My brain doesn't operate that way. Ask my boss how many times I have landed in her office hours asking questions about a. Salesforce report that I don't know how to read properly. Erica, I love it, but I don't want to be the one to do it. That, you and me, we're on the same page. Okay. So I'm getting yes. My brain doesn't operate that way. Same. I can tell you a story with the data, but actually getting it is really hard. And then, Jackie, I think I think this is a really good one. Having, like, no guidance is really stressful on its own, which is very true. So I'm gonna share, a couple of things with you today that I hope will help, whether you love it, hate it, or somewhere in between. This resource may be helpful to you, especially if you, like, know that you need to be tracking some things, but you don't really know where to start. This breaks down a lot of the metrics that we're going to talk about today. It breaks down how to calculate them, and it even breaks down what you can do with some of these data points. So I'm going to drop this in the chat, and I'll share it with you, at the end too. And, Rose, I low key love plenty of data. It reminds me of my early STEM days. I always joke when it's time for me to pull a report or do something that I got a literature degree, which I did. I majored in poetry. So, you know, we we're coming from different angles. I think I think we're all gonna hopefully get on the same page about some of what you can be doing. Okay. Regardless of where you are,. I think this resource will help, especially if you're trying to figure out, like Anne said in the chat, what is manageable with small staff. So if you have never really found yourself in a position where you need to track specific. KPIs or and this is really common. If you have tracked. KPIs in the past, but you were measuring things that didn't really have an obvious impact on your day to day life, this might not really seem important, but it it is, even if it doesn't necessarily feel like it all the time. If you measure the right trends, the right KPIs, you can use your findings in all kinds of ways. And and Colleen kind of called this out in the chat. When you are tracking the right metrics on regular basis, you can identify and address issues before they get out of control. You can communicate with your supporters more effectively, and you can use your data to set more realistic goals for yourself and the rest of your organization. And I just realized why you all aren't seeing the link. There it is. Okay. I sent it to everyone this time. Okay. But to do this, you're gonna need to track the right metrics, and you do need to track your progress on a regular basis. So if you've never done this before and if you are trying to figure out, especially, like, someone called out, you are trying to figure out what's manageable for a small staff, I'm gonna tell you right up front you don't need to start measuring everything right away. I'm gonna show you a lot of KPIs that you might want to measure, but measuring them all at the same time is not going to be feasible for you. So instead, I would really encourage you to choose a handful of KPIs that will answer questions you are already asking about your community and about your operations. Once you've gotten a feel for what it's like to to measure those metrics, to pull that data, to look for trends, and to figure out what those trends are telling you, then you can start expanding your your scope and start measuring more things. And you're gonna you're gonna figure out what is right for you to measure. So, say you start tracking your donor retention rate, you may find yourself wondering if certain segments of donors have higher retention rates than others. If you start tracking your year over year, like, membership acquisition, you may decide that you want to channels are driving the most memberships. If you are feeling a little overwhelmed, I hope you hear me and all of on all of my fellow data nerds in the chat when we say that this actually can be fun once you start kind of getting the hang of it, and it's really fun to start seeing the stories that your that your data can tell you, especially if you are are interested in the kinds of people who support you and, like, what motivates them. So, with this in mind, I'm going to go over a few kinds of KPIs that you might want to start measuring, how to get that information, and then how you can use them in your day to day job. Now, I do wanna, I'm gonna promise something to you. I'm not gonna go super into detail about each of these because if I did we would literally be here all day. My goal is to give you some ideas about what to start measuring and some kind of guidance on where you can find that data. Alright. The first group of KPIs I want to look at are your general engagement KPIs, and I say general engagement because I'm going to talk specifically about supporter engagement in a different section. So, we all know how important it is to keep your community engaged. It's a huge deal. It's, it's important whether you want to reach existing supporters, and it's really important if you want to reach new audiences. But regardless of what your goals are, understanding how people engage with you both online and in real life, will help you build deep relationships and build that really, like, thriving community. So some common metrics that kind of fall into this, bucket include things like email performance. So that could be, like, your open rates and your click through rates on on your emails. It can mean tracking engagement on your website. So that could look like, measuring your bounce rate or looking at the time spent on different pages on your site. How many of you are tracking these? I'm actually curious. Social media performance is another one that kind of falls into this area. You can even look at things like new subscribers to your newsletter, how many people respond to your surveys, how many people attend your events. There are a ton of possibilities here. Now, I'm not saying again, don't don't think that you need to measure all of these unless you're Lisa who tracks all of them monthly, which is