I’m on my way back from a great Blackbaud bbcon. As always, I’m leaving with great ideas and a long list of ideas to follow up on! I had the pleasure of speaking with Dennis McCarthy of Blackbaud about how analytics can be applied to some of the new and emerging fundraising programs to assess when you’re on track, when you’re not and guide you to success. It was a real treat to work with Dennis and collaborate on recommendations based on our work with so many clients that are leading innovation at their organizations. And, we had a great audience! Half of the audience was from a technology or information part of their organization and the other half was from the marketing or fundraising side. This mirrors the trend we’re seeing where both sides of the organization come together when it comes to making analytics work by defining goals and strategies, measuring results and KPIs and then analyzing and making decisions. Something we’ve got our eye from the corporate world is the emergence of Chief Marketing Technologists that sits right in the middle of the two disciplines. Learn more about this emerging professional role in this article from Harvard Business Review.
We picked 3 areas where we see organizations investing and building out programs; Do It Yourself events, Integrated Marketing and Mobile. For each area, we gave insights into how analytics are used with a breakdown of some of the key performance indicators and measurements. We had great audience participation sharing some of the challenges and great examples of how organizations are successfully using analytics and dashboards. An audience member from the University of Michigan shared how they use Stop Light methodology where they assess programs as red, yellow or green. And it’s ok to be red! The information is being used to guide where investments should continue and where they should stop.
We also brainstormed a bit on where we see opportunities for additional analytics for organizations. These include looking at better understanding your supporters and doing it more frequently, being more transparent on loyalty programs and measuring engagement in terms of acceleration / deceleration. We’re hoping to get asked back next year to talk about these and other exciting emerging ideas!
You can see the slides from our presentation here. We’ve got a set of resources that provide more information and the trends that are being used by some of our colleagues in the for-profit world.
Nonprofit Donor Engagement Benchmark
Interactive Investment Benchmark Study
The Workshop: Charity Dynamics Blog
Getting the CMO and CIO to work as partners