CauseVox Feature Focus: Impact Metric

We hope you’ve been enjoying our CauseVox Feature Focus series so far, where we share insights and updates about some of our community’s favorite features. If you haven’t had a chance yet, read about our Site Editor and Blog Tool.

This week we’re focusing on the CauseVox Impact Metric.

CauseVox Impact Metric

This little tool is not only a customer favorite, but one of ours as well, and more importantly, donors love it. So what is it?

The Impact Metric is an automated counter set to show the impact of your nonprofit crowdfunding campaign as it progresses, based on a unit of impact that you create in your site settings.

So for instance, if you are able to say that a $25 donation provides paperback novels for three students in a classroom, you can set that as your impact metric, and as donations come in, the counter will automatically calculate how many books you’ll be able to purchase.

Here are three examples from CauseVox customers:

World Bicycle Relief is raising $500,000 to provide bikes for people around the world.

Impact Metric: bikes, of course!

Friends and family are raising money to cover the cost of physical therapy for Christian, a baby born with a rare brain disease.

Impact Metric: physical therapy sessions

No Child A Slave, an initiative of Beyond Borders, is establishing Child Protection Brigades in 25 Port-au-Prince neighborhoods in Haiti to free children from slavery.

Impact Metric: fully funded neighborhood child protection brigades

Why is the Impact Metric useful?

So why use the Impact Metric? For many nonprofits, it’s a challenge to explain all of the programming and nuances about restricted and unrestricted funding. It’s even harder to tell a great story when all you’ve got to work with is a big dollar figure. But when you are able to equate those dollars with actual items to be funded, or ideas put into action, your message becomes stronger and your donors feel more connected with your cause.

The Impact Metric can also help lend a sense of urgency to your campaign as you close in on the deadline. So if you have five hours left and you still need 10 more Thanksgiving dinners to ensure everyone at the homeless shelter receives a hot meal, use that metric to drive your final appeal. And of course, once your crowdfunding campaign is complete, you have no better measure of success than your Impact Metric.

CauseVox Tip: Think about your Impact Metric when you first begin planning your crowdfunding campaign, and consider making it a key element in your communications, call-to-action, and visual elements.

Do you have a story about your own use of the Impact Metric? How did it impact (pun intended!) your campaign? Let us know.

Keep checking the CauseVox Blog for more in our Feature Focus series. If there’s something, in particular, you’d like to learn more about, drop us a note in the comments, to our email at support@causevox.com or on Twitter @CauseVox.