By: Mark McKeag, Andrew Flamang
“How am I doing?” the late New York City Mayor Ed Koch used to ask almost everyone he met. And while the mayor was probably looking more for praise than for critical analysis to improve his performance, the nation’s largest nonprofits could borrow a page from the mayor’s playbook and ask “how am I doing?” about their own performance—especially when it comes to fundraising.
While it’s common for large nonprofit networks—such as the YMCA or The Salvation Army—to compare costs and revenues across sites, few have attempted to ask which sites are doing the best job of maximizing fundraising potential—what we call fundraising effectiveness. In other words, is Site A not only raising more money than Site B, but is Site A actually capturing more of the available donor dollars in its community than Site B?1 That kind of comparative analysis can be used to help networks and individual sites learn and adapt best fundraising practices from top performers.
