How Business Intelligence is Guiding Nonprofits
Data has become an extremely powerful tool in the information age. Every day you rely on the data you get from platforms like Facebook, Google Analytics, and CRMs to tell you all about your donors, potential supporters, volunteers—essentially everything you need to know. Without that information, you’d be disconnected from your base.
But because that data is gathered through individual programs, your scope of viewing the information is often limited. If you want to combine all that data, it can take a lot of effort and be outdated by the time it’s prepared.
That’s why many businesses have been turning to business intelligence, or BI. Business intelligence takes the data from all your platforms and combines it into one customizable dashboard that’s simplified and easy to read. With your data collected in one platform, you begin to see it build into a narrative that points out your nonprofit’s successes as well as its failures. That way you can begin to understand your organization’s needs and start to make improvements.
Here are three ways in which BI can help your nonprofit thrive.
INFLUENCING DECISIONS
More than half of for-profit businesses use BI at the center of their decision-making process. The results have shown that it keeps them ahead of their competition by getting them the right information to stay up-to-date on current trends that can boost their revenue.
As a nonprofit, your outreach effort isn’t much different from the way businesses market themselves. In some ways it’s even more challenging. There’s such a reliance on fundraising that you need the right information to tell you how to increase your donations and broaden community involvement. With BI, you can shape your marketing plans around the data that’s going to give you proven solutions so your nonprofit can keep making changes in the world.
REVEALING OPPORTUNITIES
Growing your support base is something every nonprofit is always trying to do. More donors means more funding, which translates to you getting even closer to reaching the goals for your nonprofit’s cause.
If you have supporters now, chances are your message resonated with their demographic. With the right information, you can tap into why they donated. They might have donated because of a fundraising campaign, an email listing, or a social media post. If one of those shows more promise than the others, you can put more effort behind that campaign, knowing the results will be positive.
MAXIMIZING PRODUCTIVITY
BI not only looks outward for trends, it can also report on internal issues within your organization. With BI, you can track the departments within your nonprofit to see if they might be underperforming. Once you locate the flaws, you can work to correct them, or come up with solutions that can get you back on the right path. Not only will this help with your overall efficiency, but you can determine if there are areas where your organization is losing money and adjust to correct the issue. BI helps you trim the fat to keep your organization running lean and more efficient.
With business intelligence changing the world for nonprofits, you no longer need to be stuck trying to piece together data from multiple sources. Stay connected to your base and maximize your funds.
Cougar Mountain Software offers Denali BI, a business intelligence software with customizable dashboards, easy to read graphs, and artificial intelligence-based pulse alerts. Contact one of our knowledgeable account executives to learn how Denali BI can improve your data analytics or click here to learn more!
