Why Your Organization Needs a Nonprofit Competitive Review
How a Nonprofit Competitive Review Can Help You Increase Donor Support
In this month's blog, guest contributor Amanda Forr of Element A discusses a nonprofit competitive review to secure more donor dollars.
Many nonprofit leaders walk a tightrope. Each day, they’re asked to balance their organization’s role as a collaborative community partner with their need to secure donor dollars while their nonprofit friends are doing the same.
The good news is that those needs don’t fly in the face of one another; as long as you understand your donor and community landscapes, you’ll be able to do both successfully. And understanding that landscape starts with deeply understanding your fellow nonprofits. There’s a lot we can learn from one another.
This month, I’m here to introduce the need for regular comparative reviews in the nonprofit landscape as a way to successfully fundraise while nurturing your collective community at the same time.
Understanding Your Landscape is Crucial to the Growth of Your Organization
Commonly known as competitive reviews, another way of framing this exercise is comparative reviews. Because that’s exactly what you’re doing; comparing how your organization measures up to others in the eyes of donors. More specifically, comparative reviews can help you:
Understand current best practices
Benchmark your organization against others in your space
Be inspired!
Learn the key areas in which your organization must grow.
Achieving this deeper level of visibility into your landscape will help you start to define your competitive edge.
Who Should You Take a Look At? There Are a Few Ways to Find Out.
There’s more than one way to evaluate your landscape. Choosing your criteria will depend on your organization’s objectives. Examples include organizations with a similar:
Mission or area of focus
Overlapping geographic reach
Size (measured by either operations or revenue)
Target audience
Aspiration and inspiration
Strategies for Conducting Your Nonprofit Competitive Review
If this all sounds great, but you’re unsure where to begin, follow my roadmap below. I give this same roadmap to my nonprofit clients to help them think strategically about their place within their landscape.
Establish Your Objective
What do you want to better understand through your review? In other words, what’s your business objective for this analysis? The answer will help shape your focus and identify the proper organizations to assess.
Choose 4 to 6 Organization
First, choose one to two obvious targets. These could be organizations offering similar services or that are focused on similar objectives. For the rest, cast a wider net. Organizations that come up regularly in your work and that you may view as strategic partners or those with a similar mission should be added to your list.
Look at Organizations that are Similar in Scale
Unless your purpose is purely aspirational or you simply want to generate new and exciting ideas, comparing your work to an organization with 10x the resources can be pretty demoralizing. Focus on those with similar reach so you’re making apples-to-apples comparisons.
Create a Template
Detail your evaluation criteria and the questions you hope to answer. This is the one instance in my work when I love a good spreadsheet to organize my findings. Get creative here! You can look at strategic focus, operational information, marketing and communications efforts, financials, and any other publicly available information. The more detailed your template, the better positioned you’ll be when you begin your review.
Assume the ‘Role of Audience’
Pretend you’re new to your community, industry, and organization. This will help you review the organizations objectively as you dig through and compare each of their websites, social media accounts, Google search results, and annual reports, among other data sources.
Remember to Take a Look at Yourself!
You need something to compare to. Put your organization through the same comparative review process, and you just might be surprised at what you find.
Start Your Analysis
Now that you’ve captured your data and your spreadsheet is packed, note what surprises you. Did you learn anything about the questions you answered? Can you identify the top, medium, and low performers in each category? This step is all about identifying commonalities among your findings, from which you can start to extract insights.
Activate Your Findings
Based on your objectives, determine the five most important findings and how you’ll use each one to take action toward your goals. For instance, perhaps your marketing language is too similar to that of another organization, causing confusion for donors. Your next step could be to revisit and refine your marketing language to better differentiate your value in your community.
Competitive Reviews Make One Thing Clear: There Are Many Paths to Success
What I love most about nonprofit competitive reviews is that they reveal many paths to success. You’ll be amazed by what you learn after completing your review, and you’ll be armed with the clarity to reach your donors and create a greater impact within your community.
I encourage your organization to start your competitive review soon and move through the rest of 2024 with more clarity. And if you need support to get things started, I’m here to help.
Happy reviewing!
Amanda
About The Author
Amanda Forr, the founder of Element A, has built a career dedicated to the idea that carefully chosen words are meaningful and can drive progress. As a writer, editor, and strategist, Amanda transforms research and data findings into actionable insights and strategic plans. She also tells stories, bringing voices and perspectives to light in authentic and insightful ways.