Useless Donor Outreach Metrics That Lure Everyone Else into Time-Wasting Oblivion

They’re captivating. They’re alluring. They promise the pleasure of percentages, trend lines, and bar graphs. They are your donor outreach metrics, the ones you’ve been told to monitor as part of your major donor outreach process.

So many speakers have spoken about them at nonprofit industry events. So many blogs and articles have been written, telling you the donor outreach metrics you need to be tracking, and how important it all is. You read them in books. Hear them in podcasts and webinars.

But the sad reality is, so many fundraising metrics are basically useless.

They can be fun. They’re exciting to talk about. But they have little if any benefit when it comes to actually strengthening major donor relationships and raising more money.

The good news is – some fundraising and outreach metrics are useful. Very useful. The problem is, knowing what they are and refusing to get distracted by all the fun but useless ones everyone at parties likes to talk about. Today, we’re going to show you the useless metrics you can stop tracking, and then look at some of the very useful ones you can replace them with.

The Dirty Little Secret about Most Donor Outreach Metrics

If you conduct online searches for fundraising metrics, what you’ll find is an array of articles that, when you really drill down on them, basically all say the same stuff.

Why is that?

Because many companies in the nonprofit industry hire SEO companies to write their content. And the reality is, many of them hire the same company. SEO (search engine optimization) relies on keywords and backlinks, among other things. So when you hire an SEO company to write articles about donor outreach metrics and fundraising metrics, you’re asking people who have never raised a dime for a nonprofit to write authoritative-sounding content.

The result is, they look at what else is out there, and repackage it to sound fresh.

So, you get a growing blob of articles about particular topics – like metrics – that keep re-using the same statistics, and referring to the same ‘authoritative sources’. In other words, it’s not that different from asking AI to write your articles.

But none of it means anything.

What they’re telling you about fundraising metrics has nothing to do with what actually moves the needle for raising major gifts.

Here are some examples of useless donor outreach metrics you’ve probably been told to track – even by people with great reputations.

Useless Major Gifts Metrics

Some common major gift fundraising metrics include:

Visits

Should you track your visits? Sure. There’s no harm in it. But there’s little good either, because tracking visits tells you nothing about the outcomes of that visit.

For example, suppose one gift officer visits 40 potential major donors one year, and another visits 20. Which one is performing better?

You don’t know. Maybe the one with fewer visits raised more money. But maybe most of that came from just one donor, and the one with 40 visits received more actual gifts. The next year, both these gift officers may turn in very different numbers of visits, again with almost no correlation to actual money raised.

Yes, visits matter. But this is not a metric that helps you improve your major gifts fundraising efforts.

Proposals

Gift proposals are another valuable tool in the gift officer’s arsenal. Should you track how many proposals you are able to give to potential donors? Again, you can if you want.

But what matters more is how those proposals are received. Were they asked for or even expected? What was the emotional reaction upon seeing it? Surprise? That’s bad. Delight? That’s good. Just tracking the number of proposals is a very superficial fundraising metric.

Gifts

Again, gifts given obviously matter as a metric. But if the metric doesn’t help you replicate your successes and minimize your failures, it’s not actually very useful.

Again, say one gift officer wins ten gifts this year, and another wins five. Do we know why this happened? Can the one with more repeat that success next year? Even more importantly, can the one with more teach the one with fewer how they achieved their success so the other gift officer can improve?

If you can’t use metrics to improve your fundraising process so you consistently experience more profitable outcomes, then your metrics are mostly useless.

Useless Transactional Outreach Metrics

The next most common batch of fundraising metrics you’ll be told to track may be helpful for mas marketing fundraising, but not major gifts. These outreach metrics include things like:

Email open rates

Open rates basically tell you one of two things – how good your subject lines are, and how well your brand or sending name is respected and admired. They also reflect how busy people are, which is why open rates tend to decline slightly during the holiday season.

But you can’t improve your major gifts fundraising or outreach by looking at open rates. Now, if your rates start diving down, that’s something to worry about because it could mean you’re sending reputation or deliverability has taken a hit. But that’s a technical issue, not a major gifts fundraising issue.

Email click rates

Click rates are useful in that they show people are reading your emails and motivated enough by them to respond. But a click only speaks to engagement.

Major gifts fundraising is about relationships. Click rates don’t tell you anything about how to improve your rapport or build trust with potential major donors.

Email click-to-open rates

This is the same as click rates in principle, but just more accurate in terms of measuring engagement. The regular click rate is calculated by dividing clicks by the number of emails sent. But only the people who open an email can click on it. That’s why click rates tend to be very low. Even a healthy 30% open rate means 70% of the people didn’t open, and all your clicks have to come from that 30%.