amazing. But there are there are a lot of different things like this that you can look at to get a feel for how your community is learning from you, talking to you, learning about you. I really hope this gets you thinking. Now the tricky part with this is that there is no one place that you can collect all of these individual data points. Now this is true because you're probably engaging your community on a lot of different channels, and each of those channels probably has its own, like, reporting system. Now there is a possibility that you may find yourself in a situation where some of these are in the same place. So, for some of you, say, if you're using Neon CRM, for example, you can get things like your your, email metrics from there. You can get a couple things from there. You may if you're using something like Hootsuite or Sprout Social, you may be able to get all of your social media reporting in one place. But these KPIs are probably gonna be in multiple different places. So this where you go to get this information is really gonna be dependent upon what you wanna measure. I love that Brianna called this out. This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Brianna and their team track email performance and newsletter sign ups very quickly, but social media is a lot looser. And that's the perfect way to approach this. Figure out what is really important to you and track that very closely. And then if there are other things that are kind of tangentially related, you can spend maybe a little less time on those. It's really down to what is important to you. Now, gathering all of this information from lots of different platforms can feel a little overwhelming at first, especially when you're first starting to get into the swing of doing it, but I promise that work is worth the effort. When you understand where and how your audiences are engaging with you, you can use that information to build a really effective communication strategy. So if and it can inform your goals too. So maybe you're like Brianna and you know that the people who are reading and engaging with your emails are really what's important to you. You can use your email data to build very effective campaigns there. Maybe you discover that social media isn't as impactful for you, so you spend a little less time and effort on on your social media channels. Scott called out a really good point. Often data from multiple different social media platforms can be aggregated in a single dash board, and that is really, really valuable. I know we use Looker Studio, with at Neon One. There are some there are some really cool platforms that you can use to do that. Once you have all of this data, this can also impact your fundraising plans also, because this this information gives you a window into where your people are spending their time and how you can reach them. And it can even give you insight into the kinds of stories and information that your that your community likes. So if your stories about children's programming consistently gets a lot more engagement on social media than updates about your capital campaign. You can try sharing posts maybe about how your new facility for which you're raising money in the capital campaign will impact the kids in your community. That can help you in all kinds of ways. It can help you build more engagement. It can help you improve your email performance because you're give giving people content that they like, and it can also eventually help you write more effective appeals also. So I mentioned that we were gonna talk about that was general engagement. I also want to encourage you at least to measure specific supporter engagement. The general engagement is pretty high level, in the in the b to b marketing world, which is where I often live, we would call that, like, a top of funnel. People are, like, learning about you. They're engaging with you. When you're asking people to take action, when you're asking them to move from being more generally engaged to being very specifically engaged and you're asking them to take an action, you'll want to measure those actions from your supporters also. You'll wanna measure that engagement from the people who are actively making your work possible every day. Now this doesn't mean only tracking financial transactions, although that certainly is a part of this, and we'll look at that in a minute. Most of these metrics or KPIs can apply really to anyone who supports your work. So form conversion rates, for example. Do any of you look at your form conversion rates at all? I bet I I I bet I I bet there's, like, one or two of you. No. That's okay. Form conversion rates are actually pretty difficult to track sometimes, but what you can do so a form conversion rate is the percentage of people who land on a form or a page of yours that has a form on it and then go on to submit the form. So what's tricky about this is that depending on the platform you're using, it can be difficult to measure. You would need to use something like Google Analytics to track, the number of people who land on that page, and then look at the number of people who submitted that form. And then you would divide the number of people who submitted the form by the number of people who landed on the page. You can do that for donation pages, of course, but you can also do that, for membership enrollment forms or volunteer sign up forms or event registrations or even newsletter sign ups. We you can also track acquisition rates for your supporters too. I go into that a little more in detail in the the KPI worksheet that I shared. But you can look at what rate are you attracting new donors, new members, new volunteers, and other supporters. You can also track, and this is where it gets really cool. It does take a little extra work, but you can also look at what percentage of your supporters are involved in more than one activity. What percentage of your volunteers are also donors? What percentage of your donors are also attending events? This is this is where you can get really nuanced and really granular. So don't if you're not tracking anything, maybe don't get into that right away. That's