12 Fundraising Metrics Your Nonprofit Needs to Track

One of the biggest challenges for nonprofit organizations is the availability of funding for their projects. Unfortunately, the fact that your organization doesn’t profit from its activities doesn’t exclude it from bearing the costs of operations like your profit-making counterparts. This puts you in the precarious position of depending on external funding to survive and achieve your mission.

Securing funds from external sources can be tricky. As such, nonprofit organizations have developed and implemented several strategies to ensure their success, the most effective and popular of which is fundraising. Fundraising is the act of soliciting donations from interested parties, usually for charitable purposes. These interested parties can be individuals or other organizations that are passionate about your cause and willing to support your projects.

For nonprofits, fundraising is a serious and highly competitive business. Many organizations are seeking donors to finance their projects and support their mission. So, staying ahead of the curve is hinged on data-driven decision-making.

By diligently tracking and analyzing key metrics, your nonprofit can gain invaluable insights into donor behavior, campaign effectiveness and your organization’s overall fundraising health. This will better position you for success in fundraising.

To achieve fundraising success for your nonprofit, we’ll explore 12 essential fundraising metrics you should monitor to maximize your impact and make your fundraising efforts effective. Let’s go!

Nonprofit Fundraising Metrics: What Are They?

Nonprofit fundraising metrics are measurable components of your nonprofit that are used to analyze your fundraising activities’ effectiveness.

It would be unwise for your nonprofit to execute fundraising campaigns without tracking and assessing your success; hence, there is a need for fundraising metrics. Also known as key performance indicators (KPIs), nonprofit fundraising metrics are tracked over time, analyzed and assessed to determine the impact of your fundraising efforts. This assessment will evaluate how well you’re meeting the goals and expectations set at the start of the fundraising campaign. By comparing the current results with your initial expectations, you can objectively determine whether or not your fundraising strategies are effective.

Use the data and results to guide your nonprofit’s next steps. Should you maintain the current fundraising strategies, discard them for new strategies or modify them?

Analyzing these KPIs will play a major role in the success of your organization’s fundraising efforts and ultimately determine the success of your fundraising efforts.

Why You Should Track Your Fundraising Metrics

The importance of fundraising metrics for your fundraising efforts cannot be overemphasized. It is extremely difficult to succeed in fundraising without data-driven guidance. Through fundraising metrics, your nonprofit organization will be better positioned to:

Build Effective Campaigns

Your nonprofit’s fundraising campaigns aim to generate funds for your projects. To succeed, you must craft compelling messages that will resonate with your target donors. Some organizations might shoot blindly, sending out the same appeal for donations to every potential donor. This is risky and usually ineffective. You don’t want to miss an opportunity with a new donor by crafting the wrong message, plus it’s a waste of resources.

By tracking and analyzing fundraising benchmarks, you will gain insights that reveal what resonates with your target donors, their motivations and giving preferences. It can go beyond group analysis and provide personalized insights for each donor. With these guides, your campaigns are sure to be effective and successful.

Adjust Fundraising Strategies

You may have implemented certain fundraising strategies for your campaigns without knowing whether or not they were effective. These strategies may have been influential at one point, but over time, the impact isn’t as beneficial. Tracking your fundraising KPIs will allow you to adjust and optimize your fundraising efforts.

Metrics are highly effective in assessing the effectiveness of a campaign. Through it, you can determine whether the campaign yield is worth the time and money invested. You’ll be able to see whether your strategies should be maintained or not. Fundraising metrics can also indicate the areas of your fundraising campaign that need improvement. By analyzing your fundraising KPIs, you can identify weaknesses and make the necessary adjustments. This will go a long way toward improving the performance of your campaign.

Improve Overall Fundraising Efforts

Keeping track of your fundraising campaign’s KPIs over time is vital to its success. You’ll know which strategies have been most successful, if your campaign’s benchmarks are improving and whether your nonprofit’s goals are being fulfilled. These will give you clear insights and direction on what to do to level up your next campaign and optimize your efforts.

