Empower your non-profit organization with sales funnel analytics for NPOs

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[Music] [Applause] [Music] hey guys welcome to mayhem to measurement this week we are back with episode 23 I'm Chris book joined by the incomparable Christie Summa well hello there fresh off of dog sitting duty for me my pleasure she was an angel I find that hard to believe she was if I drank order all three she Wesson Chris's dog Chris books Doug was easily the most mature well she's nine her faces sushi nine she's nine nine and I was telling people she was 12 I was walking around my neighborhood oh that's really a dog yeah she's 12 she's got the white face and all of new joints to prove it sorry that's all right she's gorgeous yeah but I don't think you should add to a woman's age like that she's very sensitive about that shouldn't a guest know it's very hurtful but nonetheless it was a very much appreciate it was nice for us to be able to sneak away to California for the weekend always great to be out there got to see some really really great folks and get to be in the ocean just about every day which is always always huge so today getting right back to business I think we got a pretty interesting topic and it's something you know a whole heck of a lot about and that is analytics for nonprofits yeah nonprofit analytics let's get into it so one of the things that I've always you know working with a few different nonprofits over the years that seems to be a common strategy with respect to how are we going to communicate our message and it could be regardless of the goal because the goals are typically let's get more donations let's get more volunteers let's get more influencers let's get more people talking about it let's give people more people to attend our fundraisers like all those to like volume type metrics that's funny though it seems like they're so simple theoretically but there's a lot to it and it's like a lot of things you talk about when you have so many different things or ideals or frankly endeavors with what you're trying to accomplish it can make things murky pretty quickly oh for sure because the the challenge to win over someone's heart in mind for a donation is a little bit different than for a volunteer opportunity yeah and it's interesting depending upon what the context of the organization is and what they actually provide and who they serve who their constituents are what that what the split between we want donors versus we want volunteers versus we want you know people to get involved some way or another anywho one of the things that is common amongst the nonprofit's that I've worked for in the past is that they rely upon this kind of three shows communication strategy where one show is we need to show the need like who we trying to help why do we need to serve a certain portion of our community what do we do what what good are we providing to the world right and then the third the second show is show impact so based upon the things that we did last year last month last week last quarter whatever here's what we did to change this world for the better or whatever it is that we're trying to accomplish for the nonprofit's mission so impact so show the need there's a problem show impact we know how to solve that problem and then third show is show gratitude so you always want to incorporate some kind of thank-you message whether it's kind of a blanket thing thank you or an individual outreach to people who donate or volunteer or whatever or if it's like a fundraising event in which you're getting all the people who supported you in the past together do you want to show the grant it's a show need show impact and show gratitude those are kind of the free there was a three-legged stool that those would be the three legs on that on that stool yeah that's gonna be your pet your pillars obviously you know it's not necessarily that different from a lot of another endeavor so let's just take ecommerce as an example it's very very similar in some fashion in the sense that you know you probably need a product here's why we think you need it here's what this product is going to accomplish for you and now we're gonna get into the retention phase here and I don't want to equate nonprofit with ecommerce because it's obviously different in a variety of reasons but the psychological steps are at least similar in a methodical nature yeah operationally to like we talked about in show prep that this one this genre nonprofit is very similar to pirate primarily because there's so many different audiences to whom you are trying to appeal mmm right with with higher edits donors and providers and influencers and constituents and and even like you're talking about like donors their segments of donors and on the higher ed its students and faculty and again donors for higher ed parents all those different types of audiences as others there's a varied group here and it's almost like there needs to be different objectives for each one of those audiences and probably different modules of communication strategy and definitely different metrics you know sure because it to get a donor donor is different than getting a volunteer or or some or an influencer or something like that well that's why it's so important obviously we always say the first step is to understand your audience or your audiences in in this case there are many but when it comes down to using data to create an architecture for your site that supports the way your different donors go through the site and you know both does it cohesively but also in in very defined fashion it's it's so crucial you even looking at donors for instance we can really dissect that a number of ways and it it sort of gets back to what are you trying to accomplish as an organization is this an organization where we're trying to get thousands and thousands of 5 or $10 donations or is it a organization that relies on very large ticket donations because the way we're going to orchestrate that is very very different if it's a five dollar transaction okay let's smooth up the the conversion process take all the impediments away and really move people through something's right in