Anyone can see why adding data to the decision-making process is worthwhile. By establishing credibility and unifying collaborators, data informs you to take the next step with confidence, whatever that may be.

However, having data-backed decision-making become second nature in your organization can pose a challenge, especially if you’re unsure of which insights to prioritize. Not to mention, unorganized, missing, or dirty data can stall your progress or lead you down the wrong path.

To strengthen your organization’s informed decision-making, we’ve compiled a list of five strategies you can employ to back your ideas with solid evidence.

1. Lead by example

When your organization’s leaders set an example, the rest of the team will likely follow suit. Start at the top of your organization to explore ways your leadership can set the tone for following evidence-based strategies. A few leadership techniques could include:

• Setting a regular cadence of reviewing organizational performance metrics to remind teams of what metrics to go after, what healthy results look like, and how to navigate any lacking or surprising results.
• Sifting through case studies before finalizing decisions to allow previous insights to guide your strategy. This could mean diving into studies your organization has conducted or reviewing relevant ones within your industry.
• Reviewing evidence-based action plans to ensure you have informed each step of your process with relevant data. For comprehensive action plans, this would mean citing multiple sources and proactively explaining any gaps.
• Offering data research and presentation best practices from leadership’s expertise. Give tips and strategies for presenting data and research in a way that is both compelling and relevant for your audience.

These strategies should be unique to your company’s needs and objectives. For example, a healthcare organization may set expectations to review the risk adjustment process with new employees so that they understand the workflow and compliance requirements. According to Arcadia, this may mean breaking down each step to accurately suspect, engage, and assess patient needs while maintaining quality standards.

2. Provide data literacy training

While data is a useful tool for decision-making, it can sometimes be tricky to interpret, especially when gathering actionable insights from specific data points. Ensure everyone has the needed level of data literacy training to manage your organization’s data. Explore the following:

• Hands-on data analysis projects related to team members’ roles, allowing them to explore and analyze data independently.
• Peer-to-peer learning sessions where team members from various departments can collaborate and share their best practices.
• External training opportunities, such as workshops or conferences, that provide team members with opportunities to learn more about data analysis.

By offering training and collaboration opportunities, your entire team will be on the same page when approaching various decisions. Additionally, you should avoid sequestering your data science team from the rest of the organization to ensure transparency across the team. Instead, make sure they are heavily involved in explaining any process or system updates and catching any new team members up to speed.

3. Offer secure data access and management

Although the majority of your team could benefit from data-backed decision-making, it’s important to safeguard sensitive information by ensuring it’s only viewed by authorized team members. Offer secure data access and management by employing the following strategies:

• Leverage integration: Disorganized data lacks both efficiency and security, since it’s difficult to find and may be accessible by unauthorized parties. Convert your data to a digital format and aggregate it into a central location to keep it secure. For example, a healthcare organization might consolidate patient data by leveraging EHR integration.
• Provide data security training: Set up a series of meetings or an official training program to cover basic security principles with your team. This may include tips on how to create strong passwords, identify phishing scams, and update software. You might also offer hands-on training through simulations to help your team put these tips into practice.
• Use clear data access controls: Employ strict access controls to ensure only authorized users can access sensitive data. For example, you may use multi-factor authentication (MFA) or biometric authentication to verify a team member’s identity before allowing them access. You can also implement logging and monitoring mechanisms to keep an eye on who accesses this information.

Beyond implementing controls on which team members have access to specific data, you can also protect the organization’s information by determining which data sources are most relevant for certain team members. Consolidating data provides a comprehensive overview of your organization’s most important information.

This way, you’ll be able to build data-backed, team-based workflows so each department can access the data they need without sacrificing security. Just be sure to identify any incomplete or missing data before you finalize any workflows. If needed, request a data append to fill in any gaps.

4. Define clear objectives and KPIs

To reinforce a culture of data-backed decision-making, your organization must build its overall goals around relevant metrics. Double the Donation’s nonprofit marketing guide recommends using the SMART method to create specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goals. Then, you’ll have a clear plan for how and when you’ll achieve these goals.

