Enhance Your Nonprofit's Efficiency with airSlate SignNow's Data Conversion Lead

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the broadcast is now starting all attendees are in listen only mode good afternoon everyone unless you're uh on the west coast and then uh good late morning to you my name's tim cerantonio i'm director of business development here at neon crm want to welcome you to today's webinar the data driven non-profit why it matters and how you get there we're excited to share a lot of great research a lot of great tools that you'll be able to leverage in your own work uh before we get started and as people file into today's presentation as well i'm gonna go over a few housekeeping items uh the first uh item is that we are recording today's webinar so if you have to leave early though this should be pretty tight and focused but if for some reason something comes up uh you know daycare calls uh you know you forgot something for dinner that you gotta go run out and get it cool go for it uh we're gonna record it you can come back to it and we're excited for you to learn from what we're gonna go over here in any way that you want to do it housekeeping item number two is that we have some handouts that you'll be able to download that includes today's slides as well as support some supporting information about our company's offering as well as some definitions on some of the uh terms that we're going to be going into today so definitely check those out download those three handouts and uh and and make use of them because there's some really good stuff in there that we're going to be going into in a live format so today we're going to be talking about a few different things we're going to dive in first with our agenda so data can always be something that is talked about but not necessarily understood and so what we want to do is just start with the basics so we're going to start by defining and understanding why key performance indicators you know what are those and why does it actually matter so actually drilling down and understanding the elements of fundraising strategy as it relates to benchmarks and key performance indicators or kpis for short we're going to talk about leveraging the fundraising effectiveness kpis within your own fundraising strategy there's about there's 14 of these that we're going to highlight today give a nice overview on and so we want to talk about how that actually relates to your day-to-day work and then using that into your management of your strategy ultimately none of this needs to be just theory none of this just needs to be a bunch of numbers that you're provided and told oh well this is what you need to pay attention to we need this to help you raise more money to save time to build capacity and so we're going to give you some action items and of course i'm going to be available here to answer questions now who am i why why am i doing this webinar why am i somebody who you should listen to if we're going to be honest well my name's tim cerantonio director of business development been with neon coming up to seven years but before that i worked for non-profits i continue to also work with nonprofits i've raised over three million dollars i've used a lot of different databases and and and learned how to lo fold these kpis key performance indicators into my everyday work uh when i was using things like razer's edge salesforce and i actually do use neon crm as my current database for an all volunteer non-profit so that's something that's important because uh 85 of neon staff actually has a similar background to me so when we built out features that we're going to see a little bit today on we did that because we've been there and that's a really really important differential that we want you to take away today is that neon knows where you've been and where you should be going and so when we design things it's because we need it to help you and we don't just do it in a vacuum so a lot of this that we're going to see today is because of an amazing project that you might not have heard about so i'm going to give a key shout out to a project called the fundraising effectiveness project the association of fundraising professionals or afp for short and the center of nonprofits and philanthropy at the urban institute established the fundraising effectiveness project to conduct research on fundraising effectiveness and help non-profit organizations increase their fundraising results at a faster pace now our company neon crm is proud to directly contribute directly to this research as part of the donor software advisory committee and many of the underlying theories in this presentation come from these collective efforts this is an industry-wide benchmark doesn't matter if you live in the u.s if you live in canada australia doesn't matter these are things that are going to apply to your organization because there's been massive amounts of time and effort to understand what makes non-profit donors tick and then we want to put that that data that actionable information in your hands so first we have to start with understanding kpis in the first place key performance indicators so what exactly is a kpi well first it's really just kind of the understanding of just tracking benchmark information and so being able to roll up to a larger goal and just understand what matters most along the way so you can adapt that that's really at its core it's something to pay attention to so in this example here if you're trying to achieve ten thousand dollars in donations that we would term your goal from fundraising campaign we need to achieve an average gift that's a kpi that's basically a piece of data we want to pay attention to of 50 so that's a benchmark that's something that we're trying to achieve it's a number that we're trying to achieve from 200 donors so these are just kind of an easy way a visual way to understand how these all these things relate because this is the thing that you care about this is the thing that your development director your executive director your board of directors are going to potentially even hand you and say here's the goal this is how you get there this is how you get there and we want to talk about uh actionable ways that can get folded in in your decision making but we got to start with that foundation first so why do benchmarks matter well there's a few different elements here first they're going to give you and key stakeholders a focus in a sea of data so instead of just uh kind of going with uh you know what's in a gut judgment you actually have a number that you can point to and it tells you what success is going to look like when you lack that historical data so even if you don't necessarily have everything at your disposal if you know the map that you're supposed to follow and kpis