Hey, everybody. I am so glad that you're here.
I know, KPIs are not probably a topic that gets
you really excited and enthusiastic and ready to go.
So, I hope that you leave here today actually
kind of excited about KPIs.
I know it's a tall order, but we're gonna we're gonna try.
My name is Abby.
As Heather kind of mentioned, I'm with Neon One,
and I've been in the nonprofit tech industry for a long time.
I've been here for a little over thirteen years,
and believe it or not,
nonprofit tech for good is one of the first resources I
started following to learn about the nonprofit tech
sector, so I feel right at home here talking to you all.
I'm really passionate about understanding donors
specifically and what they want from nonprofits,
how you can use the data available to you to give your
donors and your volunteers and your members and everyone else what they want.
Today, I'm also so I'm gonna talk to you today from perspective,
but I'm also gonna pull in some of my marketing experience for
you today, because especially at the end,
when we actually talk about some practical tips for doing
reporting without being overwhelmed,
I'm drawing from personal experience,
because I also get kind of overwhelmed by KPIs.
So we're gonna we're gonna have some some fun today.
We're gonna talk about KPIs.
And just out of curiosity,
will you let me know in the questions module if you are if
you've heard the phrase KPI before or if you haven't?
I kind of take for granted that this is a phrase that everyone
uses because I live or I work in
I work in marketing, but a lot of you have. Okay. Great.
A lot of folks I just looked it up.
I love that, Heather.. Okay. I've heard of it.
I don't fully understand it. Perfect.
I talk to people all the time who have never heard of a KPI,
and so I wanted just to make sure that we're all on the same page.
Someone put it in questions module and they called out key
performance indicator,
I only saw one person actually write it out, but
a lot of people will use KPI when they and they will also use metrics.
So you may hear me use the word metric as a synonym
for KPI or key performance indicator.
At their most basic though,
for those of you who have heard of it, don't really, like,
grasp it all the way yet,
it's hard to graph because it is kind of a general term.
And at it at their heart, at the most basic definition,
they are trends and data points that you
track to understand your progress
and understand the impact that you're making with your work.
So if you have measured how much you've raised to date,
or if you've measured your progress toward your
fundraising goal, you're tracking a KPI.
If you measure your donor retention rate,
that's a KPI.
If you are looking at any trend or data point to
understand impact of something that you've done or to
understand your progress toward a goal or just to get a feel
for your performance, you're using KPIs even if you haven't
actually used that terminology.
So one more question.
I wanna gauge how you feel about this.
So how do you feel about this?
Usually, either people absolutely love
it, they're fascinated by data, they love tracking the trends,
they get excited about building a dashboard or analyzing a report.
Other people absolutely hate it.
I tend to relate more to David here
than anything else.
Heather, you and I are David. Rose. Alex here is a data nerd.
Okay.
So we've got a pretty good we've got a pretty good mix.
Okay.
I I feel like David frequently.
However, this is such an important topic that I,
in practice, I have a block on my calendar every week to go
through and review a lot of my KPIs.
So if you are like me,
if you are on the David Rowe side of things, I see you,
I hear you, I feel you.
If you are a data nerd,
I hope what I share with you today helps you get even
more out of the data that you're tracking than you already are.
So love it or hate it,
tracking KPIs is actually important,
not only because it's just good to know
what you are doing and good to know how you're doing,
but because it can help you plan for the future in a really
significant way.
So it is actually worth the effort.
However, I want you to notice here that on this slide,
I have underlined the word right.
If you measure the right things,
you can use your findings in all kinds of ways.
You can identify issues and fix them before they kind
of spiral out of control.
You can communicate with people more effectively.
You can plan better campaigns.
You can use your data to set better
goals for yourself and for the rest of your organization.
You can move, if you have the right mindset,
you can move beyond reactive measurement
and reactive decision making toward being very proactive
and trying new things and improving.
A friend of mine put it this way,
he was talking about something different,
but I like it in general KPIs too.
Data after a point will stop becoming a weather report.
You will stop looking at your trends and your performance as
something that's happening to you, And instead,
as you as you measure things consistently over time,
it will start being like a report card.
It helps you gauge the effectiveness of what you've
done in the past,
and it will help you chart a path forward that will make you more efficient.
So to do this though,
you do need to measure the right KPIs,
and you need to measure your progress on a regular basis.
However, this is my word of caution to you.
It is so easy to get really caught up in measuring
too many things and getting too in the weeds and getting overwhelmed.
I worked with somebody a long time ago that used the phrase
analysis paralysis all the time.
It's really easy to fall into that.
One of the worst things you can do,
especially for my fellow. David Roses out there,
is choose to measure the wrong things or choose to measure too many things.
There are lots of reasons that this is bad for you.
It's also bad for your organization,
but I can I think everything kind of boils down to two kind
of overarching issues?
The first thing is that the metrics you spend the most time
measuring are almost always going to be the metrics you
end up prioritizing.
If you measure the most useful trends,
you will measure or you will prioritize the most important work.
But if you measure too many things that are not important,
you will find your yourself focusing your attention and
your effort and your very limited resources on
activities or problems that are not really
what you need to address or solve.
So and this all kind of relates to the second reason.
When you measure everything, and you feel like everything is important,
it's really hard for you to choose what to prioritize.
It is much more effective and a lot less overwhelming if
instead you choose a handful of KPIs to measure
regularly.
It is only if you start noticing that those things are
off or not performing well that
then you can start digging into trends and data in different places.
So Valeria had a really interesting question.
