Helping Your Nonprofit
NPTech Projects is a nonprofit organization located in Florida. Our purpose is to assist other nonprofits with technical issues and projects. I want to share a portion of a discussion I recently had with a person who is active in charities and sits on multiple Boards. In our discussion, she asked what I do, and I told her about NPTechProjects and about how at this time of year many charities are winding up their annual fundraising drives. She asked about how we can help charities raise money through technical projects, and I began with asking her if she knows that, on average, only 26% of the people who donated to her charity last year will donate this year.
She was shocked. She, like many Board members, thought that since her ‘job’ was to phone her contacts and ask for donations, or in most cases write to those contacts because asking seems so aggressive. Her assumption was that her responsibility as a Board member ended there.
Online behavior patterns
The world has changed. Today many donors can compare the charities in which they are interested in. They research them, ‘interview’ them online. A majority of successful and growing charities can tell their Boards members about what is happening in this ‘interviewing’ process.
For example, the Board members have an idea about how people find them, whether searching for them by name, or more commonly by looking at a variety of charities that serve populations they are interested in. They know the words people use in their searches that brought them to their website. Further, they know how long they stayed, and where they went when they left. They then make changes on their sites to provide better information to those who find them.
Email Communication
Even more significantly, Board members should become very aware of how well their email campaigns do. For example, they want to know how many of their emails are opened (open rate), and whether those which were opened generated a response (click rate) on a fundraising drive. In other words which emails were opened, and further which indicated some sort of engagement with the reader. In the chart below, with the horizontal axis indicating the date, you will see some correlation between when emails were opened, and when those emails engaged the reader enough for them to want to learn more.
When an organization segments their emails in order to personalize emails to donors of significance, as well as separate emails to volunteers and staff, they can see what is of interest to donors of significance and whether the same things are of interest to volunteers and staff.
The lady asked for my card, and I suspect we will hear from one or more of her organizations soon.
What to Do?
Take our one question survey, and we will help you, too.
[caldera_form id=”CF5a3d4f09807a0″]
Series: Technology Performance Indicators (TPI)
This post is part of a series. Here is a list of the other posts:
- Part 1: Nonprofit Board Members and Technology
- Part 2: Donor Data for Board Members
- Part 3: Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for Board members
- Part 4: Actionable Data for Nonprofit Boards
Leave a Reply