How to Determine KPIs of Success for Your Nonprofit

A vital aspect of creating a measurement plan in Google Analytics for nonprofits is understanding what your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of success are.

Here’s how to determine KPIs of success for your nonprofit:

Set up Google Analytics for your organization’s website. Take a look at Google Analytics for nonprofits for tips on how to set it up in five easy steps. And then begin the measurement planning process.

What is the objective of your measurement plan? For example, your nonprofit’s business objective may be to receive donations with your content marketing strategy. What you want to know is if your organization’s content marketing efforts are leading to donations.

Let’s say your nonprofit wants to run a lead generation campaign to help your overall business objective. During the campaign you want to receive as many email addresses as possible so you can turn your subscribers into donors. To do this, you run a campaign on social media and create a landing page on your website. The overall key performance of success is obtaining a large number of email addresses, but how do you determine the factors that contribute to the successful outcome?

KPIs are performance metrics that show the success of a specific campaign or sometimes, the overall success of the nonprofit. They are the overall performance indicators – in this case it is email addresses for this specific campaign. However, there are leading and lagging metrics that influence the success of the campaign. A leading indicator is a metric that is predictive of the outcome. A lagging indicator is a metric that measures the end objective or desired outcome.

When choosing KPIs, let’s look separately at leading and lagging metrics. For leading indicators for email acquisition, you’ll want to track click-through rate, landing page visits and abandonment, costs per acquisition and visits from social media. These are just a few of the performance metrics that influence the user into giving their email addresses. It is important you have tracking within your website as well as on social media in order to record the entire path a user takes. If there are gaps in the path, there will be holes in your overall data. Lagging indicators are the submission of the form and the acquisition of the email address.

Whether you are just setting up Google Analytics or running a new campaign, it is crucial to develop a measurement plan and identify KPIs to truly understand and analyze your data.

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