and benchmarks help map that out for you then you know what direction to focus your efforts on because there's only so many hours in the day you're going to be waking up maybe you're helping the kids get to school you got to eat and then what are you doing with those other hours and so this is to help you use that time efficiently we also want you to be able to strategic plan with realistic goals and fewer surprises in a 2012 study the harvard business review actually uh published something called the evolution of decision making how leading organizations are adopting a data-driven culture and more than half the respondents agreed or at least indifferent about the statement my manager relies more on judgment and gut feel than data to make decisions how often does that sound familiar in our own organizations so what we need to do is be able to provide these kpis and benchmarks to our team in order to actually say look we need to make decisions that are based off of data we we don't want to discount institutional knowledge and and a person's intuition but we want that to be guided by data because that same report more than three quarters of respondents said using analytics increased productivity reduced costs and allowed first faster decision making with 70 percent of respondents saying the outcome was improved financial performance for their organization and so non-profits need to take inspiration from that i want to thank neon one consultants the kalo group for actually helping spotlight that they recently helped in articulating some of our benchmarks in a recent webinar that we did too but this one we want to actually drill in even deeper so what exactly are the kpis okay we keep talking about them but what are they what what's the actual definitions now before i dive into this in detail i do want to point out that there is a handy download from the fundraising effectiveness project that has these so there's going to be a few different ways that you can actually reference back to this that's one of them that we want to provide you from from the get-go so when we're talking about these types of of metrics of good starting point is the average let's go back average annual giving per donor and so what that actually means is the total dollars received in one year divided by the total of number donors who gave that year so that's a pretty important benchmark to start with and again uh those those definitions are something that you can not only find within neon crm but also uh in the download that we gave you so you don't don't have to worry about furiously writing these down we we have you covered so the next one that's important is average gift so this is the total dollars received by the total number of gifts received this is this is harking back to uh high school math basically averages statistics that type of stuff but it's an important one because understanding the average gift size means that uh if if you are are trying to cultivate a certain type of donor and maybe an ask amount knowing the average is a good benchmark to be able to drill down against now an important one is donor retention rate as well as donor attrition rate these two do interact with each other pretty closely so donor retention gets talked about a lot a lot in our industry and we're going to be uh focusing in on a bunch of different kpis but this is the one that you're going to hear probably the most about now the simple definition of this one is the number of donors who gave last year and again this year divided by the total of number donors from last year so the simple way to think of this is they came back the people that you got last year to donate they're back again and so that's a simple retention rate that's an important one because it costs a fair amount of money to acquire a donor typically seven times more than it is to retain somebody so that's an important benchmark that we hear a lot about but attrition rates also important too because this is the number of donors who gave last year but not this year it's like the opposite divided by the total number of donors from last year so pretty much uh these this is the inverse of your donor retention rate so if you have a high retention rate then you're going to have a low attrition rate they mirror each other that's that's the simple simple part there then we have our donor participation rate so we're going to go through 14 of these but these are pretty important to start with so the donor participation rate is the total number of donors in a year divided by the number of donors in your database at the end of that year and so a lot of times this is a metric that is dependent upon how you are managing your data so let's count a database to be even an excel spreadsheet if you keep all your donors in an excel spreadsheet you can count this as your donor participation rate so basically this is the number of people that you got to opt in to donating again uh now i know that we're going to have some questions coming in i'm going to be going through these definitions and then trying to fold in questions we do have a dedicated q a at the uh at the end we also do have a staff member on hand to answer things as well so i'm definitely not ignoring your questions if they're still outstanding by the end we'll be taking them at the end of this presentation so definitely on the lookout for that so the next kpi to pay attention to is the donor reactivation rate and that's the number of donors who gave this year and two years ago but not last year divided by the number of donors who gave two years ago but not last year so pretty much this is people that you got before but you didn't you you got them this year you got them two years ago but you didn't get them last year so they came back they came back it's it's uh it's kind of like uh you know somebody who um in the case of 2018 they gave in 2016 but they didn't give in 2017 but they gave in 2018. it's that simple so really at the end of the day these are these are pretty simple concepts but ones that are important to pay attention to so reactivation rate's a pretty solid one and then you got your recapture rate and so your recapture rate is the number of previously lapsed donors who renewed this year divided by the total number of donors last year so really it's just people that you keep a lot of these come come down to to bringing them back and it's dependent upon time a lot of this is time focused so so a lot a lot of cases this is going to be focused on calendar or fiscal year settings that you go by so that's an important element for these is what is the time frame that you're actually looking at as well so uh so if you run on a fiscal year that is not a calendar year please keep that in mind please keep that in mind so the donor uh the donor uh the next one that we should be