Has your group established any fundraising metrics? My contention is that any group – no matter the size or age of the group – needs metrics.

Those metrics need to be 1) meaningful (see below), 2) embraced by the leadership and across the organization (if they are not documented in writing, or only one or two people know about them, they don’t count), and 3) directly related to raising more money, net of expenses, over the time period of planning.

Let’s test my three assertions above, to illustrate how fundraising metrics often work, and how they should work.

Think about this metric: “We will increase the number of attendees at our annual fundraising event, and the amount of money raised.”

This sounds like a numbers-based metric, and it is. It’s also a very common one among organizations, and sometimes the ONLY metric made visible by a group to the outside world.

Let’s test it against my criteria above.

1) Is this metric meaningful? Only the group can answer this question, but the secondary questions are, does the number of attendees (“more”) contribute to the organization being able to advance its mission? How? How many paying attendees did you have, versus those who were comped for some reason? What percentage of your attendees made a gift during the event? Regarding the amount of money raised, see below.

2) Is the metric embraced by the leadership and across the organization? This gala metric often is embraced by the Board, because it’s fun to be able to tell your friends that your group had a big success at their big social event last week. But if you are able to ask the senior staff confidentially about whether they embrace the gala event metric, the responses may be less positive. On some level, they know that the gala event planning affects the staff’s work for a couple of months, and they don’t necessarily see the event results allowing for more mission delivery.

3) Is the metric directly related to raising more money, net of expenses? The key to this question is the phrase, “net of expenses.” Grossing more money, if the expenses are higher than they have been, may not be a gain at all, and might even be a loss. Furthermore, one of the biggest expenses affecting fundraising gala events is staff time. Many groups don’t count the value of their staff time at all, which is a strategic error. There’s no way to know whether you made money on your event, let alone whether you made more money than last year, if you aren’t monitoring and counting the value of staff time spent on the event. [The question of whether the EVENT is meaningful is a different question.]

In general, what are some other metrics that organizations use for fundraising?

Donor retention from year to year
Average size of gift/ frequency of giving
Number of bequest intentions from donors recorded
Number of in-person visits with donors
Number of in-person visits with donor prospects
Number and success of new inquiries to institutional funders
Number of overall touches (emails, notes, phone calls, in-person contact, etc.) with donors in each of several categories (foundation funders, major donors, annual donors, monthly donors, campaign donors, etc.)
Donor loyalty (number of years given consecutively)

Many other metrics are possible, and depending on your organization profile and current fundraising programs, your set of metrics may be unique.

If you don’t have fundraising metrics, try your hand at coming up with a few.

But proceed carefully – remember that metrics need to be meaningful, they need to be shared and embraced by everyone, and they need to help you raise more (net) funds.

Sometimes it’s foggy out there – you need to know where you are going!