a million dollar check we got to architect that information in a massively different way and make sure that we're we're constructing that information in a way that appeals to that audience and it's not about removing impediments as much as it is about supporting people's beliefs that they're spending money on the right yeah and I think to one of the one of the things that is present in all of this is just the emotion right sure for if you're buying a watch like that's there's some emotion to that transaction but if you're donating or deciding to donate to one nonprofit or another there's a lot more fields that go into that and so that has that to be an important layer of communication to that's measured and monitored and tried to try to be understood as well sure so while well a lot of these facets are very similar to like some of the other industries we've talked about in the past on this podcast there's definitely some unique intricacies to the nonprofit world that definitely come up right so and I would view these as like unique obstacles or little hurdles we need to jump over for nonprofits who are trying to establish a solid foundation for their for their measurement program one that I've come across quite a bit you're dealing with folks is that you know obviously the resources are limited and we've got it kind of consider the budget for certain things like a website like if that's the communications hub let's say by the time you build a website you might not have time to build out your own custom donation portal or your own volunteer portal or other different types of things you might need to serve your audience and and accomplish those individual objectives so a lot of times that people will not build a donate donation portal but buy it or just lease it or tack it on to what they've got another website so from a technical standpoint there's a lot of intricacies that come up coming up into play with making sure that you can track a visitor from visitor the campaign page looked around a little bit checked out the mission looked at the board of directors page finally decided to make the move gonna hit the donate button now and then they're over in a different portal website experience whatever did we lose that like number those numbers is it all kind of sync together we we tracking the journey from one environment on the website to a totally different environment and a donation of all into your portal so that comes into play a lot that's something that should be planned for by by nonprofit marketing directors and analytics folks yeah there's gonna be a lot of to it and there always are whoa you know when you look at the nature of sass right now specifically in the analytics space there are so many tools that have to work together flawlessly and frankly it's actually sort of a miracle that things don't break more than they do in for us a lot of times the that we get called in by companies it's because they broke something or something's not talking to another platform and they want us to help fix it or iron it out and get things back on the right path and I am surprised though like I said that it doesn't happen more but when you're dealing in a situation that has a little bit of a reduced or a pressured budget like you talked about you're going to see those types of things happen but you know with the nonprofit sector as a whole when you think of all the different portals you have to have because you have so many different audiences our audience segments that you're serving it really has to work flawlessly and it's too easy to neglect it or duct tape and move on but you break it and you're in a world of trouble yeah yeah totally another unique aspect to all this especially on the communication side and measuring the impact of individual communications is on the audience segment so we talked about like there's donor audiences and there's there's influencer audiences and obviously there's a constituents that we need to appeal to as well and communicate too I think if you could break every one of those apart into little segments themselves and really try and measure the impact of the message four or the messages for individual audiences right so what I'm getting at is sometimes nonprofits kind of paint themselves into a corner by only focusing on one audience and exhausting the hell out of it with with a message like this this is our audience these are the people that we want to talk to it's very finite and defined let's just you know overload them with art wealth - lets just deliver our message to them again again and again and it ends up overloading them if they get they get exhausted browbeat people into wanting to support your cause yeah well you you can try but it's not an effective to your point it's not an effective strategy at least that we've seen and so one of the ideas is that you kind of want to start things out smart in terms of identifying potential audiences that you would want to attract whether it be demographic or psychographic you could be talking about like alright how we're gonna appeal to appeal to 55 plus people because that's gonna be a lot different than the way we appeal to college-age people and that's gonna be a lot different than how we appeal to working professionals and how we build a moms or whatever right there might be specific programs that we've got that we need to develop to appeal to those particular audiences with a just varied message we're still saying the same thing it just it's coming from a different voice if that makes sense you know you do also see a lot of people to make their universes very small because they're so focused on a certain demographic or a certain set of demos for instance and they don't take the time to think about how could we tailor our message versus you know we've got this message this is what we do and we're gonna hit these demos with it really cut yourselves off to a lot of opportunity and in part part of what we do is analyst is trying to find gems and trying to find the right content or the right message for that right audience and match that up but you know without an open mind and an appetite for testing specifically around messaging and content you can