NPO Business Drivers: How to Identify Your Key Performance Indicators

What’s a Business Driver?

A business driver is a leading indicator of financial success. To think about business drivers from an organizational perspective, a business driver must drive revenue in order to maintain a sustainable organization. As a nonprofit organization, if you want to make the difference, you want to lead a sustainable organization that is driving a healthy amount of financial revenue.

So how can you measure that?

It’s easy to get caught up in different KPIs, or key performance indicators. As online marketers, we often get lost in the vanity metrics that might sound important, but are not true business drivers. It’s really important to be able to identify what your nonprofit’s business drivers, as it will help you to effectively push your organization forward. 

What is your main thing? Acknowledge that and create a concrete dashboard around it. Whatever you are doing, you need to build a report around what is your nonprofit’s most lucrative business drive in order to focus on what matters most. 

How Do I Identify My NPO’s Business Drivers?

You will want to think about your nonprofit’s marketing funnel, which at some point starts with awareness. Whether or not awareness looks like website visitors or people walking into the doors of your clinic, you want to think of what steps come after your nonprofit’s brand awareness.

For example, if your main goal is donation and if that is how you drive most of your revenue, then your business drivers will often shake out to something like the number of new donors, the amount of new donors per month, or average donor lifetime value. 

Looking deep into the funnel is how you will be able to identify your business drivers and foster your organization’s key performance indicators. Take all the steps you can take in order to scale your nonprofit and make the biggest impact you can.

Cameron Ripley