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A foundational experience for me growing up was competing in Track & Field. My big brother was really into it and competed in college, and so did I, starting in 7th grade. One of things I learned to love as an athlete, was tracking progress by measuring performance. Looking at details like splits, measuring how times were changing allowed me to better understand what was working and what needed to change. So it’s no surprise that I very quickly developed a strong affinity for tracking fundraising progress by measuring performance. Yet I find that many nonprofits do not pay sufficient attention to their metrics. If a nonprofit wants to find fundraising success, it’s critical that they measure the right outcomes that lead to success.
When you look at many of the larger foundations, you’ll find that they measure the following things.Â
1.      Meetings by Purpose
a.     Qualification
b.     Cultivation
c.     Solicitation
d.     Stewardship
2.     Gift Solicitations
3.     Gift Closes
4.     Newly Qualified Major Gift Donors
5.     Stewardship Moves with Major Gift Donors
6.     Amount Solicited
7.     Amount Closed
These are all helpful, but there are a few other metrics that I would recommend.
8.   Close % (What percentage of solicitations are resulting in a gift)
9.   Yield Rate (How much of the total amount of gifts asked, did I actually close)
10. % repeat major gifts (are past major gift donors continuing to give)
11. # of newly qualified major gift prospects who end up making a major gift
Now let me say that of all these metrics. THE most important metric for driving your work forward is the gift solicitation number. High numbers in this area tend to correlate most directly to fundraising success.Â
Why is that? In most cases, you have a 50% chance of successfully closing any major gift you solicit, provided that the ask is made to a qualified major gift prospect who has sufficient affinity for the cause your organization is addressing.   With these gifts typically being much larger than anything you would solicit through crowdfunding, direct mail, or any other approach, a single gift could easily be 10% of your annual fundraising revenue. It should be obvious then that the more of these you solicit, the more you will move the needle on fundraising.
Recently while I was interviewing Jim Langley, he suggested a new metric to measure that I thought was brilliant. He suggested that the number of repeated major gifts from the same donor over time would be a fantastic way to evaluate if a fundraiser is properly engaging and stewarding a donor. This is important because those two things, engagement and stewardship are more qualitative than quantitative, so they are harder to track directly with metrics.
A fundraiser who has a strong portfolio could very well be taking a transactional approach with donors, failing to really engage them with projects that inspire them. That fundraiser could also be failing to show meaningful impact to that donor through high quality gift stewardship. Yet that same fundraiser over the short term could still potentially be closing enough major gifts to meet their metric requirements.
The reality is though, that most donors, if approached in a transactional way and/or are poorly stewarded, aren’t going to continue giving over the long haul. So it makes sense that if we look at the body of work a fundraiser has achieved and consistently see that the donors they are managing are continuing to make major gifts, we have reason to believe that the fundraiser is performing at a high level.
I am not aware presently of anyone who is tracking repeat major gifts as a performance metric. However, I would recommend this approach. All that would need to be done, would be to cross reference the 10-12 gifts that a major gift officer closes in a given year, against the number of major gifts those donors have given throughout their lifetime. While I am not database administrator, I would imagine it would be fairly easy to create some programing that would put an asterisk next to a gift closed in the present fiscal year if made by a major gift donor who had made a major gift previously.Â
Another interesting qualitative measure, that could be tracked in a similar way, would be Major Gifts Closed by Donors Qualified by that Major Gift Officer. This would help a manager know if a fundraiser is accurately assessing major gift potential, and if they were adequately managing that relationship in such a way that it results in a major gift.
So how do we use all these numbers to measure our performance? I highly recommend using stacked charts. Many CRM’s can automatically do this for you, in real time. In the image below we see examples of three fundraisers. One is too aggressive, another is too passive, the other is just right. There may be good reasons for a fundraiser to have a season where they are asking all the time, or focusing on building relationships, this is where it is important for a manager to ask good questions. Regardless of what you find, using this approach to data visualization, you can tell a lot, very quickly about a fundraiser’s performance.
The last thing I’d recommend looking at carefully is the yield and close rates. I’ve heard some fundraisers brag about closing 90% of the gifts that they solicit, but I would question if those fundraisers were playing it too safe in their solicitations. On the other hand, if a fundraiser is closing only 10% of the gifts they are soliciting, I would question if they needed to develop better strategies and spend more time getting to know their donor.  I take a similar approach to the amount of money solicited vs. donated. If your donors always accept your ask amount, it implies that you aren’t asking them at levels that require real consideration and vice versa.
Once you’ve decided which metrics are right for your team, you don’t want to treat them all the same. You may decide that you want a contact metric, to ensure that your team is keeping busy. If that’s the case, you’ll want to weight it in a way that reflects your organizational values. That is, you should look at all the possible metrics you want to use and weight them according to priority, ensuring that they add up to 100%. For me, I would put my heaviest weightings on repeat major gift donations, major gifts asked, and major gifts closed, with lighter weighting on the other goal metrics.
Are there metrics that you think are really helpful? Do you have questions about the approach I’m suggesting? If so, please be sure to comment below!
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