What should we measure?
And that's going to depend on you and your organization and your goals.
And I'm gonna I'm gonna make some recommendations about what
to measure here in a minute, but it will depend.
So if you are a brand new organization and you're
really focused on growing your community,
you may want to measure donor acquisition rates,
which is something we're gonna touch on in a minute.
If you already have a large donor base,
maybe you switch your attention to measuring
donor retention, which we're also gonna touch on in a minute.
I'm spoiling the the presentation.
If you are on the the marketing side of an
organization, you may want to measure things like traffic to
your website or
open rates on emails or or other kind of marketing
related KPIs.
That isn't gonna be what you measure if you are a major gifts officer.
You may measure something different.
So you'll want to choose a few things,
but the thing that I would. I would recommend you do,
choose your, like, top two most important goals,
two or three most important goals for the year,
and then identify what trends, patterns,
or data points will give you the best insight into how
you're performing there.
And we are gonna cover some. KPIs that I think that you that
most people should be measuring.
We'll get there in a second.
Here's my word of caution, though.
Before we start talking about what to do and how to use your data,
I want to to reiterate what not to do and how not to use your data.
And this is something that I think causes a lot of stress
for a lot of people.
If you are measuring your progress,
it's really easy to stress yourself out.
It's really easy to give yourself arbitrary goals and to
work really hard to move the needle on something specific
and cause yourself stress.
Please hear me when I say that any any data point you measure,
any KPI you measure should help you be better at your job.
It shouldn't make you feel bad necessarily about what you're doing.
Okay? So choose carefully.
This sounds really dramatic, so here's an example.
One of the most common KPIs that I encounter in the
fundraising world is, average donation amount.
And measuring your average donation amount can be
unbelievably useful.
It helps you if you approach it with nuance,
it helps you understand the people in your community.
You may notice that people who give to a specific
program tend to give higher average
donation amounts to that program.
You can look and maybe start to understand then what kind
of programs or talking points inspire people to give larger gifts.
Or maybe you notice that, hey,
the average person in my database gives around thirty
dollars per trans like, per gift, per transaction.
I hate using that word, but it it does happen.
Maybe you decide then that you're not gonna send an appeal
that asks people to give a twenty dollar gift because the
average is thirty.
You may want to increase your ask a little bit or even just
change the suggested gift array on your donation form.
That is how donation amount,
average donation amount can be useful.
But if your focus is on average donation amount
and you get really caught up in trying to increase your average
donation amount, that can have some negative consequences.
If you are focused on raising that donation amount,
it's easy for you to overemphasize connecting with
high net worth donors that can give lots and lots of money at a time,
which will absolutely increase your average donation amount,
but it could inadvertently result in you underemphasizing
relationships with people in your database who are not able
to give those gifts.
They're valuable too.
Their support is important, but if you overemphasize
raising the average donation amount,
that can have some unintended consequences.
Especially since and this is a little personal soapbox.
So one of the trends that we see in the nonprofit sector
just as a whole is that,
as a general rule,
nonprofits are relying more and more on small groups of major
donors for the majority of their revenue.
That's a dangerous situation to be in.
You want to have a broad base of supporters that give smaller amounts.
But if you overemphasize average donation amount and you
approach it with the wrong a wrong approach,
it can have some negative consequences.
Here's another example.
This is something that I really do in my marketing heart.
Understanding conversion rates on forms can be really helpful.
So if you have your donation form or volunteer sign up form,
and you know that as a general rule,
x percentage of people who land on that form actually complete
complete the form, like that's really helpful.
If you notice a drop off in donation form
conversions, you may go through your donation form and realize
that something's broken, or
there's been extra fields added,
and that's having a negative impact on conversion.
You can maybe do the opposite.
You see, like, you've got a couple different donation
forms, and one is converting really well.
You can go take a look at it and see what you're doing
differently on that form.
Maybe you've got a really nice image on that one.
And then you can apply that same element to your
other forms and see if that boosts your conversion rate.
That's how this. KPI can be useful,
but it can also be detrimental.
One of my colleagues, Nick,
used to work at a nonprofit that really put a lot of
emphasis on donation form optimization.
And they identified, like, yes,
removing the phone number field from their donation form
increased conversions, but it meant that their development
team didn't have a way to reach out to donors that would
have benefited from a call or a text message.
They could streamline their forms by removing fields,
but they understood after a point that removing those
fields meant that they didn't have valuable information about
the people that were supporting them,
and they were having a harder time connecting with those people.
They had great conversion rates,
but they didn't have important information that was valuable to their team.
And then they said after a while,
they spent so much time tinkering with the donation
forms that they weren't they were spending a lot of time and
not getting a lot of return on that.
Now I wanna clarify.
I'm not sharing these examples to get you to stop
measuring donation form conversions or average
donation size.
I I promise. Those things are important.
What I am saying is that measuring the wrong things
or probably even more common,
measuring things but approaching your measurement in
the wrong way can have a big impact on you and your team.
So what do you then measure instead?
So keep those keep these things that we're talking about,
conversion rates and average donation size.
Just make sure that you're approaching them creatively and constructively.
Here are three things that I would suggest you start with.
Even if you don't measure these specific KPIs,
I hope that they inspire you to think about
what is gonna be useful to you,
what will give you insight into your goals,
And then what's gonna be useful to the other people at your organization?
The first one is donor retention rate.
How many of you drop in the the question module.
How many of you know your your donor retention rate
off the top of your head?
And I I shouldn't have done what I just did.
