By: Emily Ottaggio

When it comes to long-term fundraising goals and specific campaign goals, there are a number of ways to measure success. One of the hardest things to do when you are drowning in post-campaign data is looking through spreadsheets and charts and determining which metrics are crucial, and which metrics are merely helpful context. Let’s take a look at our top three categories of standard fundraising KPIs to guide you as you delve into your campaign post-mortems.

What is a KPI?

A KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, is a specific metric that you use to assess how well a campaign performed or how close you are to an organizational goal. What separates a KPI from data that is helpful context? Your goals. Any metric that directly correlates to your stated campaign or organizational goal is a key performance indicator.

Tip: Identify your KPIs at the outset to help guide campaign planning and goal-setting.

General Fundraising

The first category of standard fundraising KPIs are likely the most easily identifiable indicators of success in a campaign that is focused on raising money. Aside from the total amount raised in a given campaign, these metrics should also relate to any goals you have for your donor file. Some examples of additional fundraising KPIs can include:

• Total number of donations
• Average gift amount
• New donors vs. repeat donors

Tip: These metrics can get kind of dry. Breathe a bit of life into the reports with interactive charts in something like Google Data Studio.

Conversions

Next we have conversion metrics, which look at the percentage of people who completed the action you wanted them to take. These KPIs are almost universally referred to as a “conversion rate” and the definition of a successful conversion is entirely based on your campaign or organizational goals. This could include:

• Percentage of people who landed on the donation form and made the donation
• Percentage of people who were sent an evite and registered for an event

Tip: Set yourself up for success by using UTMs on your campaign URLs to track conversions more easily.

Engagement

The final category deals with engagement, or how much your given audience interacted with your content or goal. Typical engagement metrics include:

• Email clickthrough rate
• Website sessions or time spent on site
• Likes, shares, and comments on social posts

Even if your goal isn’t directly tied to engagement, these metrics are KPIs that tech platforms like Google, Meta (Facebook), and email service providers are using in their algorithms to determine the relevance of your content. The more your audience engages with your content, the higher priority your content receives.

Tip: If you aren’t sure how to gauge the success of an engagement metric, try comparing to a non-profit benchmark.

Don’t Let the Spreadsheet Win

Need help determining which KPIs are important for your campaign? Reach out to Doing Good Digital and let our team of experts help your organization meet your goals!