Blog post

How business intelligence will drive your nonprofit's success

By Kit Germeroth

As a nonprofit, your organization’s success is measured by the progress you make toward your mission. This could be measured by cause awareness through website visits or social media engagement, by number of donations, or by your fundraising ROI.

Regardless of your organization’s specific goals and KPIs, there’s one component that holds the secret to running a lean, highly efficient organization: data and business intelligence (BI).

When you implement the right BI processes and solutions to manage your data, you can leverage reports and dashboards that will help guide your decisions to further your mission. Tools like Tableau, Alteryx, and Rivery make it easier than ever to gather and analyze data to inform the way you tell your story so that your message resonates with your audience.

An effective business intelligence strategy will drive your organization’s success by promoting growth, improving transparency with donors, ensuring you stay compliant, and giving you clear insight into your audience.

Encourage growth and make proactive decisions

Business intelligence tools promote growth. An organized data pipeline with the right tools shows you how previous campaigns and initiatives performed so you can change and optimize efforts moving forward.

Are your high investment projects receiving low returns on reach or impact? Do you have funding that wasn’t tapped into? Are there certain geographies or demographics you should target in future fundraising efforts?

BI tools like Alteryx can easily sift through millions of data points and prep it for analysis so you can finally start getting value from your data.

Be more transparent with donors

Potential donors want to see exactly how their contributions are being used and how they’re actively furthering the cause. Clear visibility into how your nonprofit uses donations increases donor retention and encourages new donations.

A BI tool like Tableau lets you create intuitive, self-service data visualizations that any end user can access. You can efficiently track budget, spend, and results. Donors will have more confidence in your organization’s ability to drive change when they have more visibility into your operations.

Make sure you stay compliant

Compliance is critical in maintaining your non-profit status. With BI tools, you can create contract aging reports to track payments to approved contracts, ensuring that the proper amount of money is invested back into the company’s purpose.

You can also track grant recipient spending and outcomes of that spending. Aside from ensuring that non-profit status is retained, you can continue to track the effectiveness of dollars spent.

Learn more about your audience

BI tools can also improve your branding and messaging by providing fast insights into how your audience perceives your organization. Your organization’s social media accounts present a unique opportunity to engage directly with your audience, and it’s important to gather and use this feedback to your benefit. A tool like Rivery allows you to aggregate and integrate data from a wide variety of sources into a single cloud platform for faster analysis.

This type of first-hand feedback helps you properly brand your organization to followers and donors. You can also use your social media data to curate new content and increase engagement.

Data has the potential to enhance multiple aspects of your nonprofit’s operations. Tools like Tableau, Alteryx, and Rivery optimize your operations and promote growth, help you stay compliant, and provide more transparency into how you further your cause. With the right BI strategy in place, you’ll be well on your way to achieving your goals.