In addition, tracking your fundraising efforts provides your organization with data to attract new donors, secure commitments from stakeholders, and showcase the return on investment from each campaign.

Essential Fundraising Metrics for Nonprofits

Donor Acquisition Rate

Donor acquisition rate shows how effectively your outreach efforts convert prospects into donors. It helps you assess your outreach efforts’ success and identify the most effective channels for attracting new donors.

How to calculate donor acquisition rate

Number of New Donors Acquired / Total Number of Prospects

Donor Acquisition Cost

Donor acquisition cost measures the cost associated with acquiring a new donor. It informs you how much you spend to acquire new donors and whether your efforts are cost-effective.

How to calculate donor acquisition cost

Fundraising Expenses / Number of New Donors Acquired

Donor Retention Rate

Donor retention rate shows the percentage of donors who have been kept over a given period. It indicates whether strong relationships are being cultivated with current donors. You’ll want to see high retention rates for a successful fundraising strategy.

How to calculate donor retention rate

Number of Retained Donors / Total Number of Donors in the Previous Period

Donor Attrition Rate

Donor attrition rate reveals the percentage of donors that have stopped donating over a period of time. Like donor retention rate, it indicates whether strong relationships are being cultivated with donors. A strong and healthy fundraising strategy will have low attrition rates.

How to calculate donor attrition rate

Number of Lapsed Donors / Total Number of Donors in the Previous Period

Donation Frequency

This shows how often donors make contributions within a specific timeframe. The higher the donation frequency, the greater the supply of funds for your projects.

How to calculate donation frequency

Total Number of Donations from a Donor / Given Period

Fundraising Return on Investment (ROI)

This measures the financial return your organization generates for every investment in fundraising. It demonstrates the effectiveness of your fundraising efforts.

How to calculate fundraising ROI

Total Fundraising Revenue / Total Fundraising Expenses

Cost to Raise a Dollar (CRD)

The cost to raise a dollar is pretty self-explanatory. It shows how much it costs to raise each dollar donated. It is an assessment of the efficiency of your fundraising efforts.

How to calculate the cost to raise a dollar

Total Fundraising Expenses / Total Fundraising Revenue

Average Gift Size

This shows the average amount individual donors contribute. It can help you to tailor your fundraising appeals and stewardship efforts.

How to calculate average gift size

Total Fundraising Revenue / Total Number of Donations

Donor Lifetime Value (DLV)

Donor lifetime value predicts the total amount an individual donor will likely contribute to your nonprofit over their time as an active donor. It allows you to prioritize high-value donors and build long-term relationships.

How to calculate DLV

Average Gift Size x Donation Frequency x Average Donor Retention Length (in years)

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate measures the percentage of individuals who respond to a call to action after receiving your fundraising message. It assesses the effectiveness of your communication channels as well as the content and delivery of your fundraising appeals.

How to calculate conversion rate

Number of Conversions / Total Number of Interactions

Campaign conversion rate vs. event conversion rate

Although similar, the campaign conversion rate measures the conversion rate across an entire fundraising campaign, such as a text-to-give campaign or a series of fundraising emails. The event conversion rate measures the conversion rate from a single event, such as your yearly fundraising gala.

Donor Survey Responses

These are the results of surveys conducted of your donors. They give insight into their motivations, preferences and experiences. The trends and patterns recognized in analyzing these data points can significantly improve your fundraising efforts.

Donor Demographics

This refers to data such as your donors’ age, location, and interests. Knowing donor demographics makes it easier to segment them and create targeted fundraising appeals.

Engagement Rates

Email engagement

The open rate is the percentage of email recipients who open your fundraising emails.

The click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of email recipients who click on a link within your email.

The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people previously on your email list who unsubscribe.