I just said donor retention rate.
Donor retention rate is important,
but not everyone runs a traditional fundraising program.
Some folks, you maybe are working on members.
Maybe you are working on developing a volunteer program,
so you wanna track your retention rates for your volunteers.
Maybe if you're a peer to peer fundraiser,
you'd wanna measure your retention rate of participants
event over event.
Okay. I'm seeing some mixed mixed groups. Okay.
A lot of folks don't know their retention rate off the top of their head.
And if you're one of them,
I would encourage you to start tracking it because it can be
absolutely fabulous for your work.
Now this is important for a number of reasons.
I've kind of alluded to the fact that this is something
that is is troubling the nonprofit sector.
More and more people are disengaging from giving to
traditional nonprofits,
and that means nonprofits are increasingly relying on a small
group of major donors.
You can start addressing that trend.
You can turn that trend around by focusing on retaining
individuals over time.
That's important for a lot of reasons.
One of them is just because you spend a lot of time and effort
and resources getting people to give to you,
and it is more efficient to bring them back over and over
again than it is to constantly acquire new donors.
But another reason that this is really valuable is because
people not only continue their giving level over time,
but they tend to increase their giving over time.
I we did some research at. Neon One last year that looked into
this, and people give as a general rule.
People give more annually the longer they're engaged.
So if they give a hundred and fifty dollars their first year,
they may give two hundred dollars the next year,
two hundred and fifty dollars the next year.
They do tend to grow their annual giving.
But so that's valuable.
So imagine what you could do if you had a stable base of
supporters that not only stays engaged with you and gives
consistently over time,
but increases their giving over time also.
It's really valuable.
Depending on the platforms you're using,
you should be able to track this fairly easily.
Some organizations have widgets built into their dashboards
that do this for them.
If you don't have that, here's how to do the math.
And I'm telling you this as someone who did not study math.
Find the total number of supporters who are returning to
you this year, divide that number by the total
number of supporters you had last year,
and then multiply that by a hundred.
That's your retention rate.
This is something that to answer Hailey's question,
I would encourage you to measure regularly,
and I'm going to regularly meaning, like, weekly,
monthly, we're gonna get into this a little bit.
And if this is where you are gonna have to get creative.
So because you can get creative with this, this KPI.
So obviously,
you wanna look at your retention rate across just everything.
So how many how many donors return year after year?
To answer Hailey's question, this is frequently measured,
year over year.
So as a general rule, you'll see, like,
a person is considered a lapsed donor.
Hate that phrase.
But they're considered a lapsed donor if they have not given to
you in twelve months.
But you can let you can, again, get kinda creative here.
You can look at retention rates for different kinds of donors.
Do recurring donors stick around with your organization
longer than one time donors?
I would tell you the answer is almost undoubtedly yes.
I haven't shared this with anybody yet,
but we're working on some new new research.
And the donor retention rate for recurring donors is so,
like, crazy high.
I think it's, like,
seventy seven percent last year as opposed to donor retention
rates for onetime donors, which is around thirty.
So if you notice that,
you wouldn't know that you are acquiring a particular kind of donor,
and that group is staying engaged with you for a long time.
If you have a membership program,
do your members who attend events, for example,
have higher membership retention rates than those that don't?
That's really useful insight.
Do you notice that you have a huge boost in your donor
retention a few months after you launch
initiative.
You're gonna know that that is working for your for your
community and that you probably wanna double down on
stewardship rates.
And Andy just dropped in the in the questions module.
Recurring donors are the bread and butter.
And, Andy, you and I are like,
you're my best friend in this in this webinar.
No, I love recurring donors.
Now your retention rate is important,
not only because it tells you that what you're doing is or
is not working, but it can help you plan future activities.
And this can impact nearly every facet of the work you do
at your organization.
If you're really focused on donor retention,
you can try new stewardship tactics and track the impact
that that has over time.
So what does that actually look like?
Say as a as a retention play,
you want to start a monthly a version of your
monthly newsletter that has just a little note at the top
for your recurring donors.
Nothing wild, just a little a little extra something.
If you notice your donor retention rate for your
recurring donors increases over time,
you know that that's working.
Maybe you want to try something similar with your one time donors.
If you are,
like, looking for opportunities to get your supporters more
involved, this can direct you a little bit.
So for example, say you look at your retention rate,
and you really dig into it,
and you notice that donors who also volunteer with you
tend to be more easily retained than others.
Maybe you take that as a sign that you can connect more
deeply with people through volunteer activities,
and maybe you take that as a missive to start more
intentionally inviting your donors to become volunteers.
If you notice that people who respond,
who give to a specific campaign are retained at higher
rates than to people who give to other campaigns,
you can look at that campaign and see what's worked well.
So for example,
I'm trying to, like,
flip back through my mental. Rolodex of campaigns I've seen.
So maybe you see, like, alright.
The the donors who give to my
summer scholarship program come back year after year after year.
The people who give to our kindergarten readiness campaign
don't necessarily.
Maybe you can look back and see, like, oh,
we always tell a success story about a student who went
to summer school, and that that donors know then how their
gift made a difference and how it impacted the students.
So for the the kindergarten readiness program,
I'm going to do something similar.
I'm gonna share a story about one of our students that went
through that program.
When you understand your donor retention rate,
especially if you start getting really granular with it,
you can learn unbelievable things about your community.
You learn what motivates them.
You learn what they like and what they don't like.
You can use those those insights to adjust your
tactics in the future in a bid to boost your donor retention rate.
