Okay, everybody.. It is one o'clock.
I wanna go ahead and get started because we are gonna
talk about a topic,
KPIs.
KPI, by the way, stands for key performance indicator.
You're also gonna hear me use the word metric in this session.
It all kinda means the same thing.
So, lots to cover,
and I wanna do it in a way that makes it not intimidating.
So I wanna go ahead and get started. My name is Abby.
If we haven't met before, I am delighted that you're here.
I've been in the nonprofit tech sector for thirteen years this
month, which seems absolutely bonkers to me.
I really love understanding, donors and what they do
and how their behavior impacts you,
including when you are measuring donor behavior and
using those KPIs,
those key performance indicators to track your progress.
So before we get into it,
I wanna do just a couple little housekeeping items.
Mayo already oh, two things.
So one, this is going to be applicable to everybody.
If you are a Neon One user and you have questions about how to
measure any of the KPIs we're gonna talk about today,
I'm so glad that you're here.. We have resources for you.
There's the Neon One Academy.
There's our support desk.
And if you go to. Neon One Academy,
look at the the live training calendar.
We have open office hours where you can ask questions about how
to measure some of these KPIs yourself.
But if you are not a Neon. One customer, it's okay.
Everything that we're gonna talk about today is applicable to you.
It just may look a little different in your system.
The the question that I was gonna gonna mention,
we are recording this, and you are gonna get a copy of
this recording tomorrow.
So tomorrow around ten AM eastern, I think, maybe eleven.
I don't remember off the top of my head.
You're gonna get an email from me,
and it's going to include a link to our page where you can
watch the recording.
You can download the slides, share it as you want to,
and it will also include a couple resources for you that
you can use as you start measuring your own metrics.
That said, you have probably picked up on the fact that I really like it
when people talk to me when I'm presenting.
It makes me feel less like. I'm screaming into a digital void.
But because I do ask you to talk to me in the chat,
if you have a question for me that you want me to try and
cover at the end,
please try and remember to drop it in the q and a session.
I do watch the chat, it can move pretty fast,
and I wanna make sure I don't miss any questions.
So drop it in there.. Okay. Boring part is done.
I wanna get your feelings.
So tell me in the chat,
how do you feel about reporting?
Do you get this, like, deep aching sense of dread?
Are you super into the numbers?
Reporting is something that people usually either love or
they absolutely hate.
I don't enjoy reporting.. It is not fun for me.
I do not like it, but I know how important it is,
so I do it a lot.
So I'm very much on the David side of things over here,
and I see some really funny,
like, differences.
I see a lot of AI notetakers.
Some of you experience dread.
For some, it is the best part of your day.
I really like that Julia called out that, it's useful for, like,
helping make decisions because that's what we're really gonna talk about.
Don't love it. Love it brings me joy. I love it.
I hate it, like, a lot.
Love it, but have trouble with capacity to do it properly.
Laura, I love that,
and I'm really thankful that you shared that.
Thank you for that.
And I I hope that this is this this session today is gonna be
helpful for you and any of you if you hate it,
because I'm I'm a I'm a reporting hater that's gonna
teach you how to approach reporting.
So okay. This is really great.
And for those of you who love it, if you get,
like, inspired at any point during this,
just drop your own perspectives or insights or pointers in the
chat so those of us who hate it can, like,
find some inspiration and motivation.
Okay.
Love it or hate it,
tracking key performance indicators is actually really
important, unfortunately, and it really is worth the effort.
And this is true for a few reasons,
but these are kind of my favorites.
If you measure the right things,
and we're gonna talk about the right things in a minute,
if you measure the right things,
you can use your findings all kinds of ways.
I think it was, someone someone called out,
I don't remember whose name it was, I'm so sorry,
called out that this kind of data,
these insights can help you, like,
make really important data backed decisions.
And if you've ever been stressed out because you wanna
try something new and you're not sure how it's gonna work
Julia, there you go. I'm so sorry.
If you are like Julia and you're pulling data to
help inform your decisions,
that can take a lot of fear out of decision making because
you're making an informed decision.
It's not just a guess.
So it it's also really helpful because it helps you identify
potential issues before they actually become full blown problems.
And I'll share some examples of that.
But I can share just a personal example.
One of the things we measure all the time is if you get our
newsletters and you open it,
we're always tracking our open rates.
