Metrics That Matter: Taking Fundraising and Finance to the Next Level

By: Joan Benson, Nonprofit Industry Marketing, Sage Intacct

Fundraising and Finance. We often find gaps between these two key groups in the nonprofit organization, when in reality, they need to be the closest of partners. As cloud technology continues to move finance from the ‘historical scorekeeper’ role to a ‘strategic partner role’, finance teams can bridge the gap through technology that allows the whole organization to sustain grow funding, strengthen stewardship, and maximize impact.

What moves donors to give? What ensures grant renewals? What best tells your story to gain greater engagement and support? Impact! Achieving mission success! The metrics that matter are the metrics that provide insight and proactive management to make sure that you are able to achieve the commitments made for the programs you support. Since fundraising is critical, knowing where you are and how you are doing matters. Here’s an example of an actionable dashboard:

Fundraising dashboard

Whether you are tracking fundraising metrics – like Efficiency, Cost per Donor, Average Gift, or Contributions by Campaign, or program metrics like costs per participant or program efficiency – your finance team can leverage Sage Intacct to automatically pull fundraising and statistical data from Salesforce and utilize for key metric calculation and tracking within Sage Intacct.

Program participants, donations, meals served, immunizations given. Whatever type of data you want to track on the donor management side, can automatically come over to Sage Intacct to be matched up with expenses or grant billing. Want to calculate cost per program participant? Just create a scorecard to divide your expenses (Sage Intacct) by participants (Salesforce). Want to compare to prior period? Or track last year’s campaign to current year? Point and click. Revenue and receipts that are always in balance equals no more gaps between finance and development. No unmatched receipts. No month-end reconciliations that never end.

Dashboard example from Sage Intacct, a Salesforce partner.

By leveraging the modern, best-in-class technology that you get with Salesforce and Sage Intacct, you can gain the benefits of greater efficiency, better stewardship, and real time insight – helping to ensure that your organization can maximize return on mission.

Automation and connectivity between Salesforce and Sage Intacct yields real time insight that can transform you organization.

Check out these customer stories from Salesforce and resources from Sage Intacct of nonprofits using technology to improve their impact.

Fundraising and Finance are critical to what you do, but you also do so much more. With the Salesforce Platform, you can connect everything you do from program management and marketing communications to reporting and analytics. Download this e-book to start your journey with the Salesforce Platform and learn how you can become a Connected Nonprofit.