Glossary

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a simple yet effective method for measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. Participants are asked how likely they are to recommend an organization on a scale from 0 to 10. To calculate the NPS, the percentage of detractors (those rating 0-6) is subtracted from the percentage of promoters (those rating 9-10). Neutral responses (7-8) are not included in the calculation.

Originally developed by the consulting firm Bain & Company, NPS is also widely applied in the nonprofit sector. It serves as a key performance indicator (KPI) for benchmarking against other organizations and assessing the effectiveness of customer retention strategies. The NPS concept is particularly popular in the USA, where the benchmark for nonprofit organizations ranges between 30 and 50, depending on the sector. An organization with a score of 50 or more, thus demonstrates a very strong donor loyalty.

Newsletter Marketing is a subdiscipline of email marketing, focused on sending updates to donors and other target groups in the context of online fundraising. It is a key tool for charities within their digital fundraising strategy, providing donors with regular updates about the organization to build trust and strengthen long-term relationships with supporters. Smart email marketing tools can handle not only newsletters but also marketing automation tasks.

The Next-Best Action (NBA) approach focuses on user needs, motivating or prompting users to naturally take the next step in their customer journey (see CTA). The goal for the organization is to move as many users as possible to the next stage (see Lead Nurturing). In online fundraising, an NBA might involve encouraging a one-off donor into a regular contributor.

Nofollow or rel="nofollow" is an attribute value used in HTML links to signal to search engines that an external link should not be crawled and that no link equity (SEO value) should be passed through it. This attribute is commonly applied to avoid endorsing certain external sites, particularly in cases where links might be paid for, user-generated, or untrusted. It is a measure used to prevent any association with unethical practices (e.g., purchasing links), which could otherwise negatively impact a website’s ranking.

A Noindex Tag is commonly used on a website to instruct search engines not to index a specific page, preventing it from appearing in search results. The noindex directive is typically added in the head section of the HTML as a meta tag. It's important to note that pages with a noindex tag can still be crawled by search engines, but they will not be included in search result listings.

A Nonprofit CRM is a customer relationship management software specifically designed to meet the needs of fundraising organizations. It is also referred to as Donor Relationship Management. The core focus of a Nonprofit CRM is to manage and strengthen donor relationships throughout the entire lifecycle, from recruitment to retention and recovery.