And we also track subscriptions to those open rates.
So last year, we noticed that our open rates were going down,
and we started troubleshooting,
to figure out what was going on that was making that happen.
We identified a few problems, we fixed it,
and our our our open rates went back to normal.
So if you're if you're measuring the right things,
you can make really cool decisions,
but you can also make sure that you're catching issues before
they really start to compound and and be real headaches.
Now here's the trick,
especially for those of you who don't like it.
You need to track the right metrics and you need to track
your progress on a regular basis.
So we're going to focus on on really those two things.
Because one of the worst things you can do to yourself,
especially if you hate it, is measure the wrong things.
And even if you do like measuring things,
you can have any of you heard of the expression analysis
paralysis where you have too much data and it just, like,
totally paralyzes you because you don't know what to
prioritize or what anything means and there's too much to look at?
It can get complicated in lots of different ways.
So I think that that focusing on measuring the right things
is is really important.
And if you boil everything down,
it's really important for one of two reasons.
One is because the metrics that you spend the most time
measuring are almost always going to be the metrics you end
up prioritizing.
So if you measure the most useful KPIs,
you will do the most useful work.
When you measure the most important things,
the most important outcomes,
you will spend your time on the most important activities.
And that's really related to the second reason that that
being exclusive about what you measure is so important.
When you measure everything, when you feel like everything is important,
that makes it much harder for you to prioritize what actually
is important.
So it is much more effective and a lot less
overwhelming if you choose a
handful of the very important KPIs.
You'll wanna choose carefully, and you measure those regularly.
If you notice that something starts changing in a
negative way,
then that's when you dig into the rest of the data that you have.
So you want to measure everything.
You want to have access to a lot of things.
You don't want to measure everything because you don't
want to overwhelm yourself and split your attention in too
many disparate ways.
So the number one thing I want you to take from this session
today is that choosing a handful of
important KPIs is going to be much better for you
and your organization than measuring and tracking
everything you do all of the time.
And the things that you choose to measure should be selected
carefully because, again, if you're gonna place your
attention on these metrics, placing your attention in
the wrong place when measuring these metrics can have some
unintended consequences.
The phrase unintended consequences sounds very dire,
so I'm gonna share some examples.
So how many of you measure your average donation amount?
How many of you that is one of the key KPIs that you measure,
the key metrics you keep an eye on.
Measuring you. Great.
This this can have a really important place.
Eris, nope. Lots of different takes. Okay.
Measuring and keeping track of your average
donation amount can be really useful.
And if you look at that metric with nuance and you
consider the nuances that go into it,
you can learn some really cool things.
So maybe you notice that people who attend your events have
a higher average donation amount than people who don't.
Or maybe you notice that people that give to a specific
fund, like a scholarship fund,
make a higher average gift than people who donate to your
annual fund.
That's useful information.
Or maybe you notice that one of your appeals that you sent out
resulted in a higher than normal average donation amount.
Those are wonderful, useful insights.
But I want oh my gosh.
Isabella is my new best friend.
I want you all to look at what Isabella said here,
and I'm gonna touch on why that is.
So if you have a chance,
look at what Isabella said in the chat.
Simply measuring your average donation amount and
working to increase the average donation amount can have
unintended consequences.
If you are focused on raising your average donation amount,
if that's what you decide is important,
it will be easy for you to overemphasize empath
why is that so hard to say?
It's easy for you to focus too much on connecting with a few
donors who give you really large gifts while neglecting
the majority of donors who make smaller gifts.
So if you really wanna raise your average donation amount,
what you can do is you can go ask the major donor down the
street to give you a ten thousand dollar donation.
Your average donation amount is gonna go very high.
But in doing so,
you may neglect all of the beautiful people who are
donating to you in smaller amounts because they are not
driving that higher average donation amount.
What is really wonderful is what Isabella said,
which is looking at the median donation amount instead.
So understanding what the not the
average, but understanding kind of what's in the middle.
What are most people giving you?
Because the median won't reflect those really big gifts.
So if you notice that your median donation amount is increasing,
that means probably that you are inspiring more of your donors,
more of your everyday donors to increase their giving gradually.
So this is related to a trend that
we're seeing in the nonprofit sector.
Stop me if you've heard this before.