This is one of the single best KPIs that you can use to understand.
And again, like, as much as. I'm talking about donors,
this works with other kinds of supporters too.
So you can get really creative here.
Now this goes hand in hand with the second one that I would
recommend you try, because this is a pretty universally
useful KPI.
Your retention rate is the percentage of supporters who
renew their support year after year.
Your donor or your supporter acquisition rate is another
less commonly measured KPI, and this is the rate at
which you are acquiring new donors.
This is helpful kind of just overall,
but it's especially helpful if you're working in development,
and you're trying to grow your base of supporters.
Or if you're kind of on the marketing side of things,
it can give you really interesting insights there too.
And I sincerely hope that marketing and development work
hand in hand because they absolutely must to be successful.
But the reason I recommend doing this is because if you're
tracking your retention rates,
and you're tracking your acquisition rates,
you're focusing on two of the most important and most
universal goals that I encounter in the nonprofit space.
You are acquiring new supporters,
and then keeping them involved with your organization year after year.
This this can be extremely helpful,
especially if you're tracking it proactively because it will
help you identify and address issues before they become full
blown problems.
So if you are tracking your acquisition rate over
the course of, like, a campaign.
So say you're running your annual campaign,
and you decide, like,
I'm gonna measure once a month the rate at which I'm acquiring
new donors to this campaign, and it starts slowing way down,
you can start diagnosing what's happening.
Do you need to resume posting about it?
Have you not spotlighted your annual campaign recently?
Are you is a donation form broken somewhere and that's
having a negative impact?
You can start diagnosing the issue before it becomes a huge, big problem.
So another one, easy for those of us who don't like math,
you divide the total number of first time supporters by the
total number of all supporters in the the time frame or
or areas that you're measuring,
and then you multiply by a hundred, and that's your rate.
So this as you track your acquisition rate, I mean,
we talked about this with donor retention rates too.
You have the ability to get very creative here and get really granular.
You also don't have to if you don't want to. Oh, yes.
Sorry.
I see in the chat someone asked,
can you confirm what you mean by development?
Development, I just mean mostly fundraising.
So if you're the development director,
you're in charge of raising money for your programs,
as opposed to, like, a marketing director,
which probably works with development and also
works in a number of other place.
So when I say development,. I mostly mean fundraising.
Okay.
With with your your donor acquisition, right,
you can get really deep here.
So maybe you look at how your your acquisition rate has
changed over time.
If you are actively running a campaign,
maybe you measure your donor acquisition rate weekly because
it's a short time bound campaign with a lot of urgency.
You're probably reaching a lot of new people.
Maybe you decide that it you're not running anything really
urgent right now,
so you're gonna switch to measuring it monthly.
But you can you can measure how it changes over time,
and you can compare your trends over a long long period of time.
So you can figure out maybe what time of the year
is when your your community is most likely to support you.
You can identify what campaigns or what channels work really well for you.
That can give you insight into how and when people wanna get involved.
So maybe you notice you set up a a particular campaign for
your social media outreach.
And we can get we don't wanna get too in the weeds.
We only have an hour together.
But you can learn about what what marketing channels or
communication channels people like.
Maybe you notice your donor acquisition, like,
really go like, just takes off after you start sending
targeted appeals to folks who haven't donated before.
That can give you really valuable insight into what
inspires new donors to get involved.
Maybe you look at different kinds of supporters.
Maybe you can identify that your donor acquisition rate for
one time donors is staying steady,
but your donor acquisition rate for recurring donors is going down.
That's valuable insight.
You may want to adjust how you are addressing asking
people to make a recurring gift.
Or maybe you look and see that you're new if you have a
membership program.
Your member acquisition rate is going up.
You can double down on what's working.
And then if it starts to peter out,
you can go in and diagnose why and see if you can make any
adjustments to your tactics.
This is like like keeping your finger on on
the pulse of what is working at your organization.
So this is another really useful useful thing to understand.
Can you share an average across the nonprofit sector of a good
acquisition rate and a good retention rate?
I'm gonna give you the single most irritating answer that I
can, which is no, not really.
Because an acquisition rate will depend
and a retention rate will depend on a lot of different things.
Here is another reason.
So I mean, I can tell you that there are benchmarks.
It's much easier to find donor retention benchmarks than it is
to find donor acquisition benchmarks.
I don't remember off the top of my head.
The donor retention rate hovers around thirty to thirty three percent.
First time donor retention rates are around nineteen
percent, which is really not great.
Recurring donor retention rates are around seventy seven percent.
But the the big thing that. I want to reiterate to you,
and this is important if you're measuring KPIs,
so I hope you hear this.
Benchmarks industry wide are a useful place to
start, but they are not the most useful thing for you to
aspire to.
Here's why.
A nineteen percent first time donor retention rate is not good.
That means that one in five donors you acquire is gonna
come back to you, and that is not that's not a grade that you want.
What is more useful to you is tracking your
own rates over time and improving gradually over time.
If you look at your first time donor retention rate and you
see that it's twelve percent,
that just means you have lots of opportunities to improve.
If you look at your first time donor retention rate and you
see that it's sixty percent, that's amazing.
And you can continue building toward an even higher one.
The reason I'm always so reluctant to share benchmarks
and telling people, like, this is the benchmark.
This is where you should be is because that either causes
stress, or it makes people ignore
important metrics because they see that they're performing
well there, and I don't want that to happen.
What I would tell you instead is, like,
if you have never measured these things before, sure.