really limit yourself in terms of what's possible yeah for sure and then even once you've identified maybe a a wealth of or an array of segments that you want to appeal to the message that you're delivering based upon when they're interacting with you could be different like if you're just introducing hey here's what we do here's the need here's how we help people and what the impact is that's a different message to that person if that person is already aware of that and she's already donated or he's he's ready to donate or he's ready to volunteer and so on and so we kind of have to know where people are at in the funnel the funnel applies to nonprofit too obviously so there's a lot of different ways to segment it gets pretty complicated pretty quick but documentation of all that is pretty key as well you know one thing we didn't talk about but just popped into my mind is just just the environmental impact from outside so something happens you know there's a catastrophic weather event or what whether it's a political issue or whatever there are things that can happen from outside that that these organizations need to be able to respond to in a very timely manner and you know I think that that ID impacts probably everything we talk about going back to making sure that the different platforms and portals are able to talk to each other and run flawlessly all of that has to be done in in a well-orchestrated manner and in a stable manner so that you can react and capitalize on the timely nature because it's a there are opportunities for you and if you have a cause and it's very relevant to whatever is going on right now well yeah it's it's your opportunity to help a lot of people with your cause but you have to be engineered in the right way to capitalize on absolutely there's got to be like a preparedness plan yeah so it's almost like you gotta ever go bag in a sense it's like okay in you probably need to train this within your teams as well you should probably have your teams running tests to see can we actually do this because I do think a lot of T a lot of teams a lot of companies across all spectrum in all industry will say oh yeah yeah that's a good idea let's do this and then we should we go down this road we try to get an email out we try to message something we would try to get a certain P state or whatever it is windows closed you know the the excitement or the opportunity whatever it is has passed you got it you got to have this practiced right and and a lot of people say oh I don't want to waste time practicing I want my people totally focused on on doing the work at hand doing real work but practice is real work if it allows you to flawlessly executed on and that's an investment that reaps Awards many times over yeah and I think in terms of responding to crisis or just opportunistic things that come up one of the things that you probably want to look at from a metric standpoint is not you know an efficiency or a volumetric in terms of what we get out of it or how how efficient were we with the funds that we put into it or the investment we made but one I think important metric there is the more like a customer service metric like how soon did we respond oh absolutely how quickly did we identify that there's something that we need to discuss an own ant out and did were we effective in actually putting something together or firing whatever we had ready to go so well you know we had J on a couple weeks ago and what we were talking about word-of-mouth marketing and talk triggers but you know thinking of his universe and in the social media universe and all that you remember the Super Bowl that was made famous with the blackout and then Oreo cookie 49ers and ravens I think I believe it was it was the Harbaugh Bowl yeah yeah Kaepernick was still playing yeah but just the timely nature of that in and I think for all of the faults that we see with social media and and all of the sometimes exaggerated hoopla that companies place on social at least was social when when these companies built these command centers and all this other junk they're at least putting plans in place to be reactive when the opportunity presents itself and we need to be the same way with dating with the operations of our company in this case nonprofits as a whole yeah so what there's a few things there so number one what data points kind of lead us to believe that there's something that we should take advantage of that aren't completely obvious like there's a freaking hurricane coming but also how soon can we react and then given the time and investment we put into our preparation efforts was it worth it were we able to capitalize and capitalizes is a tough verb for the nonprofit world but it's kind of what it is it is and I think I alluded to it earlier a little bit you can't really look at it as capitalize as much as you look at it as an incredible window to serve the people that depend on your organization that's a better way to put it yeah well done geez words how hard to imagine that that we we grew up in an agency that had a significant PR arm yeah so what about individual metrics for nonprofits like talked about audiences and understanding objectives which might vary depending upon the nature of the nonprofit business and also some of the complexities that come into play when you are establishing a good foundation for analytics but when it comes to tactical measurement what kind of things do we need to look at well I think there's there's a couple ways that we need to to break this down and just like we talked about knowing our audience not all metrics are created equal and segmentation does get us a little bit further along so one of the things that that I think Chris myself like to point out or at least approached the nonprofit sector with is breaking down in terms of donor metrics volunteer metrics and then event fundraising a little bit more of your financial side metrics so just looking at the first of those with donors you can really look at in terms of metrics surrounding volume metrics surrounding efficiency and then look at the competitive set here sure so what volume is obviously pretty self-explanatory there how many donations do we get