paying attention to is the donor reacquire rate now this is kind of a long one so hang on the number of recaptured donors so that's that's related to the last item who gave this year but not in the last two years divided by the number of donors whose last gift was three or more years ago but not in the last two years so this is kind of uh this is a complicated one and this but this is an important one because it's showing kind of overall trends this is where when we get into multi-year percentages to pay attention to this is what you can start to point to for your team to say we have a trend that we need to address and if you have a low re-acquire rate then you might want to either start looking at at least targeting specific types of donors uh that are on the high level to reacquire or to just overall look at how you're doing your marketing because a lot of these will end up applying directly to how you're marketing to your to your constituents either through email through direct mail through social media all the different channels it's also to keep keep those in mind when you're looking at these statistics a simple one is donors in the database so we were talking about if you got um uh you know an excel spreadsheet how many people are in that that have given to you because you might have a list of just emails those are not donors if it's just an email that somebody's never given that's not a donor we should count donors somebody who's actually giving you money so an important one for obvious reasons then donors this year that's a fun one that's a fun one because you can see if you're looking at a specific year or this year in particular how many people have you gotten to give so far in 2018 we are literally halfway through the calendar year so where are you where are you right now in terms of how many people have donated and then also look at that next to the donors in the database overall do they match up how close are they a lot of these kpis that should be noted should not live in a vacuum a lot of them should not live in a vacuum because if i'm looking at something like the average gift that might be affected by something like a reta retention rate if i am bringing back a lot of small donors but losing major donors that's another important element so another important one is estimated donor lifetime how many years can we figure that these people are going to be giving to us and this is calculated as one divided by the donor attrition rate so basically this relates as i mentioned back to another kpi so this donor attrition rate we're going to be dividing that and understanding how long somebody might be giving to us because if we have a low attrition rate then that means that people are more likely to be coming back and people are more likely to continue to give and then that means that we're going to keep them for longer and we can potentially even start to use estimated lifetime as a benchmark of understanding potential income to come helps us really understand that new donor acquisition rate is just the number of new donors this year divided by the total number of donors last year again these terms can be found in the handout so if you want to reference that please download the handout we also can set you up with a trial and neon and you can see this too you'll see that very shortly so the number of new donors this year divided by the total and number of donors last year means like cool we got a bunch of people but are they new are they new because you always want to fill the well the fundraising effectiveness project has a lot of great data as it relates to things like retention rate and new donor acquisition rate and so we're going to point you to the most recent up-to-date report for 2018 where you can see the benchmarks going on this year because it's important to understand that it's also important to understand the rate of growth in your donors that's the net gains in the number of donors minus the losses in the number of donors from last year to this year divided by the total number of donations last year and so our rate of growth is going to show us how many people were gaining and that's an important metric because again you use that for overall health i would i would rate that pretty high but not as high in my opinion as the rate of growth in giving donors are individuals but the giving is going to be kind of this is a very similar one but this is the actual value of the gift the the definition is the net of gains and losses in giving from last year to this year divided by the total value of gifts received last year okay that's 14. i know that's a lot of definitions in math right like that's the scary part because understanding these is pretty vital but you know you got to start somewhere and so we want to understand that once you you're told these definitions well how can i actually leverage this in my planning like tim that's all well and good that you gave me a bunch of definitions and and i might you know look at some numbers but what do i actually do with that information and so first we want to help you build some campaign models and uh you know i'm gonna highly encourage that you go to afpfep.org uh of course but uh basically that's a that's where a lot of this information is being held including running yourself through your own fundraising fitness test and so when we start to look at this information it's important to understand that benchmarking your organization's performance can help shine a light on exceptional execution or highlight areas where you need to improve and so you'll be able to compare your previous performance against different benchmarks you want to be able to identify areas to focus on for improvement so maybe your average gift over a course of a few years is falling see and notice that it's not just all in one right like the fundraising effectiveness project really understands that it's got to be broken out by also donation levels as well so you're gonna be able to break out things like retention rates on small donors versus large donors this is why these elements can't live in a vacuum if you are very effective at retaining small donors but your major donor retention is going down that is a flag for the major gift officers or if you're a single shop at least the executive director to perhaps get more involved and so you want to align your organization around goals backed by these numbers that everyone agrees to up front so there's different tools fep is one of them neon also has a direct sync with a platform called fundraising report card that also helps visualize these types of things so putting the the tools in your hands is very important because then when you're having these discussions as you gear up for end of the year for instance to be able to say what are we going to do because you need