Tuesday’s post titled “Time in the office versus time with donors” begged more questions than it answered. Today, we’re going to zoom in on one of those questions and examine it more closely.
How do you measure relationship building
and the success of such activities?
It was suggested in earlier posts that a weekly contact report is one tool that can be used to track relationship building activities; however, there are other tools that you should consider using in conjunction with a contact report.
- Dashboard
- Scorecard
- Annual performance plan
- Weekly or monthly reports
- Donor database reports
- Moves Management reports
If you want to learn more about organizational dashboards, click here to check out a BoardSource book titled “The Nonprofit Dashboard: A Tool for Tracking Progress“. If a dashboard isn’t appealing to you, then you might want to look into a balanced scorecard approach. Click here to see what Bernard Marr at the Advanced Performance Institute has to say about this tool.
Of course, choosing the tool is probably the easiest part of this decision. The more difficult thing is determining which relationship building metrics to track. Here are a few suggestions:
- Number of cultivation meetings with prospects
- Increased contribution size – maintained – decreased
- Number of face-to-face stewardship meetings
- Number of prospects converted into donors
- Donor loyalty rate
- Donor satisfaction survey score
- Renewal rates for year two, year three, year four, and year five donors
- LYBUNT and SYBUNT renewals
There are no right or wrong answers to the question of what you should track. I believe that it really boils down to the title of this post: “Inspect what you expect”.
I suppose the best advice I can give to you is “don’t try to make decision by yourself”. I encourage you to engage fundraising staff, resource development committee volunteers, board members, fundraising volunteers, and even donors. There is nothing wrong with pulling together a small focus group, ordering a few pizzas, and engaging them with a few thoughtful questions.
If you are looking for a few good samples, the following are a few links that I think are worth looking at:
- DZO Strategists: “The Beyond ‘Cash Fundraising’ Management Dashboard“
- Candler County Schools: “District Balanced Scorecard“
- Blackbaud: “Embracing Technology for Moves Management® Success“
Using tools and metrics like these should help you answer the difficult question posed in Tuesday’s blog post: “How much time needs to be spent outside of the office compared to behind your desk?”
What tools does your non-profit organization use to track relationship building and resource development activities? What metrics do you hold your fundraising professionals and executive director to? Please use the comment box below to share your thoughts.
Here’s to your health!
Erik Anderson
Founder & President, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC
www.thehealthynonprofit.com
erik@thehealthynonprofit.com
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