What your Nonprofit’s Dashboard should look like.
Your Analytics dashboard should answer the questions your NGO is asking at a glance. Then give you an action to take based on that data. As you progress you should drill down one level deeper to see why those numbers exist but that is a different conversation. Here we are going to talk about your NGO’s Digital Dashboard.
UPDATE: We are working on a Nonprofit Specific Dashboard for everyone to use. If you are looking for our current dashboard, you can find that here.
Choose an Analytics Dashboard Application
It seems that every platform has the dreaded “Dashboard”. You can look at Stripe, WordPress, Classy, WPGive, and your mail provider for their dashboards. Here we are going to look at the most Agnostic dashboard application, DataStudio.
Every platform will try to frame your numbers in a way that looks the best for their platform… it’s inevitable.
We love Google Data Studio, if your platform doesn’t integrate with Google, there is most likely a connector like Supermetrics.
Why You Should Have A Marketing Dashboard and What should be on it
A dashboard provides a clear and easy way to grow and scale your efforts. Visualizations and numbers allow you to build entire marketing plans around a dashboard.
Your response might be “Well we have Google Analytics for that”. In that case, tell me your LTV and which channel is producing the highest traffic results. If you had to 10x your efforts next month, what would be the best way to do it?
It might be possible, but it will not be easy for you to generate that report.
That is where Data Studio comes in. You can pull data from hundreds of different locations. Stripe, Google Analytics, Spreadsheets, You name it!
You can then have your running LTV and acquisition plan results displayed next to each other. #Winning
Find our entire blog on Lifetime Value Here
What Your Dashboard Should Look Like
This depends on who is looking at the numbers. We are going to break it down for primary Nonprofit Roles. Executive Directors to a Comms Specialist should have their own dashboards. Each person is most likely going to have different questions. This will be most applicable for NGO’s in the 10mil/year budget but can scale up and down accordingly.
Executive Director Analytics Dashboard
At a glance, you should be able to see the number of Leads, Transactions, Revenue, Average donation value, type, & source of those transactions.
Definitions
Lead – a person who gives you at least their contact info email or phone.
Transaction – an exchange or interaction of monetary value.
Revenue – the total amount raised for a given period.
ADV – Average donation value
Source – the location from which the traffic originated
Medium – The type of traffic, email/paid/organic/etc
Depending on if you have monthly donors, you would want to have a dashboard for MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue). This monthly donor dashboard should answer the questions around churn, stick, LTV, acquisition, average subscription value, and cohort analysis for seasonality.
Definitions
Churn – the percentage rate at which monthly donors cancel their recurring revenue subscriptions
Stick – the percentage rate at which monthly donors stay
LTV – Life Time Value
Acquisition – the point of the first donation or the point of donation
Average Subscription Value – How much your average person is giving monthly
Cohort Analysis – Based on the time at which the donor originated, how valuable are they and when.
Your monthly giving program should have actionable metrics that your team is working on.
An example of this would be “our goal is to increase Monthly giving from $20k/month to $30k/month in 6 months.”
Marketing Vice President (MVP)
With your MVP you can get more granular, you should be able to drill down by channel to see your numbers.
Your donation pages & website are the lifeblood of your NGO.
You should be able to know exactly how they are performing. At a top-level, you want to measure the engagement level of your donation pages. Other important pages as well as those page’s conversion rates.
Once you have those metrics, you should then filter them by channel and the type of them. Facebook Organic vs Paid, your email broadcasts vs email automation.
You will also want to be able to see your acquisition and cost per acquisition in each of these platforms.
Communication Specialist
At a communication specialist level, you are looking at the acquisition and engagement levels. You will answer questions of “which email is performing better”, “Which Facebook post is producing the most revenue” and “what content is the most engaging on our site”.
These metrics will be configured based on your organization’s metrics. If you are focusing on blogs, then you are going to need to know the time-on-site and scroll depth of the pages. If you are focusing on affiliate marketing or crowd fundraising then you will have different KPIs.
Your dashboard should utilize waterfall charts, funnel visualizations, custom dimensions for affiliates, and onsite engagement metrics.
These dashboards numbers should be specific to the role and the organization. If you run monthly campaigns or let users self select you should be able to track how each piece of your marketing efforts are doing.
Fundraising Specialist
Donor Acquisition, Donor Acquisition, Donor Acquisition. That is the name of the game.
The fundraising specialist should be able to answer how much money is coming in and how it is coming in. If you are a larger organization you might need to consider attribution modeling, but there is no need to consider that if you are not doing a lot of paid media.
A few metrics you should keep at your fingertips.
- Cost to raise a dollar (for each channel & overall)
- Donor LTV and how to increase it.
- Active Donor site engagement (what donors are looking at on your website)
- Lead Acquisition
- Onboarding Sequence Results
How To Build Your Dashboard
First off you can Contact Us and see if we can work too :).
Secondly, pick a dashboard that integrates into everything. Data Studio is a free option that has unlimited customizations. There are many different options, but make sure you know what the dashboard is saying and why the numbers are there.
If you have nothing, this will start to answer some of the questions, but you most likely will need a more customized report to grow!
Looking at numbers for the sake of looking at numbers does not help you impact more people.
If your dashboard is good, you should be able to glance at it and know what to do!