definitely something that you can grow toward. I did debate. You'll notice this, this bullet point. I did debate, including recurring donation metrics here. That is one KPI, like, by nature, that is oriented toward donors, not necessarily members or volunteers. I I did kinda debate focusing more on this in the fundraising and, like, revenue oriented KPI section, and I mentioned them there too. But the reason I chose to include that here is because engagement is so critical with this group that I decided to include it both places. Are you all, like, looking at recurring donors? Are do you have recurring giving programs? Is that something you're working toward? I'd be curious to know. Understanding specifically the engagement patterns of this group is really important because they they really are your most dedicated supporters. They are your biggest fans. They are the people most likely to step up and support you in lots of different ways. I could get on a soapbox about recurring donors, but I won't. I am really excited to see how many of you are doing this, Tracy. This is a new goal for us this year. That's a phenomenal goal. I'm really excited to hear about that. I love recurring donors.. They're my favorite. Okay. So where you go to find the data for these metrics will depend largely on the tools or suite of tools you're using to manage, manage all of these different activities. So if you're managing something for fundraising or managing fundraising on a platform, your membership program on a platform, volunteering, all of these may be separately. The average nonprofit, I think, uses between three and five separate systems to manage these things. So if that is you, you may want to spend a little time double checking your data just because you may get duplicates or or something like that. But if you are using a system, if you're using a CRM or an aggregator tool that integrates all of these different tools, you may be able to pull, this data from there. Luciana asked a great question in the chat. What do you consider recurring donations? Is it monthly or annually? As a general rule, when you hear people like me talking about recurring donors, it can mean all of those things. You may hear us say recurring donors. Recurring donations are generally donations that are set up and then run on a regular schedule. So in the research I did on recurring donors last year, the vast majority of those transactions were monthly, but a lot of people also set up like quarterly or annual gifts. But recurring generally means they schedule those gifts in advance. You will hear people like me say repeat donors. If they are someone that comes back, they don't necessarily schedule their gifts out in advance, but they're coming back and they're giving to you over and over again. So recurring donors generally are scheduled transactions. Repeat donors are people who come back over and over and make those gifts. Both really valuable groups of people. What I want to reiterate here is really the the cleanliness of the data that you're looking at. So if you don't have a tool like a CRM that houses all of these different features, you may need to go through and spend some time cleaning up the data that you have. So, for example, if you have a donor who, you my name, for example. My name is Abby. My given name is Abigail. So you may have me make a donation to you, but my my, credit card information says. Abigail Jarvis made a donation. But when I sign up to volunteer, it may say Abby Jarvis. So if you are using different systems, try, Do the best you can to kinda clean that up so that way you'll know that I both donated and volunteered. But, you know Yeah. It's better to to measure and have it just kind of imperfect than it is to not measure at all. Let's see. So this is another, it's another area where gathering information from multiple sources can sound really intense. And, honestly, between you and me, digging into the different ways your community supports you can be scary. It can be overwhelming, and it can be those especially if you are a little afraid of what you might uncover. It is kind of like going to the doctor, like, if you think that you're sick but you don't really want to go to the doctor because you don't want to know. It can it can feel like that, especially when you see kind of some concerning headlines about individual giving going down and and bad retention rates. It can be scary to measure these things, but, I hope to encourage you by by saying that, yes, even if you find negative trends, finding something negative is the first step in fixing that problem. So if you're stressed out by measuring these, don't worry. You're not alone. It's okay to be stressed out. If you find something bad, and please note the heavy use of air quotes around bad, finding that can help you identify the next steps to take to kind of turn that trend around. This can give you a lot of insight into the ways that people support you financially. It can give you insight even into what campaigns and appeals are most effective. It can help you identify if you need to make updates to your website or to other materials. So if you notice, for example, that, let's look back here. If you notice, for example, that a lot of your people who land on a volunteer sign up form leave without filling it out, you may want to simplify your form a little bit. If you notice that your volunteers are much more likely to donate to you than people who are engaging with you other ways, you may want to spend a little extra time writing really beautiful thank you notes to your volunteers to encourage them to stay engaged with you. When you really dig into this, you're gonna find ways to improve your fundraising or your membership program or your marketing or your websites, your events. This kind of information can do a lot of work for you. I love this, Brianna. We experienced this when we first started using Neon. We found lots of scary data, but we've been able to come up with a plan to tackle them. That's exactly, exactly what this is for. If you find something scary, it's it's scary, of course, but now you know where to focus your efforts, and that