to know what to measure throughout the campaign to stay on top of performance and adjust if you just keep saying well we're going to send out what we planned in january and you're six months in and you're falling behind where you thought you would be it might be time to instead of just hit send take a look at that copy take a look at who you're targeting take a look at other elements that these kpis are shining on us all right so the reports in the dashboards uh what i want to do is actually show a little bit of neon crm because we need to also visualize this type of stuff and keep it top of mind every day because what we realize is that you can't just look at a spreadsheet you got to be able to understand what's happening when this is occurring and so in a system like ours i'm going to actually draw this in what you want to be able to do and this is an example of neon in action if you haven't seen it is when you log in we've built something called the mission control dashboard and what i've done is optimized a few different widgets that we have to specifically zero in on kpis and so uh you know adding these types of widgets is pretty easy by the way so a little tiny product demo just to kind of zero in but it's as simple as kind of filtering by fundraising or being able to type in kpis now we both have both fundraising or brand new membership kpis same idea if you're a membership association we have some specific metrics to pay attention to today we're talking about fundraising though and so in this system the kpis uh not only are the definitions in there but we can see live how we're doing with a lot of this stuff and visualizing this is pretty important now it might be that your organization also decides to focus in on on instead of 14 of these maybe 10. and so you can actually turn things off you can rename them you can resize them you can filter by different calendar or fiscal years uh to drill down into this information and that's important because you want to personalize it on not only an administrative level but on a case-by-case basis so everybody can have their own kpi dashboard for me i love seeing everything when i actually sent this out for my non-profit reading with pictures i did an end of the year appeal and it was really fun to see my attrition rate go down my donor retention rate go up and my average gift go up and to see that live over the course of a campaign that you're running even if it's just a few days like i did at the end of the year that was fun that was fun but there's also times that you want to drill down a lot of the stuff that we heard when we first rolled out the kpi dashboard is to also have a little bit more easy visualization around comparing times so month to date and year-to-date comparisons or something that's also there is a little widget and and the general rule in neon is that if it's glue blue it's clickable so in this case donation amounts month to date i can click and have a report and i can quickly export this information print this information uh start to configure this if i need to do a little bit of editing or drill down to a specific record so in this case these are people that uh have have donated some amount uh month to date so even looking at the dates hey i got my june donors and so that's a simple one you can also do one based off of the year as well uh when i was working at my last job it was a catholic school and we would be kind of obsessive about what we got for uh that point of the year the uh the term that i always love using is lie bunt uh last year but unfortunately not this year uh that's kind of lapse donors in this case so again being able to click into and act on these types of things is important but some people also are very visual learners so being able to uh drill down and say look i really really really want to look at my attrition rate for the last 10 years oh boy what happened here so that type of stuff is going to be pretty interesting to see on the fly and again it it's the definitions are right here the the the numbers the the actual formulas are built right into the platform and and some uh databases out there are definitely doing this but not to the extent that i've seen what neon does when it comes to putting all 14 of these metrics into it uh you know in fact uh our our ceo uh was a big driver of making these kpis uh actually something that even the fundraising effectiveness project articulates so this is something that neon's been taking the lead on and that's why we put a lot of emphasis on this again it's still data but it's important data that we want you to pay attention to so this is just a little product demo that uh that that relates to this because being able to visualize this information is of course vitally important so let's pop on back over to how we can put this into your everyday processes that's important so first um we want to be become a data driven com uh organization i i think that's a that's something that we should all aspire to as a non-profit this is something that um you know we found is actually pretty important when it's when it comes to developing organizational culture our again our friend uh mike buckley at the kellogg group uh he wrote a blog for us that's coming out soon and in that he's going to be talking about how to make a data-driven culture and one of the things that he spotlighted is that in early 2018 the society for human resource management released an article called the understanding and development of organizational culture and it's while that looked at overall culture there's many advantages that were highlighted that relate to establishing a data-driven culture at your own non-profit a strong culture can bring benefits such as enhanced trust and cooperation fewer disagreements and more efficient decision-making i think that we can all agree that those are things that that would help us and so for instance when you're becoming data driven start to schedule actual performance reviews so do this at least once a quarter so uh you know we just hit the beginning of um uh uh we're heading into the last month of quarter two so maybe once we hit july we do uh something that takes a quick look at how we did in quarter two of the year and and what would we see as an impact if we're not addressing things how much can we actually improve until the end of our campaign um so if you're doing an annual campaign this is going to be in kind of that that bucket of 365 days of the year if you're doing more of a larger form campaign that's multi-year you should still be breaking these things down and viewing them both on a calendar year basis as well as an overall campaign basis and then you need to be able to think a little you know what's happening if something's underperforming what what maybe our retention rate is is going down why do