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Mar 8, 2017

Net Dollars Not Donors Part 1

Somewhere over the rainbow in fundraising, two metrics were established as the gold standard: gross revenue generated and the number of donors acquired.

And that’s a shame.

It’s a shame because you can optimize these two metrics into organization ruin.

Let’s take gross revenue. The reason it is used is because it’s simple to measure. But it has a serious drawback: it doesn’t account for what you spent to raise that money.

It’s like a habitual gambler bragging about the $1,000 lottery winnings they had the night before while omitting the fact that have bought a $5 scratch ticket every week for 10 years. So their real ROI is 0.38.

Wahoo!

Seriously, if you are using gross revenue as your fundraising goal, you need to stop it and start using net revenue. It’s just bad stewardship to use gross revenue goals.

Part VII: How Analytical Ones Will be Using AI

Over the past couple of weeks, I have written about some potential effects that AI will have on the nonprofit sector. Today, I’m going to end this series on how we as a company intend to use AI. There’s no doubt there is a certain “wow-factor” using AI. It’s like Star...

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Part VI: The Environmental Impact of AI

Up to this point in our AI blog series, I have been discussing (some might say ragging on) the practical implementational challenges of AI in the nonprofit sector. In today’s blog, I’m shifting the focus on a more global issue: Is using AI environmentally sustainable?...

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