how much money we bring in very good the efficiency one though I think is very interesting and I'm not sure a lot of nonprofits really look I might but I haven't necessarily seen them look at this in terms of really segmenting out what our what's our one-time type donation cycle versus where do we see recurring come from in terms of recurring donation says and you know we know somebody gives us $30 a month or once a year they write us a check for a thousand bucks whatever that is because again those are two fundamentally different audiences probably yeah you're right I think there's another efficiency metric in there too this is a little bit more brass tacks but for people who actually start the process of donation like they start to fill out their name and their give amount and whatever else like did they finish that process so it's almost like a shopping cart abandonment type of thing it is where you kind of need to measure that make sure that whatever widget you've got in place to capture donations it's as efficient as possible absolutely you know third thing I touched on there was it was competitive and and again this is one of those things that a lot of nonprofit directors probably a little bit squeamish hearing but like it or not when you're trying to support organization yeah resources are resources because they're finite and you're either fighting for people's time as we'll see in the next section here or you're fighting for their and their contribution their discretionary or in this case yeah so understanding from a competitive perspective what other organizations are similar to you what where are people give you their money to if not you who are you competing with for for these funds and flipside those who are you similar to in the merchants a similar it's a complementary to in the sense that you know I see if I see people donating to this organization these are also probably people that may want to support my organization for instance are there opportunities to team up there there are but you know it all gets back to the idea that you know time and money are very finite and so we do have to look at it with a little bit of a competitive eye if we truly believe that our organization is the best organization to support our population yeah next when you talk about donor metrics let's talk about volunteer metrics so again just categorizing these by volume efficiency and competitive volume is pretty simple how many volunteers do we get how many opportunities do we have for people to volunteer so like a volunteer events and so on and then just the overall percentage of people volunteering that we talk to and that's more of probably an efficiency metric in that are we bringing in new volunteers or these kind of like the the the people that always volunteer there are loyalists that we can count on kind of brand evangelist if you will and what is our rate of bringing in people who are volunteering for the first time and what is our process for getting them to volunteer again so we don't just have one interaction with them and lose them and if they are one and done what are we doing wrong yeah well I don't they want to stay engaged with our organization is it something that they're their company's doing and I kind of felt that they had to do it once and they did their piece another done they don't really care or is there something their organization that either rubbed them the wrong way or made it difficult for them to do so these are potential landlines yeah and from a you know to compare that to the for-profit world it would be quality assurance and customer experience like what do we do what we do better well in turnover as well if you're looking at this internally now obviously turnover kills businesses and so theoretically if your organization seeing hi volunteer turnover you might have more volunteers this year than you did last year but if you're cycling through them that's potentially an indicator that something's wrong and also an indicator that that you really need to pay better attention to how it is we engage with these folks moving forward yeah for sure and we talked about you know to start the show we talked about the three shows one of them probably the most important one I think is show gratitude on the efficiency side especially when it comes to both return donors and repeat volunteers that absolutely comes into play and you can measure the impact of saying thank you and whether was actually effective in getting people to donate again or volunteer again or whatever is we're trying to do I think that's a valid point in it is neglected and if you look at the nonprofit world so much of it is about let's hear to get their time or get their money in and that's gonna sound callous to say but let's let's just get to the point where they're engaged the organization and there's not a lot of talk about by the flipside I think you know a little bit of a tangent here but higher ed which we've talked about a lot recently he's very similar in that as well and you know let's get the application or let's get the support whatever it is but here's a thought you know for higher ed okay we've got somebody that applied what are we doing with them well the praten well their applications being reviewed because even if they get get denied entrance for this program how are we serving them other complementary programs or other programs that might fit their skillsets more yeah I'd love to volunteer but I'm busy that night do you have anything else that I could do I'm sure that question comes up all the time and that message should be you know part of the fun but volunteered by the nonprofit to get people engaged however we can get them engaged absolutely on the competitive side to you there's you know obviously same kind of thing what organizations are we competing against for extra time for available time from people who are willing to to volunteer last point we have here just in turn in terms of the three ways you can really slice and dice this is event in fundraising metrics and this is obviously very self-explanatory just how successful are we with with the endeavors or the external first that we have yeah could be fundraising drives