kind of direction will help you turn the proverbial ship around. I'm gonna fly through these next things, but I'm gonna I do wanna say, like, this is our last group of really important KPIs. These are the KPIs associated with your revenue. I am sure how many of you are measuring your revenue progress? I would assume most or all of you are measuring revenue. Right? This is unbelievably important. This is how you keep the lights on. Yes. Yes. Yes. Great. We good. I'm glad you're oh my god. Yes, Scott. So while I don't want you to focus exclusively on revenue, we are all smart people. We know that we have to measure this. This is important. So some common metrics you might wanna include, and I'm curious which ones you're measuring, which of these you're tracking. You may want to keep an eye on things like your average donation or your average membership tier. You can keep an eye on this trend over time. Also, this is another thing that may may turn up something scary but helpful. If you notice, for example, that your average donation amount is going up, but your average number of active supporters is going down, that me and that happens for a lot of nonprofits. That's a really big trend right now. You will know, like a lot of other nonprofits do, that you're relying too heavily on a very small pool of donors. And when you recognize that, that can be scary. You know that if you have a small pool of donors that that are giving very large gifts, if one of those donors can't make their gift for whatever reason, that can have a huge impact on you. You may then choose to expand on focusing your donor base so you mitigate the risk inherent with losing one of those donors. If you notice that a lot of your members choose to upgrade their membership when it's time to renew, you'll know that you're doing a good job with that group, and you may want to emphasize upgrading a membership when it's time for someone to renew. You'll notice I did include recurring metrics here too. They're that important. Especially if you're measuring the percentage of donors you have who that are recurring donors, that can be really helpful as you're forecasting the revenue that you're expecting for the next month. It can help you track the success of your recurring donor, like, engagement strategies. That's really helpful. You can also look at things kind of beyond average transactions and average, donation amounts. You can look at things like which campaigns drive the most donations or membership enrollments? Which campaigns drive fewer, donations, but those donations are higher? Maybe you'll notice that people who donate to you when you are asking on Facebook give more frequently but in smaller amounts. You may notice that your mid sized donors really love direct mail appeals. The more you dig into these patterns, the clearer picture you'll get of the people who support you, the segments of people who support you, and how you can reach out to those to those folks. Now the vast majority of this information is going to be in your online fundraising platform or if you're focused on memberships in your membership management system. You might need to be a little creative if you're looking to understand which channels or appeals are the most successful. Out of curiosity, do any of you manage or track, like, which channels or appeals perform best? I'd be curious to see if you do that and how you do that. One really cool tactic I have seen is a nonprofit I worked with for a while created unique donation forms for big campaigns or for different appeals or even channels. So they had a form specifically for Facebook posts, for example, or and they did an appeal where they asked asked specifically their mid sized donors for gifts, so they had a a form specifically for them. The Facebook form, for example, was identical to their standard online form, so they could confidently compare the gifts that came in through both channels, and compare them and see which is performing better. I really like that Amy is using UTM codes. I think that is a really, really cool way to do that. Amy, high five.. That's really great. Scott uses bitly links, and they pull response data from their platform. That's fantastic. There are all kinds of ways to get creative with this. But I hope that you figure out how to do, how to do some of this comparison because it will really give you phenomenal insight into how this works. We use UTM codes for. Mailchimp emails and meta ads. Does Neon One track UTM tags? I believe I'd have to double check. So Neon CRM, I don't think, does UTM tags specifically. What you would want to do is try you would use probably Google Analytics to look at your UTM traffic. But I will say in the follow-up email that I'm sending, there's gonna there is a Neon CRM specific q and a session related to this session. So, I would encourage you to go to that q and a session. It's specifically for Neon CRM users, and you can ask. Kira and her team, and they will be able to to help you figure that out. This is another one that feels scary, and I hope that both listening to me and seeing all these people who are coming up with their own ways to track this information is reassuring to you. There are so many creative ways that you can get insight into these supporters. You can understand how your community supports you financially. You can understand how their support evolves over time. You can understand, what revenue you have coming in on a regular basis. That's really useful when you're planning expenses and building budgets. This also how many of you have ever sat down with your board and your board is like, we want you to raise x millions of dollars, and that is, it seems like a number that they just kind of plucked out of thin air? When you are planning for the future, when you're setting revenue goals, or when you are setting donor acquisition goals, or even if you're planning something really specific like a capital campaign, having this historical fundraising data or revenue data available to you will help you make much smarter, much more well informed decisions. So, and I want to emphasize that even the most transactional revenue oriented