Your board gets two MPD numbers: how many staff you sent and how much they raised.
Both are lagging indicators. By the time either one moves, the decisions that caused the movement are twelve to eighteen months old. If you want your board conversation to be about steering rather than reporting, you need four different numbers.
1. Time to full funding, by cohort
Not the average across everyone who has ever raised support. Cohort by cohort, measured in weeks from MPD launch to 100%.
Cohorts are the right unit because they share training, coaching staff, economic conditions, and organizational messaging. When you change your MPD curriculum, the cohort that trained under the new version is your experiment and the previous cohort is your control. Without cohort tracking you are changing things and hoping.
Report it as a median, not a mean. One person who took three years to fund will distort a mean badly, and that person is a story, not a trend.
What good looks like: the industry conversation generally puts full funding somewhere between four months and a year depending on goal size, training quality, and whether the person raises support full time. Your target is not a benchmark from another organization. It is your own median trending down.
2. Ask to commitment rate
Of every partnership appointment where an ask is made, what percentage produce a commitment?
This is the single most diagnostic number in support raising, and almost nobody tracks it, because tracking it requires staff to log an outcome for every appointment including the ones that went badly. That logging discipline is a cultural problem before it is a software problem, but the payoff is large: it separates staff who need more appointments from staff who need better ones.
Someone with a 15% close rate does not need a bigger list. Someone with a 55% close rate and nine appointments a month does not need more coaching on their ask. Without this number you will give both of them the same advice.
3. Monthly partner attrition
What percentage of monthly commitments lapse in a given year?
Every sending organization tracks the money coming in. Very few track the money quietly leaving. A staff member at 100% funding with 22% annual partner attrition is not at 100% funding. They are on a treadmill, and they will be back in MPD next year whether or not you schedule it.
Attrition is also the number that most rewards attention, because reactivating a lapsed partner costs a fraction of what acquiring a new one does, and lapsed partners are already qualified. They said yes once.
Split it two ways: attrition by staff tenure, and attrition by partner tenure. Staff in their first two years usually lose partners faster, which tells you something about follow-up habits. Partners in their first year lapse faster than partners in their fifth, which tells you where to put your onboarding effort.
4. Communication cadence compliance
What percentage of your staff sent a partner update in the last 60 days?
This is the leading indicator for number three. Partner attrition is overwhelmingly a communication failure, not a giving-capacity failure. People do not stop supporting a missionary because they ran out of money. They stop because the relationship went quiet and the recurring charge started feeling like a subscription they forgot to cancel.
The number is easy to gather and uncomfortable to look at. Most organizations who measure it for the first time find that a third of their roster has not sent anything in a quarter.
Why these four and not others
Each of the four maps to a decision a leader can actually make.
- Time to full funding tells you whether to change your training.
- Ask to commitment rate tells you whether to invest in coaching or in list building.
- Partner attrition tells you whether your growth is real or is offsetting losses.
- Cadence compliance tells you where to intervene before attrition shows up.
Total dollars raised tells you nothing you can act on. It is the score, not the game.
The reporting cadence
Monthly for cadence compliance, because it is the one you can fix inside 30 days. Quarterly for ask rate and attrition. Per cohort for time to full funding. Put all four on one page. If your board report is longer than a page, nobody reads the second one.
How Karani helps: Three of these four numbers depend on data your staff are already generating and nobody is aggregating. Karani captures appointment outcomes, gift history, and communication activity at the individual level and rolls it up to the organization, so the monthly report is a report rather than a research project. Let's book a walkthrough!