One of the biggest trends that we are seeing in the nonprofit
sector as a whole is that the vast majority of nonprofit
funding comes from a handful of people who give lots and lots
and lots of money.
That is okay, but what we're also
seeing is that average everyday people who are not giving
fifty thousand dollars or more are disengaging from supporting
traditional nonprofits.
Like Eris said in the chat, it's the eighty twenty rule.
But that is dangerous because if you lose one of those major donors,
you've lost a significant portion of your revenue.
And so when you are when you're focusing on your average
donation amount, this is just an example,
if you focus too much on the on the number,
the average donation amount,
it's easy for you to over index on big gifts when what
you probably need to be doing is mitigating the risk that
comes from those big gifts by by engaging lots of people.
So, this is just one example.
Here's another one,
and this one was actually a really fun one to talk about.
So this is another example of how tracking and
overemphasizing specific KPI can have unintended consequences.
If you do you how many of you track conversion rates on your forms?
It it can be really important.
If you notice that one of your forms conversion rates and if
you're not if you haven't tracked conversion rates before,
your conversion rate is the percentage of people who land
on a form and actually complete it.
So if you notice that fewer people than normal are actually
completing a donation or membership enrollment or a
volunteer sign up or whatever you're asking them to do.
That's valuable information.
You may need to go into that form and see if you can fix it.
If you notice that one of your your forms is doing really well,
a lot of people are giving or the average donation amount on
that form is higher, the median donation amount,
if we wanna be really meticulous,
you can look at that form and see if it includes any elements
that you can easily factor into other forms.
But focusing too much on form optimization
can be really distracting,
or it could prevent you from collecting information that
could be really useful.
So one of my colleagues, Nick, used to work at a nonprofit,
and, he he shared with me that form optimization was something
that that he and his team were really focused on for a while.
But then it started getting tricky.
Removing the phone number field on donation forms slightly
increased conversions,
but it meant that the organization couldn't reach out
to those donors by phone or by text.
They could they streamlined forms and probably improved
some optimization by removing some fields,
but those fields meant that they were missing important
information that they needed to learn more about their supporters.
They had phenomenal conversion rates,
but he said that it got to the point that they were missing
important information,
and they spent a lot of time tinkering with forms only to
get marginal returns.
So I'm not sharing this with you the importance of having good forms.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't measure either of these things.
These are just examples of how measuring the wrong things or
putting too much emphasis on the wrong KPI can have a big
negative impact on you and your team.
Heather asked, is there a way to track a median donation amount in Neon reporting?
I am actually not positive off the top of my head.
I'm, like, mentally running through the list of widgets that you can
add to your add to your, like, mission control center.
But take a look.
It may be easily available in there.
And if it's not, let me know,
and I will find you information about how to do that in the system.
Okay?
Okay.
So we don't wanna measure the wrong thing,
so what do we measure instead?
I'm gonna give you three suggestions.
Do with them what you will.
Even if you don't measure these specific KPIs,
I do hope they will inspire you to think about what is
most useful at your organization.
To answer this question, Susie,
where can you find form conversion rates on Neon?
You'll need to work with us to get that or to kinda get that set up.
The best way to do that,
because you need to understand the traffic that's hitting your
form, you'll need to install some kind of tracking on there.
And we have documentation about how you can do that.
So reach out to us and and,
and let us know what we can do to help you.
We can fit help you figure it out.
So here are three KPIs that. I would suggest you start
measuring, or just kind of kinda take a look at.
I'm gonna ask you questions about this.
So the first one that. I would really suggest emphasizing is
retention rate.
So, obviously, the most this is most talked about with
donors, but if you run a membership program,
tracking your membership retention rate is very important.
It's also useful for other kinds of groups too.
You can measure how free how you you're
retaining your volunteers.
You can measure the the percentage of people who sign
up for a peer to peer event and then come back and participate
again the next year.
You can do the same thing with events.
Really, the list just kind of goes on.
So, out of curiosity, how many of you know your donor
retention measure your donor retention rate?
And if you measure it,
what is it if you're comfortable sharing?
I I would love to know.
I was just talking about,
donor retention today with our with our sales team.
So this one is important for a lot of reasons,
but the biggest reason that this is so important is
because, one, if you're if you have a donation program,
if you're focusing there instead of on, like,
memberships, people increase their giving over time.
So you if you've listened to me talk at all over the last
thirteen years, but really over the last year,
you know that people accelerate their giving.