Enforce a coordinated effort to leverage data in decision-making by aligning these data-backed goals across departments. A few ways you can do this include:

• Encouraging collaboration: Enable teams to collaborate on projects by sharing relevant data and insights.
• Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Develop KPIs for each team that support the organization’s overarching goals. Track them regularly and share progress across the entire team.
• Implementing data-backed performance reviews: Use KPIs to track team performance and acknowledge team members who go above and beyond.

A collective effort to achieve goals based on actionable data will not just enhance your organization’s culture. Equipped with clear goals and the support needed to accomplish them, your team can work cohesively toward the success of the organization.

5. Provide relevant resources and support

While you may have an organized approach to data collection, you should also leverage relevant resources to simplify decision-making for your team. Consider the following ways you can support data-backed decisions:

• Leverage knowledge-sharing platforms: Enable team members to access tutorials, case studies, and best practices through internal knowledge-sharing platforms.
• Use analytics: Allow your whole team to access analytics tools to collect data analysis from various perspectives.
• Continually improve the process: Regularly evaluate and improve your organization’s data processes and practices. Ask for feedback from team members to determine data needs and address challenges.

An organization’s team can only employ data-backed decision-making when they’re equipped with the right resources and support. In addition to these tools and resources, provide data quality assurance so that team members can work with consistent and reliable information.

An organizational culture that encourages data-backed decision-making benefits not only your organization as a whole but also your individual team members. With enhanced collaboration and greater technical skills, your team will produce better organizational results.

Embrace data to drive innovation and growth relevant to your organization’s objectives, and establish clear expectations for team members to support this strategy. Where possible, explain the importance of data in team members’ roles to transparently implement data-driven processes. Prioritize data across your entire team for better results in every initiative.

When you first start a nonprofit, constituent relationship management (CRM) software likely isn’t your top priority. You’ve got tax forms to file, donors to find, and countless other important steps to take to get your new organization up and running. At the time, using spreadsheets to keep track of data is the simplest solution at your disposal. Once your nonprofit starts to grow, however, you may run into issues.

Spreadsheets can only do so much for a growing nonprofit with hundreds or thousands of supporters to keep track of. Moving to an advanced, scalable CRM allows you to easily house, organize, and analyze all of your data in one place—leading to better insights and more efficient staff.

If you’re ready to move to a system that will increase your organization’s capacity to further its mission, we’ll cover four steps you can take:

1. Evaluate Your Budget and Choose a CRM
2. Partner with a Nonprofit Tech Consultant
3. Organize Your Data for Migration
4. Train Your Team to Use the New System

Switching to any new technology can feel daunting, especially when there’s valuable data involved. Let’s walk through what you can do to feel prepared for the change.

1. Evaluate Your Budget and Choose a CRM

First, determine your organization’s budget for a CRM. This will require input from your board and leadership team, so be sure to loop them in early on in the process. As you create your budget, don’t forget to account for additional costs beyond the sticker price of the software itself, such as user licenses, consulting services, and implementation costs.

With a clear budget in mind, you can start researching the top fundraising CRMs to find the best fit for your organization. Evaluate options based on factors like:

• Scalability. How much data can you store in the CRM? Will it be able to easily scale with your nonprofit’s needs?
• Nonprofit-specific features. Choosing a system that was designed with nonprofits’ needs and goals in mind will provide you with all the most relevant, useful features.
• Ease of use. If you don’t have tech experts on your team, choosing an intuitive platform that doesn’t require too much customization or training is key.
• Availability of add-ons and integrations. Do you already have an event platform or marketing automation tool that you use? Check to see if they can integrate with the CRM.

Once you have a shortlist of options, schedule product demos and discuss the pros and cons of each CRM with your team. If you find that you don’t have enough room in your budget to invest in your top choice, Getting Attention suggests seeking out a technology grant from a corporation or foundation to cover some of the costs.

2. Partner with a Nonprofit Tech Consultant

Next, partner with a nonprofit technology consultant who can guide you through the remainder of the implementation and migration processes.

Ideally, you should find a partner who has experience with the CRM you chose in the former step. For example, if you’re interested in moving to Salesforce for Nonprofits, look for an expert who offers specialized Salesforce nonprofit consulting services. That way, they can educate you on exactly how your data needs to be formatted for the move and help you strategically leverage the platform of your choice.

