When I received this alert — Monitoring Metrics for Your Nonprofit? Look at These 3 First — from Joanne Fritz, nonprofit orgs expert at About Money, I was keen to see which three she had flagged.

Joanne is a savvy, reliable source of good advice and useful resources.

But this time I was teased and then disappointed.

Pleasantly teased because of this lead-in …

“Your performance history can guide you to improvements that are more than just cosmetic or slap dash. Metrics, properly used, will help you focus on the fixes that are most likely to pay off.

For example, let’s say you are struggling with getting donors to stay with you.

Your nonprofit decides to make donor retention a priority to combat the issue.”

“Halleluya!” I thought, she’s picked the perfect starting focus — donor retention. Must be reading The Agitator! Great, how’s she going to go at this?

Then, the disappointment.

All of a sudden I was reading about social media and online fundraising performance.

But that’s simply not where 99% of nonprofits are going to solve their woeful donor retention problem, IMHO.

I did a double-take and realized that I had missed a transition — I wasn’t reading Joanne after all … she had introduced an article from a contributing author. OK, Joanne was off the hook.

Not that the advice given by her guest was off the mark … if you wanted to focus on online fundraising. Ultimately I calmed down, concluding that the problem was with the headline, not so much the content. Monitoring your social media performance is fine — it just shouldn’t be one of the “Top 3” metrics for any nonprofit. Especially if their concern is donor retention.

I did like very much one piece of advice in the guest column:

“Too often, nonprofits stick with fundraising plans that are no longer working just out of habit. It’s okay to step back from your regular techniques if they have stopped producing results and are no longer generating enough return on investment.”

Never just ‘keep on truckin’ out of habit. Be prepared to challenge your assumptions and respect what your hard data is telling you. ‘Return on investment’ is a key metric.

And when overall fundraising performance is lagging, a look at the ROI of your various activities — where you can get the most bang for your buck — will often lead back to The Agitator’s favorite focal point … donor retention.

Tom

P.S. If you seriously want to focus on donor retention, read Roger’s book, Retention Fundraising: The New Art and Science of Keeping Your Donors for Life. 69% of Amazon’s customer reviews rate it 5 stars; another 19% give it 4 stars. Now, those aren’t bad metrics!