Event engagement

This involves metrics such as attendance, registrations and participation in your nonprofit organization’s fundraising events. Sending out post-event surveys will also help you evaluate your attendee’s event experience right from the source. These can help you identify the successful event formats and topics that resonate with your audience.

Social media engagement

“Follows” refers to the number of users who have subscribed to your social media channel and will see your content regularly.

Likes refer to the number of people who have clicked on the “like” button to indicate support and interest in your posts.

Reposts are the number of users who have shared your posts with their own followers.

Shares refer to the number of people who share your posts on their own timelines.

Unfollows are the number of users who have unsubscribed from your social media channel and will no longer see your content.

Best Practices for Measuring Fundraising Metrics

If you want to get the most out of the analysis of your fundraising metrics, you need to implement certain measures. These best practices include:

Regularly Collect Data

The aim of measuring fundraising metrics is to give you an accurate representation of the effectiveness of your fundraising efforts. The accuracy of your fundraising benchmarks largely depends on the amount of data you analyze. The best practice is to set up a system that regularly collects as much data as possible from your fundraising campaigns.

To do this successfully, you need to capture data at every point.

• Design your donation forms, event registration pages and volunteer applications so that you can capture relevant data such as donor names, contact information, demographics, interests, and giving preferences.
• Document your objectives for every fundraising campaign as well as the campaign strategies you aim to employ.
• Regularly encourage donors to update their contact information and preferences. This will ensure that your data remains accurate.

Analyze Data Trends and Patterns

As you collect data, analyze it regularly. You can compare campaigns to see the effects of your fundraising efforts during certain seasons and even compare sets of campaigns based on the strategy employed. This will allow you to identify trends and patterns – what was successful and what was not. This will enable you to recognize your strengths and weaknesses and the factors responsible for them. When you know these, your decision-making will be well-guided, and your fundraising strategy will be well-adjusted.

To maximize your data analysis, you can segment your donor base into cohorts based on specific criteria. You can then analyze how these cohorts behave over time and identify the trends and patterns within each donor segment. Utilizing data visualization tools such as charts, graphs, and tables to present fundraising performance metrics lets you view data trends clearly and easily. Statistical tests like t-tests, z-tests, chi-square tests and regression analysis are also helpful in seeing if the trends you observed are statistically significant.

Share Data with Your Team

When you collect and analyze your fundraising data, do not keep it to yourself. Anyone involved in your nonprofit’s fundraising efforts should be aware of the fundraising KPIs and be able to interpret them. By regularly sharing key metrics and insights with your fundraising team, you ensure that everyone is working towards the same goal. Bonus – this leads to sharing ideas on how to improve the state of the organization’s fundraising efforts!

Some strategies to implement include:

• Establish data-sharing protocols by scheduling regular data reviews
• Empowering your team members with data analysis skills.
• Utilizing data visualization tools
• Set team performance goals based on fundraising metrics

These strategies foster collaboration and enhance decision-making across your nonprofit, ultimately optimizing fundraising processes.

Use Software to Track Your Fundraising Metrics

Tracking, analyzing and utilizing fundraising metrics are challenging, especially when manually attempted. So, we highly recommend that your nonprofit organization utilize software to manage its metrics.

You can invest in donor management software or a customer relationship management (CRM) system that is specifically designed for nonprofit organizations. They have features on their fundraising metrics dashboard that can streamline the data collection, analysis and reporting of your fundraising efforts. These features can include:

• Centralized data management
• Automated data collection
• Customizable reporting
• Data visualization
• Advanced analytics
• Donor segmentation and stewardship

With this technology, you will be able to conveniently monitor your fundraising performance metrics and optimize your fundraising efforts.

Start a Free Trial of WildApricot

To make informed decisions about your fundraising strategy and easily monitor your fundraising KPIs, check out WildApricot. Start a free 60-day trial of our powerful software today and leverage the power of data-driven fundraising!

Explore features like:

• Member database
• Email software
• Payment tracking
• Event management