KPIs give you insight into the people who support you and the people who love you and your work. Those transactions will tell you a story and you can use that story to be more effective in your day to day work. You can make more effective emails, you can engage people more effectively, you can look at event performance and plan cooler events. This, I hope this is helpful to you. You're not just tracking revenue numbers in a spreadsheet, you're using this data to paint a picture of your community and build a plan to engage them. I just gave you so much information in a very short period of time. I'm gonna answer some questions. In the meantime, here is that. QR code for the KPI worksheet. Again, if you need me to pull that link again, I totally can. But I'm gonna take a look at the q and a. Yes. Oh, I didn't even tell you guys this. Yeah. You guys will have, you guys will get the slides. I will send you an email tomorrow morning. It will include a link to this presentation. It will include a link to this KPI, worksheet again. It will include some other resources, and I will get that to you tomorrow morning. Slides, slides. Oh, okay. So this is a really great question that David asked. So in the chart, what is the difference between recaptured, reacquired, and reactivated donors? I'm gonna go back and look at what chart you are looking at. Boop. And this one? Member upgrade or downgrade bar chart? Or this one? Ah, this one. So here, we have let's see. We've got new donors. That's pretty new or pretty self explanatory. We've got retained donors. So those are donors who give again repeatedly year after year. Recaptured and reactivated. I would believe I would need to take a closer look at this. This is a custom report that someone built, and reacquired. Let's see. So I would think that this has to do with how long they had been deactivated. So if someone was re I don't know. I have to look into this. Let's see. Reactivated see, we I keep trying to hover over these information, icons. Oh, there you go. Reacquired is no donation within the last two years. So I would look at this report that someone built, and I just took a screenshot of and take a look at that. But Colleen called out that, let's see. Reacquired or reacquired is no donations in the last two years. They're also a lapsed donor. If you have that in, yeah, and you can roll over to get the definition, someone should rename those on the platform. Recapture is someone who hasn't given in the last year. So this seems to be a report, based on the length of time that has elapsed between the moment the report was run and the the person's last gift. Good question. That will teach me to take screenshots of someone else's reports, to put in my in my sessions. Okay. Let's see. There was one I saw up here. We gotta make this bigger. I don't know if you were here when I logged in, but, I am not on my normal setup. If a current donor donates from a new source like a DAF, are they now counted as a new donor? No. What they what would show differently is the source or the type of donation that someone has made. So if I gave to you and I just used my credit card and then I gave to you again and I used a different payment method, if I paid you if I gave you money through my DAF, it should show differently. I hope that is helpful. Let's see. I think those are most of the questions. Does Neon one have comparable reports to what Mailchimp has? I'm getting ready to do our year over year newsletter performance report. We I need to look at what the Mailchimp, situation is. Honestly, I haven't been in Mailchimp in years. I do know that Neon One does have built in email reporting for different campaigns, and I know that you can run reports for your email performance. I don't know how it compares to Mailchimp. Okay. I've got a couple questions. How do we get info to attend the. Neon Q&A session you mentioned? I will let you know. I am going to break one of my cardinal rules and navigate away from Zoom. We are going to go to, you know what, I'm gonna move this over here because I don't know if y'all can see it, and I don't want you to look at my my speaker notes. I'll get you that information right now. That should also be in your follow-up email. Let's see. I hope you all are not is there a page in the Neon support chat forum that we can go to ask other Neon users questions. Let's see. What I would recommend all of you do if you are a Neon one user would be to go here. I'm dropping a link in the chat. Go to academy.neonone.com. This is where you can find information about the Q&A sessions. So if you land on this page, for example, and you go, click down and and let's see. If you click the view live trainings button, that is where you can see all of these q and a sessions. These are also attended by other Neon One users. And if you'll notice tomorrow at 4 PM, there is a Tech Circle. Q&A on reporting and KPIs. So just click into there. You can tap register and go from there. I don't know about a forum, but I would tell you that that is probably the most, easy to access opportunity for you to connect with other Neon One users. So I would go there. Okay. I have kept you all five minutes past, where I promised I would keep you all. I it looks like I've answered most of the questions. Questions. If you all do have additional questions for me, please feel free to email me. You're gonna get an email from me tomorrow with a link to the recording and the KPI worksheet, and you can just reply to that email and I will get it. So if I missed a question, I am so sorry. Do please send me an email. I will get you the right answer. If you're a Neon One user, I really recommend, checking out that Q&A session if you want to dig into things like UTMs or reporting. But otherwise, thank you so much for being here. I know it is a busy time of year. I know you are very busy and that you have a lot of hats, especially in January after after the year end fundraising season. Thank you for spending time with me today. I hope this was helpful. I hope you continue to talk to me on LinkedIn or through email. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you all have a great afternoon.