Five Measurements of Nonprofit Success: KPIs that Count

At a glance

• Main takeaway: When it comes to tracking KPIs, nonprofits are not exempt. In fact, for a nonprofit to reach various benchmarks, it’s important to capture valuable, results driven KPIs.
• Impact on your business: Prioritizing KPIs differ by organization. Yet, no matter how you use them, calculating accurate and effective KPIs on a regular basis will help your nonprofit achieve better results.
• Next steps: Aprio’s Tax Exempt and Nonprofit CPA Services team can help you reevaluate your KPIs to determine if your nonprofit is capturing valuable metrics.

Schedule a consultation with Aprio today

The full story:

Nonprofits often need to be as number-oriented as commercial businesses to reach various benchmarks and achieve success. While most concentrate on tracking the number of donors or the total amount of donations, there are other valuable metrics that deserve attention.

Prioritizing key performance indicators (KPIs) differ by organization, but below we share five popular KPIs your nonprofit should be tracking.

1. New Donors
   A nonprofit that grows the number of donors is a growing organization. Not every quarter will show a gain, but the general trend should show an increasing, not decreasing, level of support.
   
   
2. Donor Retention Rate
   If your donor list is shrinking, you may need to change your outreach effort, perhaps by changing your marketing approach. It’s usually easier to keep existing donors than gain new ones. Putting in extra effort to secure those relationships can help keep the donations flowing to your nonprofit.
   
   
3. Fundraising ROI
   Calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) from your fundraising events helps determine if your efforts are effective or not. Remember to include all costs that support an event, including internal staff time and effort. If you find that you are generating only a small profit, or worse, failing to turn a profit, you may want to reevaluate your methods for raising funds, or even reconsider your target audience.
   
   
4. Email Conversion Rate
   An email campaign has the potential to bring in donations, but it’s important to pay attention to the conversion rate to understand if your marketing pitch is effective. If this number is low or falling, you may need to reevaluate the content of your call to action. Are your emails too long? Too vague? Filled with errors? Too frequent? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, a reevaluation may help improve the response.
   
   
5. Social Media Engagement
   Your website is where individuals can donate, volunteer and otherwise support your nonprofit. Convincing them to head to your nonprofit’s website should be the goal of posts, tweets and other social media conversations. Tracking the number of visitors from social media sites — and their donations — can help determine the value of your efforts and help tailor future posts.

The bottom line

Worthy causes appeal to our altruistic nature, but nonprofits compete for attention just like any other business. No matter how you use KPIs, calculating them on a regular basis is sure to help you obtain better results. Aprio’s Tax Exempt and Nonprofit CPA Services team can evaluate the KPIs you’re tracking to make sure your nonprofit is capturing valuable and deliverable metrics.

Schedule a consultation with Aprio’s Tax Exempt and Nonprofit CPA Services team today.