Measuring and analysing your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) offers your nonprofit valuable insight into how efficiently, and effectively, your organisation is operating. This data serves as a guidepost, as it literally points the way to potential problem areas, so that you know where a change in approach or technique might help you realise a significant improvement in your results.

Every organisation is different, which effects which KPIs will be relevant for a specific nonprofit. There are many basic KPIs that your nonprofit can and should track to measure and evaluate your performance.

Regardless of which ones your NFP currently has on its radar, consider tracking the following three. Many nonprofits fail to track them, but they offer insight into critical areas. Once you locate a problem, adjust your strategy and reap the rewards!

RFM Across Your Donor Segments

It’s a safe bet that you know, off the top of your head, the total number and amount of donations that your NFP received during its last fundraising campaign. You likely know your annual donor stats as well, but, do you understand how much, and how frequently, your donors give?

RFM is an anacronym that stands for Recency, Frequency and Monetary. When you start to measure and track it across your donor segments, and, especially within specific donor groups, it provides you with a host of helpful information. RFM gives you a means to determine the results if you increase, or decrease, the total number of gifts a donor contributes, the amount of the gift, or, the number of donors.

This allows you to make more realistic revenue projections for both your budget and fundraising campaigns. Using RFM, you can see the number of gifts a donor segment gives throughout the year, and then compare each donor in that segment to the average. This helps you identify potential lapsed donors much earlier than the typical 12 months or more out. For example, if a specific segment makes an average of 3 gifts per year, and, it’s been 4 to 6 months since a donor in this segment made their last contribution, it’s probably a good idea to go ahead and reach out to them. Remind them about your mission, and how much their gift means to your cause to try to prevent a lapse.

Open and Conversion Rates

Even though social media campaigns are having a dramatic impact on fundraising, and are a key part of any successful strategy, email campaigns remain the heavy hitters when raising funds. They are also the primary way of encouraging other forms of action from your supporters, such as recruiting volunteers, gathering signatures for a petition or other forms of advocacy.

Getting your supporters to open the email and act on its contents often relies on the power of your subject line and how emotionally stirring the information is. Therefore, measuring and tracking your open and conversion rates is a KPI you want to use throughout all of your campaigns. This way, you can continually fine-tune your messaging and results!

The importance of measuring this KPI also comes into play with your social media campaigns, where you want to measure and track how often your campaigns and other posts are shared on social media, and how often these posts convert the audience into acting. Just like an email campaign, fine-tuning the content that you post on your social media channels can increase whether your post is liked and shared, and whether its viewers take additional action and donate, volunteer or advocate on your NFP’s behalf!

Top Donors and their Percentage of Revenue

While you may know one or more of your top givers by name, are you familiar with how much their individual gifts contribute towards your nonprofit’s total revenue? If you don’t, and, if only one or two donors are providing all, or nearly all, of your funding, you could be setting your nonprofit up for an eventual catastrophic shortfall.

Accidents happen, fortunes, and finances, change, as do interests. It’s never a good idea to allow one person, or entity, to provide the lion’s share of your revenue because one unexpected change could leave your nonprofit unable to provide the services that its members need and count on!

Tracking this KPI can help you see where you need to increase your funding strategy and provide the justification to your board for raising ad spend and other fundraising costs to diversify your campaigns. It also enables you to stay on top of the giving patterns of your main donors so that you can be assured that you are giving them the time and attention that they need to remain actively engaged and involved with your nonprofit and its mission.