How To Leverage Data Analytics to Drive Growth for Associations and Nonprofits
While associations and nonprofits are vital for our society, scarce resources often limit their critical work. Unfortunately, the $2 million donation that philanthropist MacKenzie Scott recently gave to a Boston children’s advocacy organization is not a standard experience.
Instead, organizations must try hard to achieve financial efficiency while navigating diverse funding sources, stakeholder scrutiny, and government and industry regulations.
Data-driven budgeting makes this process easier. Especially with the support of a managed services provider, organizations can leverage data analytics as a powerful tool for optimizing their operations and finances. Keep reading to learn how associations and nonprofits can build the optimal data analytics strategy for driving growth, making informed decisions, while better understanding your members and improving engagement.
Understanding Data Analytics
In a nutshell, data analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing raw data to discover useful insights about your organization’s activities. That data may come from various sources: your website traffic, email open rate, donor demographics, event registrations and more.
Organizations can leverage data in various ways to derive insights. Such as:
- Examining whether changes occurred during a specific time period or comparing performance between periods.
- Using data points to find correlations between variables and understand why something might have happened.
- Analyzing past data to forecast potential outcomes
- Simulating different scenarios to understand the impact of your decisions and answer the question of “what should we do next?”
Without using data-driven decision-making for streamlining association or nonprofit financial management, you risk wasting precious resources, working out of alignment with your mission, and missing key opportunities for growth.
Benefits of Data Analytics for Associations and Nonprofits
Data analytics can transform how your organization fulfills its mission. Here are just a few of the advantages you can expect to enjoy when you consult them in your work:
Improved decision-making
Diving deep into your data will provide you with accurate, objective and actionable evidence to create more robust business strategies – meaning you can stop relying on subjective opinions or educated guesses. For example, a nonprofit can use insights about the donor lifecycle discovered in their CRM donor database to strategically direct their marketing and fundraising campaigns for maximum impact.
Or consider the Microsoft Secure Score, a nifty feature that gives you a numerical grade about the state of the current cybersecurity posture around your Microsoft IT ecosystem. By leveraging the rich data it provides, you get clearly outlined steps to strengthen any vulnerabilities in your infrastructure and better protect yourself against cyber threats.
Enhanced member engagement and satisfaction
Understanding your data will also help you form stronger connections with your stakeholders. Whether engaging with association members or nurturing relationships with non-profit donors and beneficiaries, this understanding enables you to finely calibrate your outreach efforts, ensuring relevance and resonance at every interaction.
For example, you can gain valuable insights in your data about people’s preferences and behaviors, such as what services they are interested in or which communication channels they prefer. That knowledge will then help you increase your attendance at events, secure more donations, and ensure the messages you put out resonate with your audiences. You will also find the potential pain points hindering your success, allowing you to remediate issues and make your community happier.
Optimized resource allocation
Data analytics is essential for effective financial management in non-profits. It helps prevent wasteful spending, duplication of efforts, and underuse of resources, ensuring funds are used wisely and impact is maximized.
By delving into the specific data detailing your organization’s endeavors, you gain the ability to allocate resources towards the most effective programs, thereby optimizing your investment returns. Moreover, armed with insights from past fundraising endeavors, you can tailor budgets, accordingly, directing funds where they yield the greatest impact, while trimming unnecessary expenses. This strategic approach ensures that every dollar spent contributes meaningfully towards your goals, maximizing overall returns.
Better program evaluation and impact measurement
Organizations can use data analytics to establish key performance indicators for systematically evaluating and measuring the effectiveness of their initiatives. By continuously monitoring outcomes and your progress toward goals, you will then be able to tweak your program design to increase your positive influence on your community.
For example, a nonprofit that serves military families can leverage its data to improve service delivery by identifying geographic areas with higher concentrations of its target population and then offering more options in that region. Or an association supporting accountants may discover that its members prefer certain types of continuing education topics and shift its conference schedule to increase attendance.
The Key Steps to Implementing Data Analytics in Your Nonprofit or Association
While you may want to harness the power of data at your organization, figuring out how to do it effectively may seem daunting. Below, we outline a few of the best practices you can follow to carefully plan your approach, so you capitalize on the benefits.
1. Assessing organizational needs and goals
Before you start analyzing data, you first need to figure out your “why” so that your strategy has clear direction. Consider your organization’s long-term goals and the unique needs and priorities of your various departments and key stakeholders. This will help you determine the most relevant metrics to track, and the data sets you will leverage.
2. Data collection and management
Once you establish those objectives, start gathering the data! That will require ensuring your data remains accurate, confidential, reliable, and intact.
Unfortunately, security is not guaranteed when cyberattacks are a rising threat to any organization’s operational stability. Just recently, an attack on the major healthcare nonprofit organization Ascension disrupted operations at its 140 hospitals and 40 senior living facilities across the United States.
To combat that outcome, organizations should establish data governance policies around data storage and retrieval and security protocols involving strict access controls for safeguarding sensitive data.
3. Choosing the right tools and platforms
Optimizing your organization’s data-driven decision-making begins with selecting the right tools and platforms for your daily operational needs. By integrating user-friendly technologies equipped with robust data analytics and security features, you lay the foundation for empowered decision-making across all levels.
Cloud-based services, such as the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, emerge as a prime choice for non-profits, offering both cost-effectiveness and flexibility. With Microsoft Teams Premium, for instance, on a subscription basis, you gain access to comprehensive insights into meeting dynamics, chat histories, and collaboration patterns. Such detailed analytics not only enhance staff productivity and engagement but also streamline workflows, all without the need for significant upfront investment.
4. Building a data-driven culture
To successfully leverage data to improve your work environment, every stakeholder needs to recognize the value, and then actively participate by integrating data-driven decision-making into their daily workflow. Your organization should create transparent data use processes and expectations so that employees feel accountable for tangibly harnessing data analytics daily. Providing staff training on data literacy will also help achieve this, allowing your team to be more effective since they will understand how to use data appropriately and securely.
The Role of MSPs in Enhancing How You Leverage Data Analytics
Executing a productive data analytics strategy can be hard for nonprofits and associations with limited resources and technical expertise. In those cases, working with a managed IT services provider (MSP) can be a good option. They have the in-depth knowledge and experience for:
- Strengthening an organization’s data management
- Implementing strong cybersecurity solutions to help maintain your data’s integrity and availability, like data backups and encryption
- Providing daily IT infrastructure support and proactively monitoring your assets to ensure you can rely on a robust ecosystem
- Centralizing your IT resources to simplify access so your data is easy to find and use, maximizing productivity
- Oversee staff training to get your employees up-to-speed on your data practices
Empowering Data-Driven Growth: Leveraging Managed IT Services and Strategic Partnerships
Regularly analyzing your data will help your organization mitigate risk, discern critical information about your stakeholders, and make evidence-backed decisions that optimize resources. As a result, you can experience increased operational and financial efficiency that allows you to drive forward your important mission and vision.
When you choose designDATA for your managed IT services, our IT professionals will not only establish the foundation for your data but also collaborate with our vetted partners to oversee the data analytics process. By entrusting us with this responsibility, you can focus on extracting real value while we handle the technical intricacies.
Connect with us today to schedule a consultation and discover how designDATA can empower your data analytics journey, driving sustainable growth for your organization.
