The Importance of Data Analytics for Nonprofits

Data is the starting point that helps you make better decisions. When you analyze the data that you already have, you will be able to identify opportunities and patterns. That way, you will be able to make an impact on people in a way that you never have before.

With that data analysis, you will be able to identify the following:

-What happened?
For instance, data analytics can be useful for nonprofit digital marketing since it will give you some context in terms of which pages or blogs are most effective for the nonprofit niche and which ones need more work.

-Why did it have to happen?
At this level, you will be able to look at variables as to how a certain situation occurred. That way, you will be able to answer critical questions such as why profit grew significantly last January or why people donate more to a particular impact area.

-What could happen?
This level is the most essential. This is where you analyze past data so that you make more informed decisions in the future. It touches base on things you can do to resolve an issue or things that you can do right now to prevent a negative outcome from happening again.

Traditionally, organizations focus on one goal and then do whatever it takes to get to that end goal.

While this does get you busy, it does very little in making you productive. Studies show that exerting your effort in 20% of the project can lead to 80% results.

What this means is that you only need to know a small aspect of your project that is most significant to your goal. Once you find this leverage point, fulfilling your goal in less time becomes a lot easier.

If your goal is to bring awareness to particular social issues, you can utilize previous content that has proven to have had the most impact on people based on what your data analytics tell you.

Data analysis will help you save time and work smart. That way, you can focus your energy on the mission itself.

With data analytics, you will be able to keep track of staff-related data. Staff can pertain to people that you hired or to volunteers who also partake in your missions.

At this level, you can make use of data analytics so that you can assign people to tasks that are most appropriate for their skills and personalities. This makes task distribution a lot easier and more effective.

On another angle, you can use data analytics to analyze the personalities of your team for a more effective people division later on.

Let’s say that you have to send a group of five people to a house shelter for a feeding mission. With data analytics, you will be more effective in selecting the right people who can understand each other best. If group them with people they have compatible personalities with, they are more likely to bring home better results than if they ever grouped randomly.

You can also use the same technique in creating better experiences for the people you serve. Data analytics can help you select people that will be able to get along the most with the people you want to help.

Let’s say that you want to assign a team member to go and speak to a child who had recently been traumatized due to family loss. In this case, data analytics can help you identify the people who are most skilled when it comes to building rapport and showing empathy to children.

In this internet age, everything is expected to move at a quick pace. How do nonprofit organizations catch up? The answer lies in automation.

You can use automation software that can help collect and analyze information faster. Investing in one is most ideal but you can start with something as simple as an excel sheet.

Anyone can say that they are doing this particular thing to make an impact on the poor, the children, or the elderly.

But one also has to check if he is making progress. How do you know if all your effort has been for nothing? The answer, again, is through data analytics.

Data analytics is not just about the data that nonprofits receive and process every day. It can also help you track your audience reach.

For instance, by using website analytics, you can monitor the following:

-Organic traffic
This pertains to the people who visited your website by searching for you on Google (either through a keyword you rank for or through your organization’s name)

-Referral traffic
This means someone went to your website as they were directed to it from another website. Maybe someone wrote an article on their blog and decided to link to your site. When a reader clicks on that link, it will be considered as referral traffic.

-Social traffic
Someone went to your website because they saw a post or ad on a social media channel. Let’s say that someone found one of your blogs on Facebook which resulted in a site visit. Or maybe someone sent your website link to his friend through Messenger. The visitor that you gain will be considered referral traffic.

Let’s say that you decided to set five goals for the first quarter of 2021. Also having other priorities and obligations within the organization, it can be quite a challenge to keep track and monitor these goals.

With data analytics, you’ll have your goal-related data at your disposal automatically. You don’t need to manually write them off yourself.

If your goal is for people to complete a form, download one of your mission-involved resources, or whatnot, you can determine the ratio of your traffic vs. the number of conversions you are getting through data analytics.

Let’s take donor retention rate as an example. Without data analytics, calculating donor retention rates can be a drag. With that, your team may only want to look at your donor retention rate on a general level but won’t want to look at specific data. While this may have little impact on your organization, you may miss out on opportunities to improve your overall processes.

Whereas if you have data analytics, you will be able to look at what actions or channels led to the most donor retention rate. You can identify what processes lead to bad outcomes.