Data dashboards help you make sense of the information that your nonprofit generates and collects. This dashboard centralizes your analytics and allows you to view key metrics in real time through charts, graphs and other data visualization techniques.
When you have a data-driven strategy, you can optimize your strategy to make the most of your resources. This efficient usage improves the way you use donations and the way you fulfill your mission.
Important Nonprofit Metrics
A data dashboard isn’t useful on its own. You need to track the correct metrics that are relevant to your nonprofit first. Here are a few metrics that can provide useful insights for your organization:
- Donation size: The average amount donated
- Donation growth: How much donations grow year over year
- Fundraising ROI: The return on investment for fundraising efforts
- Online gift percentage: How many donors use online channels for donations
- Donor retention: The number of repeat donors
- Giving capacity: The estimated upper limit on how much a single donor can give annually
Benefits of Data Visualization
Looking at raw numbers makes it difficult to draw comparisons between different metrics or make meaningful conclusions. Data visualizations streamline this entire process and make it more understandable for people who don’t have backgrounds in data analysis.
You can use visualizations in donor reports so they can see the ways you’re using their funds, bring it to board meetings as part of a presentation, and incorporate it into your daily operations with a data dashboard.
Using Data for Informed Decisions
Real-time data allows you to quickly react to emerging situations, such as scaling your investment in successful fundraising projects. You can objectively see whether your donor numbers and the amount they donate are going up or down, the channels that work best for attracting donors and the effectiveness of your volunteers.
Whenever you make decisions, you get real-time feedback that assists with optimizing your efforts and making changes that lead to a better overall result. Data dashboards are a necessary part of getting data to work for your nonprofit organization.
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