We know from our research at Powered by Action that the average nonprofit does not have the analytics tools they need to effectively deliver on their mission. According to Salesforce, more than half of the nonprofits surveyed found it difficult to analyze and draw insights from data in order to track their overall impact and performance. Having the right data collection and analytics tools is a major determinant of survival for nonprofits as we enter into a prolonged recovery from the economic fallout of the Covid pandemic and ongoing uncertainty.
What if there was an easy way for nonprofits to track engagement in their virtual communities and programs? What if there was a user-friendly tool that helped nonprofit staff members quickly make data-driven decisions that save time and resources?
Well, we found a solution to address these questions.
Team PbA is proud to announce phase one of our PbA Engagement Dashboard. This analytics tool is available to all of our nonprofit customer administrators on the platform. With the Engagement Dashboard, administrators can easily monitor user engagement within their virtual communities and digital programs. Now as an administrator on our platform, you do not have to guess how active your community members are within your organization or the performance of your content.
Our tool helps nonprofit staff members track engagement and draw the insights they need to monitor their organization’s virtual delivery strategy and achieve their goals. With a few clicks, administrators can track how engaged their users are within their virtual communities and programs. Phase one of the dashboard provides an overview of the following categories:
Community
Organization
Program
Program Topic
Within these four categories, administrators can track user's engagement with a nonprofit's posts, events, likes, comments, and replies during a specified timeframe.
Make Better Decisions
Gathering data is not the end, but rather the starting point for nonprofits to understand how engaged their members are within a virtual setting. We recognize that the data collected is only as useful as the insights nonprofits gain and the improvements that can be made to their virtual program and services delivery strategy. When nonprofits adopt the PbA platform, our team of experts will help you identify your organization’s goals on the platform and determine how your metrics can be tracked through our dashboard. Now nonprofit staff members can easily identify patterns and opportunities to improve engagement in the communities they serve through data-driven decision making.
The current dashboard provides insight into how frequently community members interact with your organization, including the number of virtual events they attend and how often users post, like, or comment. This information informs administrators on when they should make adjustments to their content strategy based on how your users are interacting in virtual communities and programs. Administrators can determine the appropriate adjustments including the frequency of posts and the overall value of the content shared.
We recommend that administrators review their dashboard daily to monitor your organization’s progress and track alignment with your organization’s goals on the platform. For example, if the goal of your nonprofit is to better understand user behavior in your virtual communities, you might want to know:
How often do users post within my communities?
How frequently do my community members attend virtual events?
What timeframe were my users most active?
To answer these questions, you can use the PbA dashboard to drill down by scope from community, organization, and program. You also have the option to present the data by the individual users within an adjustable timeframe. We are committed to working with our nonprofits to improve upon these features to ensure they can achieve their goals on our platform.
Save Time & Resources
At first, adopting a virtual delivery model for your nonprofit can seem like a daunting task. However, the Covid pandemic has shown that nonprofit leaders can no longer afford to delay adopting a virtual delivery model for providing services to their community members. A virtual delivery model combined with the Engagement Dashboard eliminates the guesswork of how your programs and services are performing virtually.
Nonprofit staff can measure the efficacy of your community and digital program outreach to make changes only when necessary which saves time and resources. The engagement dashboard streamlines the program management process for the administrators by providing objective feedback on which areas to target for improvement to increase their chance of success.
Access to automated data collection and analysis tools also provides consistency to keep your staff on the same page regarding your nonprofit’s performance and provides accessible metrics to report to internal or external stakeholders. Best of all, you can export your data to excel or download a pdf version for reporting purposes and additional analysis.
Transforming your nonprofit into a 21st-century organization with a virtual delivery model gives you access to automated data collection and analysis tools necessary for data-driven decisions.
Use Data to Tell a Story
The insights provided by the engagement dashboard gives your nonprofit the quantitative information you need to tell a story about the effectiveness of your virtual communities and programs. It lets you know objectively what your organization has achieved and how closely you are tracking with your identified goals and mission.
The data provided by our dashboard can be used to create visuals like infographics or presentations to easily present your organization’s progress regarding user engagement on the platform.
We recommend your organization present the data in a digestible compelling format when reporting to external stakeholders such as grantmakers, strategic partners, or governmental agencies. It's important to add context to the data to provide a narrative of how user engagement aligns with your overall nonprofit mission.
Ready to get started? Contact your Service Line Director to learn how you can leverage the Engagement Dashboard for your organization.
If you are new to PbA and would like to learn more about how our solution can help your nonprofit contact us at hello@poweredbyaction.org
Very interested to see how nonprofits will begin to leverage this data from the dashboard to compare their virtual impact to their outreach in person. I imagine connecting virtually will increase the number of interactions organizations are able with to have with their constituents similar to what we see in the for profit industry.