They give more every year the longer they stay engaged.
Another big reason, honestly, for being very pragmatic is
that you spend a lot of time and
effort and resources acquiring new supporters,
and keeping them involved for longer means that you're gonna
get a better return on all of the time, effort,
and resources you invested in recruiting them.
I love this. LARC measures.
I think it's about forty seven percent right now.
LARC, that is a phenomenal donor retention rate.
You should teach us how to do this.
Jenny, my Neon KPI widget tells me it's currently sixty five percent.
Forty five percent,. I wish it was higher.
I want you all to know for those of you well, one,
I hope we always aspire for higher retention rates,
but I also want you to know that those of you who are
dropping your, your retention rates in the chat,
I think in q three twenty twenty five,
the retention rate was around thirty two percent.
So you're killing the you're beating the benchmark.
I love this. So the formula is really simple.
If you find the number of supporters who are we use a different CRM.
Sorry. Don't be sorry.
I'm just glad that you're doing the work.
I'm very proud of you for doing that.
The formula for measuring this is very simple.
You've you don't even have to have a CRM.
If you're using spreadsheets, you can do this.
You find the number of supporters who are returning to
you from this year.
So if you're measuring your. January retention rate,
find the people who are returning to you.
They made a gift in. January last year.
They've made a gift in January this year.
Then you divide that number by the total number of supporters
last year, and then you multiply it by a hundred.
That's your retention rate.
I love that Errol mentioned too,
we measure the lapsed donor rate.
That's very good and closely related to what we're talking about here.
Now knowing that you should do this is all well and good,
but who wants to measure something if you don't know how
to do with it?
So you can get really creative with this.
So look at retention rates for different kinds of supporters.
Do your recurring donors stick around longer than one time donors?
Do your members who attend events have higher renewal
rates than members who don't?
If you have volunteers, you can look and say, like,
okay, the the volunteers who signed up for this event
last year have a higher retention rate than
than people who went to different events.
You can talk to those volunteers and figure out what
they love and then implement what they love in different events.
Do you notice, like, a huge boost in donor retention after
you started doing something specific for your supporters?
You wanna keep doing more of that.
This can do so much for you.
Love what Lark is putting in here.
We measure first year retention rate,
multi year retention rate, reactivation rate,
and lapsed donors.
This is amazing.
And, yes, Shannon asked, would the last year but not this
year, list be helpful for for determining this?
Yes.
If you are running for those of you who I'm about to use the
phrase, it's libund.
It's last year, but unfortunately not this year.
If you are looking to boost your donor retention rate,
what you can do is you can pull a report, a libund report,
people who donated to you last year but haven't yet this year,
And you can send them a special appeal.
So like, hey. I like, we miss you.
Here's what we've been up to over the last year.
Your support accomplished this last year.
We would love to continue working with you to make a difference.
You can do all kinds of cool stuff with this.
I love that people are sharing so many ideas.
This makes me deeply happy.
And yes, Jennifer,
I will make sure that you get a copy of the deck.
The deck slides will be included in the sidebar of the,
page, that will host the recording.
So that'll be on there too.
Okay. This is my next question for you.
How many of you track your supporter acquisition rate?
So your supporter acquisition rate,
this is something that I don't see a lot of nonprofits measure.
I would love to know if you are measuring it and when you
decided to start.
This is something that you it is you usually see it measured
for, like, donors,
but this is also important for membership organizations especially,
or any measuring your acquisition rate for any group
that you are trying to emphasize is going to be
really, really good for you.
This is just really helpful overall,
especially if you are actively working to grow your supporter base.
And the best part is that if you are tracking both your
acquisition and your retention rates,
you're focusing on two of the most important
goals that you can have,
reaching new supporters and retaining the ones you already have.
This is so important, especially because it will help
you identify and address issues before they become full blown problems.
If you notice that your acquisition rate is slowing to
abnormal levels,
and we all know that it can get kind of seasonal and cyclical,
but if you notice that things are starting to change outside
of the normal patterns that you normally have,
you can start to diagnose that issue before you're really in trouble.
I love that Kate said that this is one of the to be built reports.
This is this is so valuable.
So this is another one,
even for those of you who don't like math.
You divide the total number of first time supporters by the
number of all supporters,
and then you multiply it by a hundred.
