You’re a leader in the nonprofit sector, which means you know the importance of communicating your impact to donors and stakeholders.
You also know the tremendous effort it takes.
When you’re on the continuous fundraising hamster wheel, it can be difficult to find new and engaging ways to articulate the impact of your organization’s efforts.
You know that your work is important, but how do you get that across to current and potential donors and other stakeholders?
Most of the organizations I speak to do incredible work, but they struggle to talk about their impact in a meaningful way. This creates a barrier between the change they’re creating in the world and garnering support for that work to make it sustainable.
Articulating your impact is the lifeblood of your nonprofit. It shows that the work you’re doing is meaningful and valuable, it connects your donors, community and stakeholders to your organization, and it positions you to make data-backed decisions in your programs.
So how do you do it well?
The number one way to improve your ability to articulate your impact is to start with tracking.
It’s not sexy, I know. But in order to tell people about the difference you’re making, it’s essential that you not only DO the work (you’ve already got that part handled!), but also track and measure the work so you can use data to tell compelling stories about your organization’s impact.
Tracking Metrics is an Essential Piece of your Nonprofit Marketing Strategy
Keeping track of the work that your organization is doing by tracking valuable metrics related to your mission is essential to telling a compelling impact story backed by proof.
The data you capture show that what you’re doing is actually making a difference in people’s lives.
It lends credibility that offers opportunities for donors, foundations, and the broader community to trust your organization. It gives them a reason to support and believe in your work.
This also helps you stray away from slimy marketing tactics, because you are marketing based on real impact and real stories. No manipulative marketing tactics needed!
So, how do you track the impact of your work?
Choosing the right metrics for your organization is important. That means looking at all of the different things you can track, and deciding which tells the strongest story about your mission.
Below are some ideas about what your organization might choose to begin tracking to ensure you get the most out of your efforts.
Financial Metrics
These metrics can be great for grant applications or business-minded donors who want to understand how their donation will be put to use:
- Funds Raised: Keeping track of total donations, sources of funds, and fundraising efficiency (ex: cost per dollar raised).
- Expenditure: Monitoring how funds are spent, including program expenses, administrative costs, and fundraising expenses.
Programmatic Outcomes
A huge impact metric for your community and donors is how well your programs are working. The importance of knowing that your programs are actually working and how, cannot be overstated.
- Service Delivery Metrics: Quantities such as the number of people served, services provided, or products distributed.
- Outcome Indicators: Specific indicators that measure the change or benefit brought about by your programs. Things like improvement in program recipient’s quality of life, educational attainment, health outcomes, or any other metric directly related to your mission.
Beneficiary Stories
While it’s important to capture quantitative data on programmatic outcomes, it’s equally important to have solid qualitative data to communicate impact and create an emotional connection with current and future donors. When you capture stories from those who’ve benefited from your work, the real impact becomes tangible and emotionally compelling.
- Impactful Testimonials: When a stakeholder can point to the impact your organization has had through a direct quote, it carries a lot more punch than when you say the same thing about yourself. First-hand experience shares go a long way to build trust with future donors.
- Outcome-based Case Studies: What was life like for the beneficiaries of your work before they connected with your organization? How are things different now that they’ve worked with you? Case studies can paint a clear picture of the change your mission creates for stakeholders.
- Show, don’t tell: Visual and audio storytelling through videos and photos that bring beneficiaries’ experiences to life, can build empathy and strengthen the connection between donors and your mission.
Efficiency Metrics
These metrics let your stakeholders know that your organization is efficient with gifts and isn’t wasting precious resources. It also allows you to connect impact stories directly to program outcomes, which can be an effective fundraising tool (for example, $100 provides meals for 10 families).
- Cost-Effectiveness: Evaluating the cost per outcome or cost per service delivery, which helps in understanding how efficiently you are using your resources
- Operational Efficiency: Measures like staff-to-beneficiary ratio, or administrative expenses as a percentage of total expenses.
Engagement Metrics
Stakeholders are often interested to know who else is involved with your organization. Tracking how other volunteers, donors, and community members engage with your organization can be a compelling tool to bring even more people on board.
- Volunteer Engagement: Number of volunteers, hours contributed, and the estimated value of volunteer time.
- Donor Engagement: Tracking donor retention rates, frequency of donations, and average donation amounts.
- Community Engagement: Measures of community involvement and participation in programs or events.
Digital Metrics
Digital metrics are important indicators of how people engage with your organization online. They offer a window into your organization’s visibility level and can be helpful for gauging growth and familiarity of your organization’s brand reputation.
- Website and Social Media Analytics: Tracking website traffic, social media engagement (likes, shares, comments), and online conversions (e.g., newsletter signups, donations made through the website).
- Email Metrics: Open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates of email campaigns.
There are endless metrics that your organization could choose to track in addition to those listed here. From sustainability, policy, and equity metrics, knowing what your stakeholders care about and measuring data to speak to those priorities will allow you to clearly articulate impact.
Collecting, analyzing, and reporting these metrics not only helps you communicate impact, but it helps build transparency, accountability, and trust with stakeholders.
At the end of the day, you could be doing incredible and necessary work in the world, but without a good way to track essential data and information in a way that helps you retell your story to future donors, volunteers, community partners, and strategic allies, you will have a difficult time articulating your impact in a way that helps people connect to your mission.
Support for Your Nonprofit Marketing Strategy
If you’re ready to up your metric-tracking game and are looking for support to articulate your impact and fine-tune your nonprofit marketing strategy, reach out to our team.
At Wayward Kind, we work with changemaking nonprofits every day to amplify their work and help them share their impact with the world.
We’d love to see what we can do with you, too.