Look at a benchmark and see kind of relative to the rest of
the industry where you are,
But it will be much more beneficial to your mental
health, to you just like as a person and to your organization
to prioritize instead understanding your past
performance and improving from there.
You're gonna be a lot less miserable.
And you're it's gonna be better for your brain. Okay.
So this is another really good KPI for planning,
and you can use your donor acquisition rate in a lot of different ways.
If you are super focused on growing your supporter base,
this is common, especially for small organizations or new
organizations.
You're really focused on growing.
Keeping an eye on this will help you understand
not only how you're performing now,
but how you're probably gonna perform in the future.
You will be able to make more accurate predictions about how
much money you may conceivably raise,
or set a reasonable goal for a number of new volunteers.
We've all probably had a board member tell you, well, like,
you should be we should we our goal should be to reach one
thousand new donors this year.
If that doesn't line up with your past member or donor
acquisition rates, that's not a reasonable goal,
and you will stress yourself out trying to reach an
arbitrary number.
Basing your goals on past performance,
donor acquisition rate, retention rate, or otherwise,
will be much more beneficial for you.
If you're in marketing, this is also really useful for you.
If you know that your donor acquisition rate reliably
goes up when you consistently post on social media,
but if that's great.
Keep posting consistently on social media.
If you notice that you're paying for Google Ads
or search search ads,
and you notice that your new donor acquisition rate isn't really going up,
that means that that those campaigns aren't working.
You can pull back on them,
either fix them or spend that money somewhere else.
We've all, you can do this with, events too.
I don't know about any of you.. This is a pet peeve of mine.
If you notice that, your, like,
events program just aren't they're consistently not
reaching new donors, then you can pull back on those events.
We don't like events. Okay.
We don't like events that don't work.
You can use this to plan campaigns.
You can use this to adjust the emails that you send.
You can use this to
kind of look back and evaluate, basically,
the messaging that you're sending,
the talking points that resonate with people.
You can you can make some really important decisions that
will guide not only what you do,
but where you spend your your effort.
If you're not acquiring new donors and that's a goal for
your social media campaigns,
you can focus your time and energy elsewhere.
You don't have to keep trying something that doesn't always work for you.
Okay.
We've touched on this, and so I wanna touch on the last thing.
And this is another one.
Like, don't stress yourself out about response rates.
Just track it and then focus on improving it over time.
Alright. How many of you track your response rates?
This is the number of people who respond
to an appeal by taking an action that you want.
Lots of raised hands, lots of thumbs up.
I'm really glad that you guys do this because this is not
something that I encounter commonly a lot.
Okay.
So your response rate is essentially the percentage of
people who respond to an appeal.
It doesn't have to be an appeal for donations.
It can be an appeal for anything,
by doing the thing that you want them to do.
This is absolute gold, because as
you track response rates to different appeals,
you will start to notice patterns.
You will pick up on the kind of language that inspires people to get involved.
You will understand the work that they're passionate about,
the stories that move them, the programs that they love.
You will start learning when people want to act.
You this is absolute this is like being able to read people's minds.
I love this. This is my favorite one, obviously.
I even say this is as important or more important
than tracking the amount of money you raise from an appeal.
If you raise six thousand dollars from four hundred people,
that's pretty great,
and it's probably better than raising six thousand dollars
from forty people.
So to find this, you're gonna divide the total number of
people who responded to your appeal the way you wanted them
to by the total number of people
who received it, and then multiply that number by a hundred.
So here, if you sent an appeal to three thousand two hundred and fifty
people, a hundred and fifty four of them donated,
you would do the math,
and you had a four point seven response rate.
That's pretty decent.
Are people tracking this manually?
Aliyah, sometimes people do track this manually,
and some people have it automated,
and it really depends on the tools that people are using.
So it I mean, it it truly depends.
And again, I know that that is the single most infuriating answer that you can get.
But, yeah, some people do it manually,
and some people some people have this set up.
So as you track this, you'll start noticing patterns.
You'll ask yourself questions.. What themes are most effective?
Are the appeals that you're seeing that consistently
feature people's stories,
are they consistently earning more responses?
Keep that up.
Do you notice that emails that include a lot of branding
elements get lower response rates than those that are more simple?
That is important data for you.
Can you identify a time of day or a day of the week that gets
higher response rates?
You can prioritize sending communications then.
Is there a response for benchmark for response rates?
Not not really. There are some, I'm sure.
I think, like, if it depends so heavily on so
many different things.
I mean, I I can't give you, like,
a solid benchmark right now.
You may want to you can probably look up, like,
response rates for donation appeals.
But, again, this is something where I would really emphasize tracking your
own improvement over time,
because that's gonna give you better insight into your your support group,
and I'm gonna give you an example of this in a second.
So if you love the ins and outs of creating appeals,
this is gonna be, like, a really fun one for you.
And I hope that this does become fun for you,
because you are reading your community's minds, like, in real time.
You can start applying the the patterns and the trends that
you notice to all kinds of different things.
You will start noticing the kinds of stories that get
people excited about donating or volunteering or attending an event.
You will notice messaging that works.
You will learn talking points that really elicit a strong
response from your community.
You'll notice design elements that catch people's attention.
You'll get a feel for how frequently you want to donate
or link to your donation form.
Now this is why I am why I'm putting
so many caveats behind benchmarks and, like,
industry standards and everything.
There is a lot of information out there,
and I'm just gonna focus on I'm just gonna focus on retention rate right now.
Retention rate response rate right now, the other r word.