And you can do this for for all of your supporters just kind of
across the board, but,
I think this is gets really exciting when you start digging
into it a little bit.
So as you track your your acquisition rate,
you can use it to kind of hone and adjust your strategy in a
lot of different ways.
You can so you can look at how your rate has changed over time
and then figure out what activities may be causing those changes.
So maybe you can decide, like,
I wanna know what campaigns we ran last year,
what fundraising campaigns we ran last year that got us the
most new donors,
and I'm gonna try and run those campaigns again,
or I'm gonna use the same tactics again.
Or you can look at different kinds of supporters.
So maybe you identify that your one time donor acquisition
rate is growing, and that's wonderful,
but your recurring donor acquisition is slowing down,
then you can adjust your tactics.
Maybe you decide that you want to pull back on one time
appeals and increase recurring gift appeals,
or maybe you decide that you want to send invitations to
your one time supporters and invite them to become a
recurring supporter.
Or if you look and say like, okay,
I want to know what my members are achieving,
maybe you can look and see like, hey.
My new member acquisition rate is going up.
We're doing something really well.
We're gonna look at what it is,
then we're gonna double down on what's working.
This is a phenomenal KPI to track and understand.
And then this one, I'm. I'm curious about you.
The last thing I'd recommend that you track is your response
rate for the emails or other asks that you send.
So this is specifically when you're asking people to take action.
This may not be something that you can really neatly pull into
like a widget in but it is absolutely a phenomenal
way to figure out how effective your communications are.
So, this is just absolute gold.
As you track your response rates and this is something
that you're gonna do over time.
This is useful the longer you you measure it.
So as you track response rates for different appeals,
asking for donations, asking people to volunteer,
inviting people to attend an event, ask like,
anything that you're asking people to do,
You'll start picking up on the kinds of content and even the
kinds of language that your community really likes,
and then you can find out some other stuff like what time of
day or even what day of the week people are more most
likely to ask or to act.
So
this is absolutely invaluable insight to you and your community.
I would think, to be frank with you,
that this is probably as important,
maybe even more important,
than tracking the amount of money you raise from a single appeal.
And the reason I say that is because if you're if you're
sending an appeal to your to your customer base customer base?
Oh my gosh. Donor base.
Raising six thousand dollars from four hundred people is
probably better useful to you than raising six thousand
dollars from forty people.
You're doing a you're raising the same amount of money,
but one tells you that you're doing a really good job
inspiring a lot of people.
The other just tells you that the few people that responded
to you gave you higher gifts.
So you can learn a lot from this.
So to find this,
all you do is you divide the number of people who responded
to your appeal,
and then by the number of people who received your
appeal, and then you multiply it by a hundred.
Erica dropped a really cool insight into the chat.
My favorite thing is to compare each source of revenue and
number of donors over the last three years.
That is unbelievably good.
You can make the most educated decisions about new tactics and
trying new things if you understand what Erica is measuring.
You can do the coolest stuff if you look at not only where the
money is coming from,
but the number of people who are responding.
Now I knew that I knew that someone was gonna ask me what's
considered a nonprofit standard for a good response rate,
and I'm going to tell you something that I tell a lot of
people when I'm talking about KPIs.
So I think the benchmark is somewhere between, like,
three and a half and five percent.
I don't remember off the top of my head,
but what is more important is
seeing incremental improvements in your own metrics.
If you already have a good response rate,
try and beat it.
If you understand that your response rate is lower than the
benchmark, I mean, that stings.
But if the one that you got from the last appeal is higher
than the previous one, you're doing well.
You're making incremental progress.
So I always tell people, like, look for benchmarks.
I think, like I said,
the benchmark is between a three and a half and five
percent response rate, but benchmarks are only so useful.
What is most useful to you is incremental improvement in your
own benchmarks.
You're competing against yourself, not other people.
Alright, I'm going to go really fast through this,
so I have a little bit of time for questions.
But as you track this, as you track your response rates,
look for patterns.
What themes are most effective with your community?
Do people stories, like people centered stories
consistently earn more responses than like
a general update, keep doing those.
Do you notice that sending emails that have lots of, like,
branding elements get lower response rates?
You may wanna simplify your email templates.
Can you identify a day of the week even a time of day that
consistently gets better responses from your community?
Try sending other emails then.
