A Dozen Free Ways to Evaluate
Your Nonprofit PR:
Justify Your Budget
Without Even Having One

by Katharine Delahaye Paine

Summary: Seven general measurement strategies and a dozen specific research tactics are discussed that will provide nonprofits with inexpensive yet valuable insight, background or research.

Whether you’re the local food kitchen or the national March of Dimes, in this day and age no one can get away without some level of accountability. There’s a perception out there, however, that only the biggest nonprofits can afford the money and person-power to really evaluate results.

Not true. The whole point of The Measurement Standard and our sister Web site, measuresofsuccess.com, is to help communications professionals and their organizations take control of their images at whatever budget is available. Elsewhere in this issue, for instance, you can read about some very inexpensive ways to measure your Web traffic and perform communication audits.

In this article, we introduce seven general steps that are especially recommended for those with tiny budgets, but which will improve your measurement no matter what your resources. Next, we give you a dozen specific research tactics that will cost small change but provide big bucks results.

Step 1: Get the (White) Paper

Go to www.instituteforpr.com and read Dr. Walter Lindemann’s terrific paper entitled “Research Doesn’t Have To Put You In The Poorhouse.”

Step 2: Read a Good Book

Specifically, A Non-Profit Builds a Dashboard. This will explain how one of the all-time great Measurement Mavens, Dennis Bender of Habitat for Humanity, approaches measurement.

Step 3: Get Some Higher Education

Make friends with your nearest school, college, university or other source of free labor: Interns? Work study? Semester projects?

Step 4: Know What You Don’t Know

Conduct an audit of your organization’s existing data. I’m not talking KPMG here, but you need to know what data is available before you calculate the cost of collecting the rest. Do you have attendance figures? Old awareness or attitude studies? Accurate data on number of new donors acquired or volunteers added to the rosters? Do you know the return from your direct mail campaigns, your door-to-door solicitations? Do you know how much money is raised per event?

Step 5: Know Why You’re Here

Understand your organization’s mission and reason for existence. As you’ll read in the Habitat for Humanity case study, cited in Step 2 above, Habitat exists to build housing for people who can’t afford it, with volunteers. That subordinate phrase is just as important as the main one. If all Habitat had to do was raise enough money to get contractors to build a house, that would be easy. The challenge is to raise enough money to build a house and then build it using volunteers. So they can’t just measure their success in terms of money, they need to measure the number of volunteers as well.

Step 6: Look for Bad News

Remember that you want to measure your failures as well as your successes. If you don’t know what didn’t work, you are doomed to repeat it. Have the confidence to point out what doesn’t work; this conveys the message that you are managing budgets well and are willing to make judgments based on facts, not emotions.

Step 7: Measure, Change, Measure Again, Change Again...

Evaluation is not something that gets done once and put away. It should be an ongoing process so you can examine the impact of a variety of elements over time. Does an event work better at a particular time of the year? You’ll only know if you are looking at results over the entire year.

With those steps in mind, here are twelve ways to evaluate success that won’t break your budget. We promise.

1. Cost per donor acquired

Count the number of new donors each month. Divide that number into the total amount (including salaries) that you spend trying to get those donors.

2. Cost per volunteer acquired

Track the number of new volunteers you’ve signed up each month. Divide that number into the total amount (including salaries) that you spent in recruitment efforts.

3. Cost per contribution

The question sounds simple, for every direct mail piece you send out, how much revenue comes in? The trick is to calculate not just the cost of the piece itself and the mailing, but the labor and marketing efforts that accompany it. Without the reputation and awareness that your PR and other marketing efforts have built, chances are no one would be donating anything. Direct mail experts know these numbers cold, so if you have one on your board, enlist their help.

4. Cost per attendee

If your nonprofit or event is designed to bring more people through the door, you need to be counting traffic on a daily or weekly basis. The key is to track that traffic against other marketing and communications activities. For instance, if you double the resources you devote to PR, does attendance go up proportionately? Even more revealing, if you cut back on advertising or PR efforts, does attendance decline? With sufficient amounts of data, you can calculate what it costs to get someone through your doors.

5. Percentage of exposure containing key messages

By analyzing the media (print, radio, TV or Internet) you can see if your messages appeared (this is a good place to put those interns to work.) Use the audited circulation figures of the media in which your messages appeared to determine the extent of the opportunities to see your message. If you want, you can also “rank” the exposure in terms of most likely to be seen vs. less likely to be seen. Studies show that if a message appears in a headline, call-out or caption, it is most likely to be seen and remembered.

6. Cost per message communicated

Once you’ve tallied the opportunities to see your message, you can then calculate the cost of disseminating the messages (via advertising vs. underwriting vs. PR, or whatever methods you employ). This will yield a “cost per message communicated” calculation that will help you decide where and how you want to disseminate messages in the future.

7. Level of message penetration

If your raison d'être is educating the public or getting a particular idea disseminated, you not only need to know if your idea was seen by your audience, you also need to determine whether they heard it or not. We all know it’s not enough to merely get messages out there, what we really need to evaluate is if anyone heard them or if they changed anyone’s opinions. But doing pre-post awareness surveys is too expensive, right? Wrong. Think creatively. Can you build a “test” into your Web site or next event to gauge people’s awareness? Give them a prize for getting three right answers. Or create a “Passport” system for which they have to answer questions and get their passport stamped to signify that they know one of your messages.

8. Return on investment of a Web site

If you are taking donations from your Web site, calculate the cost of the site and its maintenance and subtract that from the amount of the donations coming in. Do this weekly or monthly, then when you make changes to your Web site you can see how it affects the ROI.

9. Use your Web site for surveying your publics

The Internet has brought the cost of surveying way down, in some cases to nothing. (Check out CustomInsight that offers a free trial survey.) While Web survey results may not be representative of your entire target audience, they are a way to get a pulse check of what people who are Internet savvy are thinking about your organization. (For a Measurement Standard Buyer’s Guide on Web survey vendors, see the article in Volume One, Number 4, July 31, 2002: “Sorting Through the Web: Your Online Survey Options.”

10. Constituency questionnaires

Give your board members a survey and ask them to get feedback and ideas from their peers and colleagues. Explain why this data will help your endeavor. If you have 10 board members and each interviews 10 friends, you’ve got enough data to yield reliable stats, as long as you don’t try to slice and dice the numbers too narrowly.

11. Use a booth at a local festival

If there is a local or regional festival at which your organization has a booth or a table, create a questionnaire that people have to fill out in order to win a prize. The person staffing the booth should encourage people to fill out the questionnaire, but they need to be consistent about when during the visit they ask: If visitors fill it out before they’ve talked to anyone, you will get more “off the cuff” comments, whereas if visitors consistently fill it out after they’ve talked to booth staff, you’ll learn what information they take away.

12. Attendee or constituency surveys

At least once a year, include a survey in a mailing or distribute it to attendees at an event. Make sure you ask the same questions year after year so you can gauge changes in perceptions over time.

So you have no more excuses. All of the above measures can be done with little or no budget, and as I’ve seen over and over again, evaluating results will no doubt help you increase your PR and measurement budgets in the long term. Good luck. And let us know how you do.