The click-to-open rate is the number of clicks divided by the number of opens. So, it reveals much more about how engaging your email was.

But in terms of usefulness, it ends up in the same place. Nice to know how engaging the email was. But it doesn’t help you write the next email or know what to do next to move a prospect forward in their qualification or cultivation.

Phone answer rates

This one could be construed to measure trust or familiarity, because the recipient may see your name or phone number on their phone when you call. So, if they decide to answer, that means they trust you. Maybe. It could actually mean a lot of things. Maybe they’re retired and bored and they always answer the phone. And no, we’re not saying all retired people are bored.

The point is, so much that is out of your control determines whether a person answers their phone. This metric does not help you replicate hardly anything, other than perhaps time of day. But even that assumes you’re calling people out of the blue – they aren’t expecting your call.

Wouldn’t it be better if they were expecting you to call?

Returned call rates

A returned call can at least claim to represent some level of interest. Anyone who hears a voicemail and decides to call back is taking an action that say something about their consideration for your message.

But you don’t know why they called back, and you can’t do much to replicate this other than improve your voicemail – which is an important skillset. So of all the donor outreach metrics so far, this one may be the least useless.

Meaningful conversations or connections

This is another common one that is so vague you can’t get two people in a room to agree on what it means. Even if they’re the only two present. You might see this defined as

  • When a donor says something that signals deeper interest
  • When the gift officer uncovers new and useful information about the donor
  • When something happens that counts as a ‘move’ in your organization’s ‘moves management’ system
  • You’ll know it when you see it

The point is – no one knows what makes a conversation meaningful. There’s no rubric for this because conversations are fluid and unique to each individual.

And none of these metrics offer anything concrete regarding where someone is in their consideration process. None of them give your gift officer a clear, defining moment they can build on. They are all vague and relate only to general engagement.

Useless LinkedIn Metrics

You’ll see similar metrics proposed if you’re using LinkedIn (which you should) for donor outreach:

  • Number of InMails sent
  • Number of conversations started
  • Number of conversations that shifted to phone, email, or text
  • InMail reply rate – number of replies divided by number of InMails and introductions sent
  • Engagement rate – number of conversations started divided by InMails and introductions

Again – all of this is fascinating stuff. Metrics are fun. Especially when they look good. They make great party talk.

“Hey, last month my InMail reply rate was 40%! The month before it was only 33%. We’re doing good!”

“Awesome. I sent 45,000 InMails, because I was told the fifty I was sending before was holding me back. So now I’m doing great.”

“Did anyone respond?”

“What?”

“Never mind, let’s get another drink.”

But fun metrics do not mean useful metrics. LinkedIn is useful because it’s where wealthy people hang out en masse, far more than on any other social media platform. You should pay attention to where your best leads come from. But the metrics that matter are more concrete than any of these engagement-level ones.

Some Useful Fundraising Metrics

This article is about saving time by avoiding useless outreach metrics, so we won’t go into too much detail here. But because MarketSmart is all about advancing donor relationships in ways meaningful to the donor, we recommend a wide array of fundraising metrics, for all sorts of situations.

For major gifts fundraising, here are a few metrics that actually measure how well your fundraising is progressing:

Granted permission for future outreach

This is a major one. Getting on the phone or having a Zoom call is great. But does the donor want to talk to you again? If so, that’s a very strong sign your conversation was “meaningful.” Who cares if you decide it’s meaningful if they don’t ever talk to you again. But if they explicitly agree to talk again, that means the call went well enough that you earned a measure of trust, or deepened it.

And that means you’re getting good at talking to donors on the phone.

Agreed to a meeting

Agreeing to meet is a fundraising metric worth tracking. Why? Because once you meet with a potential donor, the chances of winning a gift go up dramatically. Meetings signal a high level of interest in partnering with your organization in some way.

Agreed to work with you on a gift

After the meeting, your goal is get the donor to want to discuss making a major gift. But agreeing to work with you like this is much more important than winning the actual gift. Why? Because when they agree to work on it, this means they want to give, but also recognize that how they give, and when, and the other details of giving larger amounts of money away aren’t something to zoom past just so we can write a check today.

The biggest major gifts come not from checking accounts, but from assets. And giving assets is more complicated. So when your prospect agrees to work with you on a gift, this is a very good indicator that they want to give a gift.

The common thread among all these, if you didn’t pick up on it already, is outcomes and donor empowerment.

When the donor agrees to move the process forward, you know you’re doing well because they – not just you – want to keep going. Track metrics related to their decisions, desires, and preferences, and you’ll be tracking metrics that really do tell you where a donor is in relation to giving.

 

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