Beyond that, Redpath’s nonprofit CRM implementation guide explains that the right partner can help your organization with every aspect of the process, including:

• CRM implementation
• Functionality testing and fixes
• Data migration
• Team training

While guiding you through the implementation process, a qualified consultant can also look at your current data management practices and explain how to use your new system to improve them.

3. Organize Your Data for Migration

The only way to successfully migrate your data from spreadsheets to a CRM is to ensure that your data is formatted consistently and correctly for the new system. 

Spreadsheets can be haphazard and disorganized, with different team members inputting information in different ways. Where one person might only add “yes” or “no” in a column tracking conversations with donor prospects, for example, someone else may leave long comments about what they discussed in each conversation.

Your consultant should be able to help you understand exactly how your data needs to be formatted for the specific CRM you’re implementing, including which fields need to match up and how to verify that everything is organized correctly. But before you reformat your data, it’s your responsibility to ensure that it’s clean and up to date.

Clean up your data now by going through your spreadsheets and removing or updating:

• Outdated information like old phone numbers, email addresses, or mail addresses.
• Duplicate data, where the exact same information appears in multiple places.
• Any information you used to collect but no longer use, such as participant information for a program that ended years ago.

From here, your consultant can make a detailed data migration plan for moving all of the data you’ve identified to your new system and mitigating the risk of data loss. They’ll perform the migration and let you know what your role is in the process.

4. Train Your Team to Use the New System

Finally, work with your consultant to find the best training resources, then schedule training for relevant team members to learn the ropes of your new CRM.

Since you’re moving to an entirely new, more advanced system to house your data, the training process will understandably take time. Be sure to communicate openly with your team throughout implementation and training, and provide them with any additional support they may need to navigate this change.

While you’re devoting time to training, this is also a good time to implement some new policies based on data hygiene best practices to ensure your data stays accurate and usable going forward. This might include adding rules that standardize how team members input data and handle issues that arise. For example, clarify that addresses should always use abbreviations like “St.” and “Ave.” rather than spelling them out.

With a new, advanced CRM at your fingertips, your nonprofit’s team will be better equipped to use fundraising, marketing, and donor data to raise more for your mission. As you start using your new platform, note any features or data analysis strategies that prove especially valuable so your team can keep improving.

In today’s hyper-competitive business landscape, staying ahead of the curve is crucial for the success of any niche business. While traditional marketing strategies may have once sufficed, the digital age demands a more refined and data-driven approach.

In this guide, we’ll delve into four popular data-driven marketing strategies. Whether you own a dog grooming business, flower shop, or dance studio, these insights will help you propel your niche business to new heights.

1. Create Customer Profiles

A customer relationship management (CRM) system is the foundation upon which data-driven marketing is built. Within this comprehensive database, create customer profiles to store and access key information about your target audience.

Creating these profiles can be broken down into three main phases:

• Collection: Use data appends, website analytics, social media insights, surveys, and past purchase history to collect information about customers, ensuring that it’s properly stored in your CRM. This data should include demographics (age, gender, location), psychographics (interests, values, behaviors), and transactional data (purchase history, frequency).
• Analysis: Once you’ve collected enough data, analyze it to identify common characteristics and behaviors among your customers. Depending on your marketing goals, you might look for patterns in age, gender, location, interests, purchasing habits, and online behavior.
• Personification: Use the insights gained from your analysis to create detailed customer personas, which are fictional representations of your ideal customers. Detail their pain points, goals, and preferred communication channels to serve as a reference point when crafting personalized marketing messages.

Keep in mind that customer profiles are not static; they should evolve as your business and customer base change. Take measures to keep your database clean and update your personas as you gather more information through your marketing efforts.

2. Personalize Outreach

Using the information stored in your customer profiles, segment individuals into distinct groups based on shared characteristics like:

• Demographics
• Financial health
• Geographic location
• Buying habits
• Brand loyalty

Then, create targeted messages for each segment that address their unique needs and interests. For instance, if you segment customers according to their brand loyalty, you could send first-time customers a welcome email with a special introductory offer, while providing long-term customers with exclusive customer appreciation gifts like discount codes. Doing so will ensure that all customers receive a relevant and engaging experience with your brand.