There's all kinds of cool stuff that you can do if you can find
time to dig into it.
And to do that, to have time to dig into your data and
make real intentional data backed decisions,
you need to simplify what you're measuring and then
figure out how to make measuring things less overwhelming.
So I know when I'm talking about all of these different
ways that you can use these. KPIs how tracking things over
time can be really cool.
And when I see all of these amazing people sharing what
they measure in the chat, I am excited because they're like,
you guys, data can do the most beautiful things for you,
but I worry that giving you this information is
overwhelming you,
especially for those of you who said at the beginning of the
session that you don't like reporting.
So I'm gonna share three of my own personal tips for making
measuring your KPIs feel less intense.
And I would love for you all to share your own tips.
How do you make these things less overwhelming to you and
your team, especially if you are measuring lots of things?
These are my three tips,
and they come from a certified reporting hater.
I do not like it. I do it, but I don't like it.
So this is how I approach it,
and I would love to know what you do.
So the first thing is choose a handful of things to measure.
I think about this. Tumblr post a lot,
which is I'm probably dating myself because I'm citing a
Tumblr post.
Pick your battles. No. That's not that's too many battles.
Put some of those battles back.
Same with KPIs. That's too many KPIs. Put some back.
You only need a handful.
If you start identifying negative trends in the KPIs you
choose to measure, then you dig into more data points.
Then you start going into the data and tracking other things
and trying to diagnose the problem.
Okay? Pick a handful of things.
Be deliberate about what you choose.
Talk about it with your team.
Make sure you're doing something.
And then if something isn't serving you well,
you can change it.
Alright.
Choose a handful of things.. Measure them every week.
You can measure them every month.
That's I don't like measuring things every month because frankly,
I forget how to pull that data and where it came from and all the things.
I don't we measure some things every day, but,
measuring things every day can get very overwhelming.
However you decide to do it,
the point is to measure them regularly.
This makes identifying patterns easier.
It also makes it much easier for you to catch issues
earlier in time to fix them.
But the other thing, honestly,
is that you just get used to doing it.
You don't feel that anxiety in your stomach when you log into
your CRM and start pulling more points.
You're gonna get faster at it.
It's gonna be less intimidating.
It's gonna be less overwhelming.
It's part of your routine.
If you can, build us if you have a Neon One dashboard, great.
Build your your mission control center,
put the widgets in there that you like.
They're front and center,
and you'll be measuring what's important every time you log in.
If you're not using that,
build build your reports in advance and set them up to run,
don't know, weekly or whenever you wanna measure it.
If you're using spreadsheets,
see if you can start pulling formulas in there and plug in
your plug in your performance and have it spit out the, you know,
the percentages of whatever it is that you're measuring.
Just and here's the other thing.
If you if you're like me and you don't like reporting,
write down step by step how to do it.
Having a step by step guide is really helpful when you're
trying to do this if you're tired and you're overwhelmed
and you're, like, kinda mentally fried and you log in,
you're like, what what report did I pull to find that again?
Write it down.
The other thing is that this is gonna be really useful if you're, like,
on vacation or something and you need someone else to step
in to do it for you.
I love that Neon called out I feel like a big part of success
in measuring is making sure the data is clean.
So removing duplicate amounts and donors. I love that.
It's it's work to do that.
Let's be very clear.
It is extra work, but it will make pulling reporting so much
easier, so much less of a headache.
And then I'm like, this is my last slide,
and I'm gonna I'm not even gonna say what I was gonna say.
I'm gonna read what. Audrey just put in there.
Remember that your identity isn't in what you are measuring.
Audrey said sometimes we put off measuring important metrics
because we're afraid of the results.
But if we can separate ourselves personally and remind
ourselves that the data is there to help us no matter
what, then the numbers become less overwhelming.
That is lit that's the most beautiful thing I've had anyone
put in a in a webinar chat ever.
If you are intimidated, if you are overwhelmed,
remember what Audra said, your metrics are there to help you.
They will help you decide where to focus, decide what to do.
If you see a metric you don't like, take a deep breath.
What you have just learned is what you need to focus on.
That's all it is.
Okay.
We covered a lot of information in a very short period of time.
We're actually over by two minutes.
I've been able to answer most of the questions.
Also, Lark, also the world is weird. We're in a recession.
Everyone is overwhelmed and sad. Yes.