There's a lot of information about best practices and
benchmarks, and how many links you should include,
and the kinds of design elements you should include,
and I know that because. I've written some of them.
I've written benchmark reports for emails.
People will tell you so confidently, yes,
you should always include emojis in your subject lines.
People will tell you equally as confidently, no, you shouldn't.
And that's because no two communities are the same.
Kira's community is not the same as Thomas' community,
and theirs is different than Alex's.
And what works for Kira may not work for the other two.
An example, I was talking with a a group of people who were
and we were exchanging stories about email fundraising,
and one woman noted that her response rate was
sky high when she stripped all of the design elements out of her emails.
They were plain text emails.
She didn't even have text hyperlinks.
She just plopped an unformatted URL right into the middle of her email.
Her response rate went through the roof,
and then another person in the group said that they had tried
the same thing, and their response rate dropped.
The first woman's community appreciated the no
frills, very straightforward, one to one personal feeling email.
The second person's community did not like that.
That's not what resonated with them.
So your response rate, especially as you track it over time,
will give you insight into what your community wants in a way
that benchmarks and large scale researchers like me can't give you.
But it's easy to know, for example, like,
I did some research a while ago,
we found that the best time to send emails for our base of
customers was on, I think,. Mondays and Fridays.
But we had a whole segment of people,
faith based organizations that got the best response rates if
they sent their emails on Sundays.
Benchmarks are really easy to over overemphasize
because it's nice to know, like, oh,
we looked at four thousand organizations and saw this
trend, and so you need to do this.
Where that becomes troublesome is if Kiera says,
this is the benchmark that I have,
and then Thomas gets really stressed out because their
benchmarks are different.
That's where that's where benchmarks can become a a
hobble and not something useful for you.
So I hope what you're taking from all of this is that your
experiences are more valuable than benchmarks.
Your KPI and your gradual performance over time is gonna
be more valuable than comparing yourself to other people who
don't have the same community as you.
Now this is all really great,
but we're talking about getting granular,
and we're talking about,
what platforms give you this information and what what which ones don't.
Are you tracking these things manually?
Is it automated in a widget for you?
So I worry that I'm overwhelming you a little bit.
So now that we've talked about like things to measure and how
to measure them and the formulas,
I wish I could give you more solid answers on how precisely
to pull all of these numbers,
but that depends so widely on what platforms
you're using, and when, and where, and how.
So I'm gonna pull back a little bit,
and I'm gonna give you some tips for making this all feel a
little less overwhelming.
So remember, we're only choosing a few things to measure.
So even still, those few things can be really overwhelming.
So these are my own tips, that I'm giving you.
I am a certified reporting hater.
I don't like doing this.
I know how important it is, so I do it.
But my coworkers would tell you, like,
Abby Abby doesn't like this at all.
So these are my tips for you for making this all feel a
little more manageable.
First thing, choose a handful of things to measure.
Just a few. Don't measure all of them.
If you have a really hard time finding,
like, super solid response rates,
maybe you decide that you're gonna get to response rates
later, and right now,
you're just gonna focus on click through rates.
That's probably easier to find.
Choose a handful of things to measure.
I am probably dating myself here,
but I always think of this Tumblr post,
if you guys remember Tumblr.
Pick your battles.
Pick pick fewer battles than that. Put some battles back.
That's too many. I think about that with KPIs all the time.
If that's too many KPIs, put some back. That's too many.
Put some back. I see the little laughing guys down there.
Okay. You only need a handful.
If you if if you're like Kira,
and you don't have all of this all of these details
immediately available to you, pick something else.
Pick a handful of things that are most important,
and then if you start noticing negative trends,
then you can dig into all of the activities that go into that.
If you are measuring your response rate,
even if it's not perfect,
and you notice that your response rate starts to drop,
then you can go in and measure more things.
But measure a few things a few things.
That's important.
Then once you have your few things that you're gonna
measure, I would measure them regularly.
I know that this sounds terrible.
Start with every week.
Sometimes you will learn that measuring something on
a weekly basis is not what you need to do.
If you have a fairly static donor retention rate,
and you're measuring it every week,
and you're only seeing fractions of a percentage point
of fluctuation there,
maybe you don't need to measure that every week.
Maybe you move to measuring it every month.
Or if you we kind of alluded to this earlier.
If you are running a really intense campaign, like,
and you've got ads running and social media campaign going,
appeals going out,
and all of these different activities happening,
you may want to measure your donor acquisition rate weekly.
And then when that campaign concludes and you don't have
anything very urgent going,
you just maybe have your annual campaign going,
maybe you make the decision, like, oh, yeah.
We can do this on a monthly basis.
But the reason I'm encouraging you to start by measuring a
handful of things very frequently is because you will
learn very quickly, one,
how frequently you actually do need to measure them,
but you will start being able to catch and
diagnose potential problems early.
So I've it's not one of the three I cover,
but if you if you decide to measure click through rate,
for example, the percentage of people who receive an email, open it,
and then click through on one of the links that you've included.
You measure it weekly, and you notice, oh gosh,
like two weeks ago, our click through rate just fell off a cliff.
You can go in and start diagnosing things,
and you can you can fix the engagement issue before it
becomes a problem.
This also makes it easier on your on you mentally.
If you I think this is actually my next one. No.
We're gonna stay here for a second.
If you measure something regularly,
you will remember how to pull those numbers.
You will remember where to source that data.
You will remember the formulas.
You will remember the whole process more easily.