3. Leverage Omnichannel Marketing

After segmenting customers into well-defined groups, use an omnichannel marketing approach to meet customers on their preferred platforms and provide a unified experience that drives results. Here’s an example of how the omnichannel process could work for a dog daycare business:

1. A past client searches for pet-sitting services in their area and finds a paid ad from your doggie daycare.
2. The client clicks through to your site and begins scheduling an appointment. However, they abandon the page before pressing submit.
3. Using the phone number stored in their customer profile, you send an SMS message to remind them that their registration is incomplete.
4. The client returns to your site to complete the form and receives an automated confirmation email in return.
5. You then send an email newsletter inviting them to explore your other services, products, and events.

To streamline the process, invest in marketing automation tools that specifically cater to your niche. For instance, the doggie daycare discussed above might benefit from Gingr’s all-in-one software, as it has built-in tools to help you send personalized messages and track customer interactions.

4. Conduct A/B Testing

A/B testing, also known as split testing, empowers companies to optimize their marketing efforts by comparing the success rates of different messages. According to NPOInfo, this practice allows you to adapt to changing customer preferences and market dynamics for better results. Take these steps to test the impact of your niche business’s outreach:

• Identify your variables. Start by identifying the specific elements of your marketing campaign that you want to test. These could include email subject lines, call-to-action buttons, images, or even the layout of a landing page. For example, if you’re running an email marketing campaign, you might want to test two different subject lines to see which one generates a higher open rate.
• Implement variations. Once you’ve identified the variables to test, create different variations for each element. For instance, if you’re testing email subject lines, create two different subject lines—one for the “A” group and another for the “B” group. Ensure that the variations are distinct and test only one variable at a time to isolate the impact of that change.
• Monitor the performance. Send the content to two different segments of your audience (Group A and Group B). Monitor the performance of each variation by tracking relevant metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, or engagement.

After collecting enough data, analyze the results to determine which variation performed better. The winning variation should guide your future marketing decisions.

Remember that data-driven marketing is an ongoing process. Don’t be afraid of making changes to your strategies and trying new approaches. With the power of data backing you up, your niche business will be able to make decisions confidently, easily adapt to changing market conditions, and achieve sustainable growth.

When your nonprofit hosts a silent auction fundraising event, most of the planning process is typically focused on logistical details and procuring auction items. After all, your supporters are more likely to attend a well-organized event that features prizes they’re excited to bid on!

However, there are two other critical steps in planning a successful silent auction that are sometimes overlooked. The first is taking the time to set specific, achievable goals for your fundraiser, and the second is determining how you’ll know if you reached those goals after the event ends.

There are a variety of objectives you could be working toward as you plan your fundraiser, and each of them will be best measured by a different metric. In this guide, we’ll look at six popular metrics nonprofits use to evaluate their silent auction’s fundraising success, including:

1. Return on Investment (ROI)
2. Items Sold
3. Donor Acquisition Rate
4. Donor Retention Rate
5. Marketing Conversions
6. Participant Satisfaction

Applying any or all of these metrics to your nonprofit’s silent auctions will help you identify what you did well, where there is room for improvement, and how you can adjust your strategy as you plan future auctions. Let’s dive in!

1. Return on Investment (ROI)

One of the easiest metrics to calculate from your silent auction fundraising data is the total amount raised from ticket sales, winning bids, financial sponsorships, and additional donations made during the event. However, this doesn’t take into account the upfront expenses that tend to be associated with auctions—venue rentals, fundraising software payments, marketing materials, any prizes that your organization purchased rather than receiving as in-kind donations, and more.

Return on investment (ROI) is a more holistic metric that considers both the revenue your nonprofit generates from your silent auction and the expenses you incurred while planning it. You can calculate it using the following equation:

ROI = [(Total Amount Raised – Total Costs) / Total Costs] x 100

If your ROI is negative, it means that your auction cost more money than it raised, and you’ll need to find ways to reduce your expenses when planning future events. On the other hand, a positive ROI means your auction was financially successful. Ideally, you’d want your ROI to be a larger positive number, as this would indicate that you raised significantly more money than you spent.