And you know what? Here's one more thing I'm gonna say.
If you want I was gonna plug this KPI worksheet,
but it's in the email. I'm gonna send to you.
So you can grab it here,
you can wait till you get the email from me tomorrow.
Here is something that I think is it may it makes it makes
data easier for me.
Every data point that you pull,
every trend that you see, every KPI that you measure,
remember that all of that is just people.
It's just people.
If you are overwhelmed because you're seeing like, oh gosh,
my email open rate is down, it's okay.
You're not talking to like,
it's not just an arbitrary number that's assigned to you.
You're it's just people. You can go try something new.
Your metrics should always help you focus.
They should inspire you. They should kind of guide you.
They should never make you feel bad.
If you don't see if you see a negative trend, if you're like,
wow, my donor retention is really low,
accept it.
Now you know where to focus.. Now you know how to fix it.
You're gonna be great.
One more thing from. Suzanne. Question.
Should foundation or grant funding be included in tracking our KPIs?
It seems like these can skew results,
especially if you get multiyear gifts.
So I would encourage you,
to track your your grant and foundation funding maybe separately.
So, of course, you can include it in your overall progress.
We raised x amount of money in twenty twenty five.
We're gonna raise x amount of money in twenty twenty six.
A portion of that will come from from foundations or grants.
But because it can skew things so much,
I would also encourage you to look at how you are engaging
individuals.
So I would pull that out separately.
Let's see.
How would you recommend telling leadership to pick fewer KPIs?
I love this so much.
I don't know that I would go to your leadership and say,
we're not measuring all of these.
Pick five.
What I would what I would recommend you do is, like, listen.
We really want to achieve. I'm I'm making this up,
so bear with me.
We want to grow fundraising ten percent this year.
To do that, the most valuable things we can do is attract new
donors, keep the ones we have,
and then make sure that all of the appeals that we're sending
out are really effective.
So our primary KPIs are going to be these three
things, and we're gonna measure these things every month.
We can have other data available to you
on request or something like that.
I'm not sure of the board dynamic.
I'm not sure if it was me talking to a board,
I would say, like,
these things are what we're going to prioritize.
We wanna make sure that we're focused on the right things.
These are the things we're gonna focus on this year,
and then have a conversation with them.
Okay. Let's see.
I've got a couple questions,
about Neon dashboards specifically, and I
will recommend so because we are past time,
what I'm gonna recommend is that you go and I'm gonna put
this in the chat.
Whoop.
Go to Academy
Neon One dot com. If you go there, there's a button.
It's called you know what?. I'm just gonna show you.
Bear with me here.
Who? Can't spell. Academy dot Neon One dot com.
My hotel Wi Fi is really killing it today.
Go up here to live training,
and then click on. CRM group training.
And then oh, let me look at the calendar view.
I like that one better.
So you can see that we have all of these open office sessions.
Go in there and ask them specifically how to measure
specific KPIs, how to set up widgets, how to build reports.
Because there are so many things that you can do in the system,
I don't want to give you a blanket answer because
everybody sets up their system differently.
They can help you do it.. They are wonderful people.
They are experts.
They are absolutely going to be able to help you do that.
My last one, I'm gonna just drop down this.
When I find data that shows upsetting numbers this is
Isabella again.
Isabella, I'm gonna have you do this webinar with me again in the future sometime.
I write that down,
and then I turn it into an issue identified for my
performance review.
Analyzing bad data is just as important as analyzing good data.
I love that.
Okay.
I cannot tell you how much I appreciate you talking to me.
To be super transparent with you,
I was kind of worried about this session because no one
likes talking about measuring KPIs,
and I cannot tell you how much. I appreciate you talking with
me and sharing your ideas and encouraging each other in the chat.
This has been one of the most fun webinars I've done in
recent memory, so thank you so much.
Okay.
Just a reminder, I'm gonna get you an email tomorrow morning.
It's gonna have the the webinar recording.
It will include a link to the presentation deck,
so you can download those and share those with you.
So
whoever is asking about Isabella,
if you wanna talk to your leadership about measuring
fewer KPIs, send them in the slide deck.
Abby says measuring too many things is not useful.
I hope you have a wonderful Wednesday.
I will talk to you all tomorrow.
Please be safe today.
Please stay warm, and, and we'll see you soon. Okay?
Bye, everyone.