To me, at least, repetition is key to making something
that stresses me out feel less stressful.
You get better at it.. You get faster at it.
You get more efficient, and you get smarter.
So not only will it help you, like,
diagnose problems and catch them more quickly if it's
necessary for you to measure that that regularly,
but it's also less of a mental strain.
Like, it's like riding a bike.
You'll it sucks to learn to ride a bike,
but once you figure it out, it's much easier to do it.
And then the last thing is that if you can,
I would encourage you to build build a dashboard?
If that's not reasonable for you with the tools that you
have, build a spreadsheet or at the very least,
just write down
how you get the numbers that you get.
If you are, someone that you don't have a widget that
just automatically populates your donor retention rate,
if you have to be a little more manual with it,
just write down the just write down step by step how you get
the numbers, where you pull the report,
how you do it with your individual tech stack.
I will tell you this for this is helpful for two reasons.
How many of you have ever gotten to the end of an
exhausting campaign?
You're like, oh, god.
I need to run I need to do the reporting to report on on our
progress to the board, and I'm exhausted.
And you don't remember how to do it,
and you can't remember where to get that number or where to
find your donor retention rate or how to pull your email
engagement, and you just get overwhelmed and frustrated.
I'm a frustration crier.. I've done this many times.
But if you have it written down for yourself,
the frustration isn't there.
Even if you're absolutely mentally zapped,
you can get there.
It's also great when you go on vacation.
The last thing you wanna do if you're on vacation is have
someone else ask you how to run the report to find your
fundraising progress.
So it's useful for that too.
So being focused on a few measurement or a few metrics,
measuring them regularly, and then writing it down
writing down your process will make everything
feel more manageable, more useful,
less overwhelming, and that pit of dread that you get in your
stomach anytime you have to report on your progress will
start to disappear.
I am noticing some questions coming up, which is great.
We have a few minutes left.
So I'm gonna answer some questions.
That said,
if you're interested, and so here's a a thing for you.
This is a KPI worksheet.
So this tells you not only, like,
how to calculate a lot of these KPIs,
both the ones that I've talked about and other ones,
but it will also kind of get you started thinking about
where to pull this this data from.
Again, it will vary widely based on the solutions that
you're using and the the different tools in your
proverbial toolbox, but this will at least get you started.
And to answer Nicole's question,
this worksheet does include some KPIs
for communications and marketing positions.
So I would snag this.. And don't worry.
If you don't if you don't get this,
if you don't have your phone handy or whatever,
I'm sending you an email with a link to the recording and the
slides and a couple other, like,
articles that breaks this down a little more and explains it a
little more thoroughly,
and it will also include a link to this resource.
So if you still have questions, totally understandable.
I'm gonna go through and answer as many as I can.
Let's say you are tracking response rate,
and your weekly tracking day is Friday.
How do you handle an email posted from Tuesday versus an
email posted that morning?
Does it make a difference,
or should you be tracking relevant or relative to the
time you send something out?
This is a great question and a great example of why I
encourage you to track KPIs regularly.
So you're right.
If you send an email on on Friday morning,
you will notice almost every time that you'll get, like,
a spike in engagement and a spike in responses,
and then gradually that will will kind of peter over time.
But you will probably still be getting responses to your Thurs
or your Friday morning email by the time you run your reports
on Friday afternoon.
If you are measuring just your general response rate
over time, and you're measuring weekly,
you will measure eventually their your Friday appeal next Friday.
So you'll start to notice little fluctuations,
and the more you measure,
the more things will kinda start to even out.
What that means is, if you measure your response
rate every Friday,
and you've got kinda like a wacky email that goes out,
eventually, the more data points you have,
the less of a fluctuation you will see in your response rate.
That said,
measuring your general response rate over time will help you
the trends will smooth out and you're you'll start seeing
patterns over time.
What you may wanna do though is if that Friday
appeal is an unusual one for you,
if you don't normally send it that time,
or if you're trying a new storytelling format
or something.
You may wanna look back and say, like, oh,
that was a that was an unusual appeal.
I wanna go see how it performed and dig into it individually.
And that can also be really useful for you.
So I wouldn't I wouldn't worry yourself about changing when
you report on on things.
I would encourage you to measure at approximately the
same time of week every week.
But if you notice any outliers or if you really wanna dig into
something in particular,
that's when you can go back and really get granular with things.
Qr codes don't work on phones.. Perfect. Sending. Never mind.
Oh, dear. Let's see. Post the link in the chat.
Oh, thank you for doing that, Jen.
I'm going to do that.
I'm going to copy this link.
I'm going to send the link to the chat.
Did that go to everybody?
Nope. That's the wrong chat. Look at me, guys.
I'm doing great.
Alright. It's in the chat.
Let's go back and see.
Over what period of time does it take to decide that
something is a factor?
For example, that a style of email works.
Again, this is something that it it just kinda depends.
So if you, thank you for this question, Carrie.
If you send, for example,
we're gonna take the the previous example that I gave.
You decide that you wanna send,
an appeal to your community,
and you decide that you wanna try what your friend did.
She did the no formatting plain text,
just plopping a URL right in the middle of the the email.
You decide that you wanna try that,
and you notice that your response rate just absolutely tanks.
You don't need a long time to decide that that's a problem.
You'll probably know that your response rate dropped,
but you'll see it that week.
If you're making a more subtle change,
it can take a little while longer,
or if you're making lots of changes at the same time.
So what's an example of that?
You say you decided that you're gonna send,
two versions of an email campaign,
one specifically for recurring donors,
one specifically for one time donors.