2. Items Sold

At an auction, the items are the star of the show. Plus, procurement is often the most time-consuming and resource-intensive part of the planning process. So, it makes sense to include metrics related to the sale of your silent auction items when evaluating your fundraising success.

Review the completed bid sheets from your event to calculate the following item-related metrics:

• Sell-through rate. This is simply the percentage of items that sold at your silent auction. For instance, if you had 100 prizes up for auction and 95 of them were purchased by participants, your sell-through rate would be 95%.
• Average bid amount. Determine this number by adding up all of your supporters’ winning bids, then divide by the number of items sold. This metric demonstrates how valuable participants perceived your items to be.
• Number of items that sold at or above their fair market value (FMV). Winspire defines FMV as “[an auction] item’s worth relative to what supporters would pay if they purchased it elsewhere.” Since participants often choose to purchase items at auction because they’re hoping for a discount they couldn’t get otherwise, any prizes that sell at or above their FMV are particularly appealing to your supporter base.

Knowing this information about the items that sold at your silent auction can help you hone the procurement process for future auctions—you can make sure to find items that your supporters are interested in and perceive as high-value to maximize your ROI.

3. Donor Acquisition Rate

In the context of a silent auction, donor acquisition rate refers to the percentage of participants who engaged with your nonprofit for the first time by attending your event. If 200 people participated in your silent auction and 80 of them were first-time supporters of your organization, your donor acquisition rate would be 40%.

Auctions are particularly effective for attracting new supporters because while some participants will sign up specifically to contribute to your nonprofit, others just want to purchase one-of-a-kind items that also happen to support a good cause. Make sure to follow up with these new donors after your auction to encourage them to learn more about your mission and stay involved with your organization.

4. Donor Retention Rate

Donor acquisition and retention are complementary to one another. Acquisition allows your organization to engage more community members and plan for growth, and retention helps you cultivate lasting relationships with supporters and sustainably fund your mission.

The most common way to calculate donor retention rates in the context of silent auctions is to determine the percentage of participants from a previous auction that also attended your most recent one. For example, if 75 of the 150 supporters who participated in last year’s silent auction came to this year’s event as well, your donor retention rate would be 50%.

5. Marketing Conversions

Leveraging multiple print and digital marketing channels is essential for attracting as many participants to your silent auction as possible. After the event, conversion data can help you determine which methods were most effective for generating registrations.

Track the number of auction signups from each of the following promotion channels:

• Direct mail invitations
• Email marketing messages
• Your nonprofit’s various social media accounts
• Google Search Ads
• Redirections to your event registration form from other pages on your website

Understanding which methods compel the most supporters to register can help you allocate your marketing budget more effectively in the future. For instance, if you find that direct mail had the lowest conversion rate of any channel and social media generated the most signups, you may decide to reduce your spending on mailed invitations and instead put that money toward paid ads on Instagram and Facebook for your next auction.

6. Participant Satisfaction

Participant satisfaction is a less objective measurement than the other fundraising success metrics discussed above. However, it’s still important to consider when evaluating your silent auction. After all, a major purpose of nonprofit events is to bring your community together around a cause, and learning what supporters thought about your auction can tell you whether you did this effectively.

Post-event surveys are one of the best ways to track participant satisfaction. MemberClicks’ guide to event feedback surveys recommends referencing your auction check-in list to ensure you get feedback from actual participants and incentivizing survey completion by entering respondents’ names into a drawing for a gift card or branded merchandise. Additionally, include both multiple-choice and open-ended questions on your survey to encourage supporters to share their honest opinions.

The metrics your nonprofit will find most useful will depend on the primary goal of your silent auction. If the main objective is revenue generation, your ROI and item-related data analysis will tell you how successful your event was. Marketing conversions are the most important metrics if your goal is to spread awareness about your organization. And measuring donor acquisition, retention, and satisfaction is essential if you’re focused on supporter engagement.

No matter how you plan to measure your silent auction’s success, make sure to store all of your event data in one place so it’s easier to analyze and evaluate. Happy fundraising!