Nonprofit Marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Why You Need Them
If you break into a sweat every time you hear the term key performance indicator (KPI), you are not alone. Developing and measuring key performance indicators is easier said than done.
Having a real marketing strategy and sticking to it is a hard thing, and key performance indicators, or KPIs, can really help. However, most folks have a very fractured view of KPIs for marketing. Because good KPIs use cross-team metrics, they usually are not developed and kept in one place, and they can be a real source of siloed and fractured information.
In this post, I will go into the benefits of clear, combined marketing KPIs for nonprofits, how to choose and refine them, and the benefits of KPIs.
Most folks look at KPIs around three big buckets: donations, signups, and spend.
- Donation amount: Fundraising is core to nonprofits, so tracking donation amounts makes sense, but going beyond single monthly donations is likely important for your growth.
- Volunteer signups: Online volunteer signups would be ideal, but it is not a great metric. Many folks don’t volunteer online, especially the first time, so digging deeper is likely to get you better information.
- Marketing spends by conversion: When you pay for ads, especially for list building or donations, understanding your conversion rate is key. There is a lot of unclear data around conversions, and this is often not as easy as it seems—the big-bucket approach misses a lot and is often not strategic at all.
Think of your KPIs as a math problem.
Communication KPIs + members KPIs + development KPIs = marketing KPIs
The communications department has one set of KPIs, the development team has one set, the member folks have one set, and the advocacy folks have another. And gathering information takes time. It is not often that folks proactively sit down and review all the goals of the organization and these teams. Folks see the KPIs and goals in general as tactical (“We need to do social media or have a big email list”) instead of an overall strategy. These combined KPIs have multiple uses for your organization. It can provide transparent information to department heads as well as information to leadership, your board, and donors.
Getting Started Measuring Your Nonprofit Marketing
Ask teams what they would like to measure, then look at what is possible, what is strategic, and what is just nice to have. Remove the “nice-to-haves” and the “not possibles” to get to clear KPIs. These may be important, but they will take more time or system changes to be able to measure.
Define your goals. It takes time, focus, and an openness to some conflict to dig into clear strategic communications goals. Most folks don’t do it or go part of the way and give up.
Have your own vision of the right goal. Professionals don’t always agree on marketing or organizational KPIs. Some are singularly focused on a section of the work or a tactic they specialize in, and they do not always have a holistic view. My view is that organizational and marketing success is a varied, layered puzzle, and achieving goals does not happen by focusing on one piece of the puzzle.
Know your audience. Who are you really trying to talk to? Dig into this, be strategic, ask questions, and don’t skimp on this, as it matters a whole lot.
Don’t ignore your website. An updated and organized website is something many folks don’t have a real plan for, but you should make sure you have streamlined and focused goals. Your website cannot do everything, so ask yourself what you are really trying to do with it.
Key website questions. How many folks come to your site? Sometimes folks have lofty goals for site traffic or engagement, but their website is not built to accommodate that.
How do they find your site? Understanding why folks come to your site is a basic question that often goes unanswered, and many folks do not know. Try to answer this question thoughtfully.
Do they engage? Depending on what your goals are (story collection, email signups, etc.), you want to know what the base level of engagement is.
When was the last time your site was updated? Having an updated website with good content is hard, but it can yield a lot in results, and if you focus your time, that work can be a place to brainstorm for other content creation or used for other things.
Do you have an active blog/content stream? Yes, this is very 2013, but now more than ever, with all of the AI material out there, good content matters. Don’t have a traditional blog unless you really want to work on it, as having a blog that was last published in is worse than not having a blog at all. Substack and Medium can be useful alternatives, but you still need to do the work.
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