or big galas or even little things like bake sales you know like silly things just to why shouldn't say silly but like more innocuous less time intensive things that collectively can have a big impact in raising funds and awareness for an organization well think about you know let's say we throw a great gala really fun people show up in their their tuxes and their black ties and their gowns and all that but if we're spending a ton of money to put that on it is quite possible that we bring in less less money that we can actually use to the people that depend on our organization versus a thousand and one bake sales to use your example and bake sales you can have in every corner pretty easy to set up not that hard to execute but could be when it's 115 out but yeah yeah but I mean the gallows are the big sexy thing that everybody talks about and okay that there might be some implications with press coverage and all that but let's look at this a little bit critically in as opposed to just getting getting caught up in the shiny object let's think about what is it that is going to provide the most support in continuity for our organization yes we talked about donor metrics volunteer metrics obviously there's some event fundraising considerations that should be kind of laid out on the table I think more than any any of these that the event fundraising metrics really call for like a post-mortem process like what do we put in what you know time effort money all that what did we invest and what did we get out and is it worth doing the big gala or should we do a barbecue next year well you know we this might be more important than people initially think you look in the last few years at the way nonprofits have come under fire for misuse of funds you see some of these organizations where you know of the contributions they have something like 97% are spent on salaries and travel and events for employees you know and you see like 3% actually flowing through to the people that depend on that organization you're gonna be under a microscope in a probably an increasingly big microscope in this environment yeah I think that kind of leads us into some other elements to be considered for a sound non-profit analytics program obviously there are regulatory concerns that should be at least monitored and addressed in metrics obviously play a role in that we're not attorneys thank goodness but I think that the message there is if there is some regulation and your industry and if your nonprofit guess what there is you should learn about that and have a process to measure all the things to make sure you're on the up-and-up with Uncle Sam or whatever country that you reside in then I think there's other elements like every nonprofit typically has like an annual report that they share with big donors or the board of directors and things like that I almost think like throughout the year there should probably be like little little earmarks on events donation campaigns volunteer campaigns that can contribute to that grandiose annual report that's typically well designed and bandied about and all that sure the transparency and the frequency of that as well are also if you think about sort of great marketing tools one it's an excuse to continue to talk to people but two it's a confidence builder mm-hmm if I understand okay you know throughout the year here's how the money is being spent and you know if it's quarterly that gives me a pretty good idea it's only 12 weeks cycles okay we can run within that and it gives me the confidence that I need to donate to this organization because I know that the money I I spend there is going to be used effectively yeah so one of one of the other considerations that we had is similar to the audience segmentation that we're talking about I think the more that we can get away from traditional demographic targeting the better because motivations and attitudes are really kind of what drives a decision to donate or volunteer or get involved in any way to people can look totally different come from totally different backgrounds but have the same feelings and attitudes about a particular issue shouldn't be about their age or their income or or whatever or their location it should be more about how they feel about something and what their psychographics are one and that is why digital matters that's why digital's digital it's it's not just simple database marketing we've been able to fire off emails and postcards to people based on database attributes for years but the whole point of digital is that we were supposed to be able to get as one-to-one as possible and that is is how we speak to people with motivations in nonprofits really need to embrace that idea think and I think I'm not sure whether they're ahead of the curve or falling behind or whatever but especially due to the emotion that's involved with with where I donate for a lot of people at least I think motivations and attitudes really come into play so consider that and the last consideration we had was really for budgeting and forecasting so we talked about demonstrating and showing the need and understanding what the need is but also from a budgetary standpoint what do we actually require to get the word out to get the proper amount of donations to accomplish our goals to get the proper number of people who are volunteering to you know create sack lunches or fill up backpacks during the summer or whatever that whatever the driver or volunteer opportunity yeah yeah exactly so I think there's a lot of analytics and numbers and metrics that go into determining what we actually need because obviously more than anybody nonprofits really need to be fiscally responsible with with their budgets and be accountable to them yep things need to go further so that's all we have for tonight if you want to learn more about what we do check us out .imtcva.org and chris seat simha on twitter and linkedin believe it's at seat summit siet SEMA I'm at Chris book we always love hearing from you any questions comments whatever you got shoot them our way we love getting a chance to interact with you guys however possible and we will be back with you next week talk to you then [Music] you [Music]