As we know, measuring the performance of any strategy or plan can help you decide how successful and effective the activity was.  This then allows the analysis of the performance so changes can be made as needed.

With any form of measurement or use of key performance indicators (KPIs) it is imperative that they are relevant to the activity, are useful, easy to understand and decisions can be made by the organisation based on the analysis of the information.

This last point is especially important as there are a huge number of ways to measure performance of fundraising and donor activities and they can be quite complex to calculate.

For example, the acquisition cost to obtain each new donor or even the return on investment for each donor can provide some valuable information but you would need a good fundraising database and accounting information to ascertain these figures.  Medium to large organisation can do this but it may not be as practical for smaller organisations that don’t have the systems or resources.

Follow this link to the website of The Non Profit Times for other examples of measures and metrics that can be calculated.

Even if you are a small organisation review the list below which is intended to highlight some fundamental key performance indicators that you should try to measure and which are not too hard to track:

The important issue with the above is that they relate to the donors.  If you organisation has several different activities, events, programs or appeals that people can donate to then the next step would be to do the above analysis for each different source of the donations.

By keeping track of this information allows you to assess the success and effectiveness of your activity so you can make changes as needed.