Steve Peretz, M+R Strategic Services
Since the release of the 2010 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, we know many of you have been hard at work looking at how your programs measure up against industry benchmarks.
But the Benchmarks Study is really meant to help you think (or rethink!) how you collect and calculate your data in the first place — since the most important metrics for your organization are, of course, YOUR metrics.
Here are three tips for better collecting and calculating your organization's metrics:
1. Source Everything!
Does your fundraising campaign use the same donation page for both email messages and website promotions? Are you promoting the same advocacy page on Facebook that you're using in your online advertising? If you've done either of these things, you're in good company — but you also know how hard it is after the fact to tell where your donors and activists came from.
It's essential to set things up so that you know where someone who makes a donation or takes action comes from. If you're using the same donation form everywhere on your site, you won't be able to tell if that spike in donations came from the great email you sent or from the well-trafficked blog post that linked to your website.
It's worth taking the time to set up a different page for each traffic source. And if you know in advance that the blog is going to link to your donation page, clone the page and give them their own page so you can see how much they helped!
(Of course, if you can use custom URLs with source codes – such as Google Analytics codes – to distinguish where users are coming from, that will work too! For instructions on how to do just that, click here.)
Sure, having one donation page for a campaign makes it quicker to tell how that campaign is doing overall. But in order to truly analyze the effectiveness of your program, you need to be able to go beyond how much a campaign raised and track where all that exciting activity came from.
2. Get Raw
Once you've sourced everything, I recommend tracking raw data – the actual numbers of clicks, actions, donations, etc. Only when you're ready to calculate a metric like response rate or conversion rate should you move from numbers to percentages.
Why? Let's say you want to track your email fundraising open rate. The equation for that rate (found in the glossary of the 2010 e-Nonprofit Benchmarks Study) is the number of email messages opened divided by the number of email messages delivered. That's easy enough to calculate if you track the numbers.
Let's take an easy example. Imagine you sent three emails: the first email went to the full list of 100 people, the second email went to the 10 people on your email list who are donors and the third email went to the other 90 people who aren't. Your email system will spit out open rates for each of the three emails, but what if you want to track the OVERALL open rate across the series?
If all you have is the rates, instead of the raw numbers, you're stuck averaging three open rates from very different groups and giving them equal weight. But if you have the raw numbers, it's easy to combine them to calculate an overall metric.
How's that work? Imagine that those emails were opened by 13 people, 5 people and 8 people respectively. In order to track the open rate across this messaging series, you would take the RAW numbers of email messages opened (13+5+8=26) and divide that number by the raw number of email messages delivered (100+10+90=200) for an open rate of 13% (26/200 = 13%). Not too shabby.
If you hadn't kept track of raw numbers, you'd be calculating a less-accurate average of the three rates: 13%, 50% and 9%, respectively. Averaging this way would give you an open rate of 24%! By giving the email you sent to only 10 people the same weight as the other two emails, you would arrive at an inflated open rate.
We know you don't want to make important programmatic decisions based on misleading data, so just remember: tracking your data in raw numbers is always going to be more accurate.
3. Compare Like Messages
Of course the email you sent to the most responsive segment of your list had better rates than the email that went to your full file!
On average, your fundraising emails will have different rates than your advocacy emails, and both of those emails will have different rates than your newsletter. So when you're comparing emails, make sure you're comparing like messages. You're going to get the most informative results if you compare messages with similar asks, messages with a similar number of asks, and messages that were sent to the same audience.
By comparing like messages you'll be able to see if differences in your rates are caused by differences in your program or differences in the mix of types of emails you're sending or differences in which part of your email list you're emailing.
You can find even more great tips and information in the 2010 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study – and be sure to check out the study glossary, which describes how we calculated various metrics.
Still have questions about how to put the 2010 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study to use for your organization? You can reach me directly at speretz@mrss.com
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