5 Steps to Create Better Marketing Reports for Your Nonprofit
Marketing professionals are storytellers. We tell stories to external audiences to convince them to buy into our vision. But telling stories of our marketing vision to our colleagues is just as important. Internal stakeholders need to be connected to your work and watch you succeed. This is why it’s very important for marketing professionals to strengthen their skills at demonstrating wins and insights to leadership.
In the non-profit space, a disconnect between the marketing team and leadership is amplified, because without profit and loss signals (apart from fundraising) your colleagues may not understand how marketing is helping them achieve their goals. Therefore, it is very important that the non-profit marketer be skilled at communicating progress. Reporting is an excellent way to record and share that information across teams.
Good reporting requires gathering metrics and data, displaying it in a way that is easy for colleagues to understand, and providing good analysis on the data that reveals what insights can be gathered. When developing a new reporting structure for a non-profit organization, I recommend marketing professionals take the following five steps:
1 — Connect to Your Goals
Your goals serve as the basis for everything. You likely have two categories of goals: your organization’s mission goals and the marketing team’s specific goals. Setting clear goals is very important for guiding a marketing professionals’ work, but also key to clearly communicating to your colleagues what you are trying to achieve. Presumably, everyone at your organization will be working towards the organization’s outlined mission, however, it is important that leadership is connected to the specific outcomes the marketing team is driving towards in order to achieve the overall organization’s mission. When everyone at your organization is connected to your team’s goals, they become an anchor on which you can focus your reporting and the basis to which you track your progress.
When sharing larger timelines worth of reporting data (such as quarterly), I highly recommend starting the report with a list of these goals and how your efforts have made progress towards the desired outcomes. You can even get creative with your display and visualize through graphs how close you are to reaching your intended goals — think thermometer charts.
2 — Determine Metrics that Define Success
With your goals in mind, it is important to identify which metrics track your success. If you are new to analytics, social media platforms are very good at providing materials that educate about their specific metrics. Making sure you are familiar with Google Analytics and email marketing metrics is very important as well.
With a clear understanding of these metrics, you can consider which metrics will demonstrate the progress you are making towards your goals. Here are some examples:
- If you are trying to boost event attendance, focus on metrics that track how many attendees registered from marketing efforts and how much you spent to advertise per event registration.
- If you are trying to increase the readership of your blog, focus on metrics such as page views, scroll depth, and time on page for example to both tracks the quantity and quality of interactions with your content.
- If you are trying to bring in new online donors, track metrics on how many new donors came online, where they came from (using UTM parameters), how much you spent to advertise in order to gain a new donor, etc.
As you can see, each goal will generate several metrics to track. I recommend making sure your metrics both track the quantity and quality of your results. For example, if you generated a number of leads, what was the quality? How many of your leads took the desired action?
Demonstrating to leadership that your organization is consistently gaining influence over time is also important. Keep track of general growth metrics in addition to goal-specific metrics. Growth metrics will measure how your organization is growing its reach, for example:
- email subscribers,
- social media followers,
- web traffic
3 — Select a Frequency to Demonstrate Progress & Gain Insights
Now it is important to decide on how often you will track these metrics. Consider these timelines:
Shorter timelines allow one to keep a strong finger on the pulse of performance. Weekly reporting is a short timeline approach to keep track of these metrics for an internal marketing team discussion.
Medium-length timelines allow one to see and recognize trends. Monthly reports allow for enough time to identify trends and keep track of these insights month to month.
Longer-length timelines allow one to analyze findings and show insights and progress towards goals. Quarterly reporting serves as a long enough timeline for this sort of reporting and is a good cadence to present to leadership. Now is a good opportunity to determine what changes need to be made in the next quarter to optimize performance. Annual reports, also fall in the longer-length timeline and are helpful in understanding progress year by year and making large-scale comparisons.
4 — Display Information in a Helpful Format
Once you’ve determined the metrics you need to include and the frequency of the report, it is important to figure out the best way to display that information. I recommend creating tables in a document you can send around to your colleagues, however, there are many ways you can choose to display the information. You can even create dashboards on Google Analytics or your social media management platform. There are often ways to automate these reports, but always include your analysis when you send the reports to your colleagues to help make sense of the data.
Dive into some research on marketing reporting templates and automated reporting and decide what is the best fit for you in terms of time efficiency, readability, and comprehension by those at your organization outside your team, and the best format to focus on the key metrics you want to highlight. Whatever format you land on, be sure to include a section for analysis that explains what the data means.
5 — Disseminate Your Reports to the Organization
Now that your report is finished, it is time to decide how you will disseminate the reports to your organization. Will you send around the information in an email? Will you prepare a presentation to teach colleagues how to read the reports?
This is the stage where storytelling matters the most. However you decide to display the information, it is up to you to tell the stories behind what the information means. These are the types of details leadership and your colleagues are likely interested in:
- What key insights did you gain?
- What trends did you notice?
- Are there areas in which you’d like to do further experimentation?
- Where have you been successful?
- Where could you use improvement?
- Are there ways you could optimize your performance?
Becoming a good internal storyteller is just as important as being a good storyteller to external audiences. It is worth taking the time to learn how to create better reports that tell the stories about your team’s work. By refining your skills in internal communication and creating useful reports, leadership and colleagues at your organization will feel better connected to your team’s work and its successes.
