4 Ways to Track and Prove ROI on Advocacy Software

Nonprofits of all types are constantly seeking new ways to prove to their membership the value that they yield from their member dues. Advocacy software provides a great way to prove clear cut member value in a quantitative manner.


Nonprofits of all types are constantly seeking new ways to prove to their membership the value that they yield from their member dues. Advocacy software provides a great way to prove clear cut member value in a quantitative manner. Below we’ve shared simple and helpful ways to extrapolate the member value you gain from the analytics of your advocacy campaigns.

Starting Point

Providing a comprehensive year-end report is a great way to show your members all the online advocacy efforts the nonprofit organized. The report can be as simple as: “We ran “X” amount of campaigns that resulted in  “Y” amount of message on “Z” topics”. Taking an entire year’s worth of work and distilling it down into a couple of sentences shouldn't take more than an hour or so and can be a large catalyst to reduce member churn (and even drive new member growth!).


Next Level:

Take your reporting efforts to the next level. Diving deeper includes:

  • Breaking down what governmental entities were the targets for your legislative or regulatory efforts
  • What committees were the focus of these efforts
  • Who the individual targets were and how many messages they received

Ensuring your members know this information is important so they realize the value that online advocacy provides them as a paying member.

Pro Level

There are several different ways a nonprofit can determine the return of investment (ROI) from advocacy software. The first and foremost of which occurs when a large legislative or regulatory battle falls in your favor. These victories often pay for the software thousands of times over and are the most exciting stories to relay to your members. It’s important to let them know how their actions directly resulted in a favorable policy or regulatory outcome.

An example of this return on investment involves a case study where Muster was used: an entire niche medical industry was facing deregulation in our home state of Virginia. After a couple of very successful advocacy campaigns, the legislation that was going to cause this deregulation was killed in committee. The threat was extinguished largely due to the 18,000+ messages sent through Muster’s advocacy platform. Because of this victory, the association can now say they protected the profession of the 1,500 or so licensed medical practitioners in the state. From a quantitative perspective, the annual return on the nonprofit’s advocacy efforts can be calculated by multiplying the number of saved jobs by an estimated salary for each job: $50,000 by the 1,500 practitioners comes out to be a ROI of $75,000,000. An amazing ROI story awaits to be told for advocacy software in circumstances with legislative or regulatory wins - all one has to do is take the time to reverse engineer the stats!


All Star Level

Put everything above in practice AND THEN report it all to your current membership in a year-end update. Plus, identify all the action takers (including non-members) you have gained through  your advocacy campaigns from the last year and target them to become members or invite them to an upcoming event. Your advocacy software system should have a way to do this (if it doesn’t, schedule a demo with Muster!) and you can prompt a person you already know is aligned with your organization from a policy standpoint to drive new member growth and revenue.

Advocacy campaigns and software can be a member prospecting tool, you just need to start taking advantage of it in creative ways!


Summary

Advocacy software provides numerous opportunities to prove significant ROI. Whether your nonprofit is a large national association with a six figure budget or local chamber of commerce spending a few thousand dollars - advocacy software is a safe and rewarding investment to grow the capacity of proving member value, retaining members and driving new member growth.

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