And you notice that, well, this one,
this email that we that we segmented had a slightly higher
retention rate.
You may wanna try it again because it's slightly higher.
It's not a really significant data point.
You can it gives you room to experiment over time.
Sometimes you will see dramatic results,
and you can either say like, nope,
absolutely never doing that again, or yeah,
that is something that I may want to experiment with.
What is probably more likely is that you will see little
fluctuations in time.
And if those fluctuations are not really dramatic,
you can be a little less intense about adjusting your
strategy accordingly.
Then to, say you're doing an email newsletter,
and you notice that, like, okay, well,
my my response rate say. I'm trying to remember.
You know what? We're not gonna think about response rates.
Your click through rates.
Say your click through rates are down a little bit this
month compared to last month.
Is that cause for alarm? Maybe not.
But if you notice that your click through rates are
steadily dropping a little bit every month,
that's when you may wanna dig in.
You this you'll get a feel for it.
As as much as it makes me laugh to say that, like,
using these hard data points will become an intuitive
exercise because it's hard to think about something as
squishy as your intuition and as hard as data points in the same thing,
but that would it you'll you'll develop an intuition around it.
So for the first few months that you're really tracking things, like,
unless you notice huge fluctuations in your
performance, I would encourage you, like,
don't sweat this don't sweat little fluctuations.
If you are sending monthly appeals and you
notice that your response rate just is terrible for one of
them, like, dig into it.
But if you're sending monthly response rates, like,
it may be two or three months before you decide that, yeah,
this thing that. I've tried really
really makes a difference.
Kiera, do you have any advice for how to dig into the information?
Yes. And this is probably not the advice you're looking for.
Instead of approaching digging
into any given KPI,
instead of approaching it as a job or something that you
must do, change your mindset a little
bit and approach it as just being very curious
about your community.
And here is something that is important for fundraisers to hear especially.
One habit that I notice when nonprofit
fundraisers are measuring. KPIs is that they get
really stressed out and anxious about them.
Any tiny fluctuation is a cause for concern,
and there is because of that, and it's understandable.
Let's just get that other.. This is understandable.
Any little change can be scary,
and you become paralyzed by benchmarks that you see
other people hitting, or why is my click through rate half a
percentage point lower than it was last time.
As you're measuring these things,
as you're getting curious, as you are approaching your
performance and your progress,
remember that you are not experimenting
and reaching out to nameless,
faceless people who are judging you for trying something new.
If your click through rate drops a little bit,
you're not doing anything wrong, probably.
If your response rate drops,
you're not failing your community.
You're not you're just you're remember that you're just
inviting your community to support something they love,
to donate to a cause that they're passionate about,
to do work that they think is important,
and you're just trying to figure out the best way to do it.
That sounds like a really subtle shift.
So when I say that, I want you to approach it with curiosity.
Instead of looking at your response rate or your average
donation size or whatever as a do or die thing,
what did I do wrong to make my response rate drop a little bit?
Or what am I doing wrong to make sure or to that
resulted in a lower average donation amount?
Like, what am I doing wrong?
Am I making people angry by trying these things?
Am I putting a burden on my community by asking them to donate?
I would say instead,
instead of seeing a dip in. KPIs as something being wrong,
just be curious about it.
What was different here?
What can I learn from this drop?
What is happening with my community that is causing
this response, and how can I adjust my tactics to address those issues?
Maybe you may notice this is and sometimes it's good things.
So I talked to someone recently.
She was stressed because her response rate for for an
appeal was low, but her average donation size was higher.
That's not bad.
That just means that you have a certain subset of people in
your community that are passionate about this program
to the extent they're giving you more than they usually would.
She dug in a little bit.
It wasn't that she had done anything wrong.
Her messaging just reverberated with a specific group of people and not others.
If you are measuring your,
your donor retention rate,
and you notice that your donor retention rate has slipped.
It's not you can take that as an opportunity to get curious and ask why.
Instead of panicking because your retention rate has dropped,
which is something that would make a lot of people panic,
you can dig in and just start asking additional questions.
Instead of I take. KPIs very personally.
So like, for it was if I had a really low attendance rate at this
webinar, I'd be like, oh god, like,
my session wasn't interesting.
The topic wasn't something that interests people.
Maybe that's not necessarily true.
Maybe I can just dig into it a little bit and start asking questions.
You can do the same thing.
That's a really subtle shift.
Taking KPIs as a conversation almost between yourself and
your community where you can learn about what inspires
people and how you can inspire them better is a much healthier
way to approach measuring something that can cause some stress.
I hope that that makes, makes sense.
It's it's a funny nuance to navigate.
Okay.
I'm seeing a question slow down.
I wanna thank you all, one, for being here.
Talking about KPIs is overwhelming.
It's not everyone's favorite topic.
Most of us are like David Rose,
and we're not having a great time when we open up a
dashboard or run a report.
But I I appreciate you being here.
I appreciate your curiosity.
I appreciate you being willing to listen to me talk about
this, and I appreciate you taking time out of your day.
I know that you're busy,
and putting the effort into learning and making yourself
better is really proof that you care a lot about the community
you serve, and that's something that you should celebrate.
Keep an eye out for me.
I am going to send an email with a link to,
this KPI fundraiser's worksheet, some additional
resources that explains KPIs
and measurement and why it's important in clear language,
and it will include the slides and the recording as well.
So keep an eye out for me.. I will talk to you all soon.
You all are wonderful.. Have a great day.