Let’s be honest: nonprofits do not have an excellent track record when it comes to digital marketing.

And they are even less stellar when it comes to measuring essential marketing metrics.

However, measuring your marketing efforts is a pre-requisite, and nonprofit organizations are not any different. It helps you recognize how your marketing campaigns are faring and whether you are working in the right direction or not.

Hence just like other conventional organizations, nonprofits also need to measure their marketing results.

Measuring marketing results is particularly useful for nonprofits as it helps them with the following:

To keep track of their volunteers
To evaluate which leads are converting into donors   
To check whether they are able to increase their outreach

And this doesn’t even begin to cover it.

In this guide, we will see how you can make the most out of your marketing efforts for your nonprofit organization by evaluating essential metrics.

1. Evaluate Campaign Conversion Rate Via Analytics tools

You are putting in tremendous efforts in order to scale up your marketing efforts.

But it is not necessary that all the marketing tactics you use are going to bear fruit.

To discern what’s working out in your favor and what’s not, you need to evaluate your campaign’s conversion rate and other key data.

You can evaluate it quickly using Google Analytics or any other analytical tool.

You just have to measure how many people your campaign converted and what action are they taking: are they, first-time donors? Volunteers? Newsletter subscribers?

Once you extract all the numbers, then you can come to a decision whether your conversion rate is up to the mark or not. If not, then the next step is to analyze where you are going wrong and then ultimately optimizing your approach to see a better conversion rate.

2. Launch Surveys

There’s nothing better than getting feedback straight away from your prospects.

Naturally, it helps you understand their personal needs and how well you can meet those needs.

And this is where surveys come into the game.

Surveys are, without a doubt, one of the most effective ways of measuring your marketing efforts.

Avoid asking vague questions.

And most importantly, don’t ask polar questions. They don’t serve any purpose and might end up annoying a potential donor.
You wouldn’t want that, would you?

For instance, rather than asking something like this:


Ask a question like this that will naturally help you acquire more information:


Taking a non-profit organization as an example, you can ask your audience whether they would like to hear about real-life survival stories or get to know about statistics or anything else altogether.

The goal is to evaluate whether your prospects are showing interest in your marketing campaign. And if not, what would they like to see instead.

Make sure to ask questions keeping your target audience in mind in order to acquire the most accurate feedback from your prospects.

Share online surveys via email, social media, webinars, or build them into your blog or landing page.

Moreover, ask questions to shed light on elements, such as:

Which marketing tactic is working the best?
What type of content would your audience like to see more? What is it that they find most compelling?


3. Ask Your Volunteers, Donors, Petition Signers, Etc., How They Learned About Your Program

It’s essential to know what led your prospect to your website or official page.

And that’s why you need to set your focus on asking your prospects how they learned about you or your program.

Say, for instance, you are running campaigns on several platforms, including a couple of social media channels, email, newspaper ads, billboards, etc.

When you ask this pertinent question to your prospects, it turns out that a bare minimum of them learned about you from your Instagram or Twitter ads. This means that your target audience is barely present on these social media channels and you are wasting your funds on running ads over there.

All in all, it helps you evaluate where your target audience hangs out the most on the internet. Suppose, your motto is to attract as many donors as possible, and after evaluation, you realize that most of the donors are coming directly from your newspaper ads. Now you know what’s helping you drive more traffic.

As a result, you can now increase your performance and engage your target audience accordingly.

4. Measure Donor Acquisition Cost

As a nonprofit organization, a significant part of your marketing campaign goes towards garnering donations for your humanitarian program.

Therefore, to discern how much you are spending in order to acquire a new donor, add up the total cost of a particular campaign — marketing expenditure, design cost, paid advertising, staff, etc. Now divide the total investment by the number of donors (or volunteers) acquired from that campaign.

Ultimately, use the following formula to calculate your donor acquisition cost:

DAC = Total costs ÷ Total # of acquired donors

This will help you analyze your donor acquisition cost, which will make you solidify your decisions. If your acquisition cost is considerably lower than the donations, then there’s no problem continuing with whatever marketing tactics you are using currently. Otherwise, it’s better to cut down on things like design cost, paid ads, email campaign, and more.

Wrap-Up

If you are running a marketing campaign, then you really need to analyze how well you are doing. Does it have the impact you want? Are you acquiring the expected donations? You need answers to all these pertinent questions to scale up your efforts. At every point in your marketing campaign, you need to keep track of your success and loss.

It’s better if you start small and focus on the bottom line, namely conversion rate, ROI, and donations. Once you are through with these metrics, focus on advanced metrics,such as retention rate, referrals, activation, and so forth.

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