Many nonprofit leaders wonder how their fundraising programs compare to those of their peer organizations and what they can do to imitate the highest performing organizations in their sector.

To help nonprofits measure their performance against their highest-performing peers, American Philanthropic is pleased to announce that the launch of the 2019 Fundraising Performance Survey on June 17th 2019.

This survey—the fifth of its kind—was born out of frustration. We were frustrated at not being able to tell our nonprofit clients how their fundraising results compared with industry benchmarks, since such benchmarks often didn’t seem to exist. And we were frustrated at not being able to inform clients how their results compared to those obtained by their peers.

Decision-making suffered in the absence of such information. Nonprofit executives had to lean on intuition, anecdote, and conventional wisdom to guide fundraising strategies, with little or no hard data to confirm or disprove their gut instincts.

The Fundraising Performance Survey fills this gap, accumulating and assembling fundraising data and allowing nonprofit groups to see how their organization performs on various key development metrics such as:

  • Fundraising performance by source, including direct mail, foundation grants, online sources, and so on, offering powerful insight into what works and what doesn’t in today’s landscape.
  • Positioning vis a vis emerging trends in management and governance, ranging from executive involvement in fundraising to board engagement to CRM adoption and market share.
  • Fundraising efficiency: how much groups raise relative to key units of input, such as staff time, number of development staff, and fundraising expenditures.

Read the full article about nonprofit fundraising by Scott Rubush at Philanthropy Daily.