How Nonprofits Can Track Their Brand Performance

Your nonprofit’s brand isn’t just a visual on social media, or the work you show on a website. The brand brings an organization to life. It’s the way people interact with your nonprofit, talk about it, and choose to support it.

That sounds pretty important, right? It also makes it essential to understand how your brand is performing. 

Tracking performance is subjective. The audience you’re engaging, who you’re reporting success to, and so many other factors come into play. However, you can find some great benchmarks to measure your brand’s performance and apply them to your next brand report, or even create your first report using this blog. 

Why Tracking Brand Performance Matters

Think of your nonprofit’s brand in currency. We’re going to call the currency trust or confidence. The way your brand performs should be measured in how much faith people put in your organization to live out its mission, adhere to its value, and solve the problem you’re presenting across your website, social media, emails, and physical handouts. 

When the public has faith in your organization, they want to get involved. Maybe that looks like volunteering, donations, or telling their friends about the organization. People want to engage through other means, such as submitting surveys, liking posts on social media, and more. This engagement builds social proof of your organization. People don’t want to visit a website and see no testimonials, or go visit your Facebook and see no comments or shares. Public perception is everything because perception is reality. 

This makes tracking your brand performance incredibly important, and there are a variety of ways to go about it. Let’s talk about some of the metrics. 

Metrics to Monitor Brand Performance

The first metric useful to monitor is brand awareness. This metric tracks how recognizable your brand is, and this is the first step and the most important to have performed well. Without awareness, you don’t hit the first step of any pipeline, so we want to ensure that people are aware of your nonprofit. Some great ways to check out brand awareness could be:

• Monitoring website traffic

• How many new followers you gain on social media

• How many people come to your nonprofit for assistance a month, a quarter, etc

The next metric after you gain awareness is tracking brand sentiment. This metric focuses on how people feel about your organization. You want to aim for positive sentiment, and this is where understanding your mission and organization comes into play. Positive sentiment may be comments on social media about how you helped clients. Maybe it’s donors posting on social media about your great work. Here are some great baselines to look at:

• How many people are commenting on social media, what are they saying?

• If you request new testimonials from donors and supporters, how many do you get? What do they say?

• Check out your reviews on Google and other places. What ratings are you averaging?

After this comes the last metric, and one that can branch into subcategories. That’s brand engagement. This metric looks at how people choose to engage with and support your nonprofit. This has to be tracked based on what matters to your nonprofit. Maybe it’s based on the number of partnerships formed, clients gained, or other statistics. Here are some strong baselines:

• Track metrics on social media, focus on the ones you care about

• How many people are opening your emails

• How many mail-ins for donations come back with money

• How many people attend events and fairs your nonprofit hosts

From here, engagement could be divided up into groups. You may break up by who volunteers, who donates, and who goes even further to be a loyal supporter or advocate by hosting fundraisers, speaking to people at events, or who agrees to be a case study or testimonial on your website. 

So, we got an idea of what to measure. How do we do it?

Tools for Measuring Brand Performance. 

With great analytics comes great reporting – maybe that isn't an actual quote but we sure love it. 

So, we have the metrics. How do we track them and visualize them? 

Measuring brand performance on social media can be done through platforms or with management tools, such as:

• Hootsuite

• Sprout Social 

• Buffer

Measuring sentiment can be done through social listening tools, such as:

• Brandwatch

• Sprout Social

• Meltwater

Finally, you can track web traffic and engagement online using your website provider’s tools or Google Analytics. 

These types of tools are essential for the basics and measuring brand performance, but there’s also an important qualitative tool for brand measurement – surveys. 

Using Surveys and Forms in Brand Performance

Surveys are a great tool to track brand awareness and sentiment in particular. These give you access to people’s thoughts and opinions about your organization and what you can do to improve it if needed. 

In tracking brand awareness through surveys, you can ask questions such as:

• How did you find out about our organization?

• How did you find out more about our organization? 

• How long have you been aware of our organization?

For brand sentiment, you can use linear scales and a variety of other basic survey tools to gauge the numbers for sentiment. However, some great qualitative questions could be:

• How do you feel about our organization? 

• What is our nonprofit doing well?

• What could our nonprofit improve on?

• Describe the first three words that come to mind when you think of our organization

While numbers are great, you will also want these types of questions and surveys to help you truly understand how well your audience is aware of your organization, and how they feel.

Now Go Track It!

As we’ve covered, brand performance is key for a nonprofit. It measures the most important currency, trust. 

You can track several metrics and also break them down into different categories, and ultimately tracking this will be based on your organization’s needs (if only there was an agency that could help you do this, oh wait, it’s us!), and you can tinker and format as needed to track it. 

Make sure you’ve got enough trust in the bank – start measuring your brand performance or keep improving it by using our insights.