STEP 4
Select Key Performance Indicators To Measure Success
Your goals should be tied to specific metrics. That way, you have a clear indication as to whether your efforts are paying off. Without tracking your organization’s marketing plan’s performance, you won’t know where to invest your efforts next to improve results.
It’s important to note that different goals will be attached to different performance metrics. Here are several different metrics you might track and some of the ones specific to marketing include:
Conversions. This is the number of desired actions someone takes to support your nonprofit. Depending your goals, you might track something similar to one of the following examples:
How many people donate?
How many people register to volunteer?
Email open rate. This indicates the percentage of people who opened an email you sent them. In an ideal world, your open rate would be 100%. However, the industry average hovers around 23-25%.
Expert tip: Experiment with your subject lines and maybe try sending emails from a specific person at your organization to drive higher open rates. Test, test, test.
Amplification rate. Specific to social media, this is the ratio of shares per post to the number of overall followers.
Bonus: Some social media platforms will provide you with similar metrics like the number of impressions that will also help you determine your digital reach.
Tracking the right marketing analytics will take the guesswork out of those critical decisions, so you can maximize your ROI and focus on what’s yielding the best results. Not to mention, accurate KPI tracking also allows you to adapt your marketing strategies if you start to head in the wrong direction.
Of course, there are always other metrics and combinations of metrics that you might use — it all depends on your outreach methods.