we think this is happening do not be afraid to ask these questions being data driven in a culture is also not punishing people for asking uncomfortable questions about performance so the reason that that that can help is if you have trust if you have cooperation if you basically come together and say you know what we're not doing as well as we thought we did what can we do what can we do different right now and then do it and then brainstorm those changes based off of the hypotheses implement the plan to address maybe you have done a tip historically a very expensive direct mail campaign and this year the numbers aren't actually coming in is there a subset of donors that did succeed did you use different copy or messaging or a different font i mean these are little things that donors are going to be paying attention to and donors don't live in a vacuum they're hitting getting hit with different media different messages different types of things and so if you ultimately realize that your donors are not your donors and that we need to speak to them on their own terms then we'd be able to act on that so speaking of actions what can we do so first and foremost one of the things that we can take is before you do anything what goals and data do you care most about i gave you 14 kpis to think about today do you care about all of those i have personal opinions on the main ones to pay attention to i think donor a retention rate average gift and growth and giving are at least the top three in my my book number of donors in the database is definitely important um number of donations in the database is obviously important but being able to understand trends being able to understand if we're doing something that's affecting our stewardship and and in turn affecting our retention and our acquisition that's where my mind goes because ultimately we need to be a donor-centered culture as well so how do you translate the data and the goals first so you got to understand what you're working with to start with then you got to research your benchmarks how do other organizations perform two great resources to start with first start your search at like i said afpfep.org and so that's a good starting point in order to really kind of understand where the industry as a whole is also another really cool thing that i've seen is our friends at fundraising report card have their own live benchmark uh program so they're able to actually drill into even specific industries uh you know as an example so you know collecting data it's just from their clients fap is a lot broader than that which is the important part about fep is that it's definitely more reflective of the industry as a whole but there's a lot of other benchmarking uh uh research that's been out there uh also the m r benchmarks report just came out and that's while not as direct as fep that's another cool one to check out so between those three you'll be able to drill down specifically to uh who what your organization should be aiming at ultimately though researching benchmarks and seeing how other organizations perform such as overall retention rate in the industry which is kind of eh so far for this year by the way um that's important but it's not as important as making it specific to what you do benchmarks are good benchmarks are good to to be able to point to and say this is where we should be thinking about in terms of our goals uh you know if the industry benchmark historically has been under 50 and your organization's retention rate when it comes to to retention at under 50 percent maybe you're a little higher maybe you're in the 50s and your executive director comes in and says we need our our retention rate to be 90 percent you can say nobody really gets that that's a little unrealistic why don't we take a look at something that uh aligns with where we've been and try to increase that we would love to be at 100 retention but the reality is is that that it's going to be very tough to achieve that so uh what can we do to make a plan and apply our own goals into the results that you want to see and when you see results what are you going to do because a lot of times we focus in on the negative when it comes to these types of things retention rate is going down um you know that type of stuff but the reality is is that there's a lot to celebrate there is a lot to celebrate giving's going up um you know people people are are deemed uh you know more generous than previous generations we're seeing a massive transition of wealth occurring in the next few years uh between boomers going to the next generation and so there's a lot of exciting stuff that's happening especially when it comes to major gift too major gift numbers are actually going up in many cases and so we want to celebrate that and so when it happens at your organization it's not just that you should focus in on the negative and go oh gosh what are we going to do celebrate talk about and and part of being a data driven culture is is celebrating good data too celebrating that so what are you going to do no matter what have a plan so i'm going to pause here for any questions i know that our team has been taking a look at that um our right okay actually it looks like our team's uh done a great job at answering the question so uh if if there's any other questions happy to answer that though for what we talked about today all right well we keep it tight and focused here at neon want to give you a little bonus besides the action items and the handouts that we encourage you to download is if you go to phep's website go to the uh slash report slash download or at least slash reports and you'll be able to see this and you're gonna be able to see 2018's quarter one report it is out and it is something to pay attention to when it when we start talking about this now again this is the first quarter it also might be useful to look at previous reports too to see how 27 panned out that was some really uh fascinating data phep does a lot of great work we're really proud partners of that and uh and and definitely check out we did just a link to that resource there but this is a cool report and it helps us stay on our toes as our as we do our own fundraising and as we build our own product and so being able to supply something that helps organizations like yours is something that we're very proud to have built into neon crm when we have something like this right into the platform so definitely uh if you're looking for a system to help centralize and make this more efficient for you check us out reach on out we'll be reaching out to and we wanted to thank you for spending the time today learning how to be a data driven non-profit and uh thank you very much for stopping by and again this has been recorded we'll be putting that all together you all have a wonderful day