Before We Lose Trust: Why Nonprofits Need a New Way to Measure Belonging

Every nonprofit leader can tell you how much money came in last year.Fewer can tell you whether their community still feels alive.

Across the sector, donor files are shrinking. Fewer than half of donors renew each year. First-time retention hovers below 20 percent. Jewish Federations once supported by nearly a million households now count fewer than half that number. It’s not that people stopped caring. It’s that our tools stopped listening.

For decades, we’ve managed philanthropy like baseball before Moneyball: tracking the score after the game instead of the stats that predict who stays in it. We measure dollars raised, not trust earned. We track clicks and gifts, but not connection. We’ve built dashboards that tell us everything except the one thing that keeps communities together: belonging.

The Problem Isn’t People — It’s the System

The nonprofit world knows how to build relationships in person — coffee meetings, community events, shared purpose — but online, we lose the plot.Our CRMs measure activity, not relationship. Our messages talk at people instead of with them. And without a shared metric for belonging and trust, communications — the very function responsible for connection — keeps getting written off as “overhead.”

We need a better language. One that helps organizations see what’s working, repair what’s not, and prove that connection is the real engine of growth.

Our Solution: A Simple KPI for a Complex World

That’s why we’re building Semora — a communications-intelligence system that helps cause-based organizations see, measure, and strengthen belonging at every step of the journey.

At the center is one repeatable measure: the Belonging & Trust Score (BTS).It tracks two journeys side by side: the Action Funnel (donations and advocacy) and the Belonging Funnel (trust, identity, resonance). When the two move together, communities thrive. When they drift apart, pipelines weaken.

Our goal is to make BTS the sector’s first board-ready KPI for belonging — the same way Gallup gave workplaces the Q12 and Edelman gave institutions the Trust Barometer.

Where We Are Now

Right now, we’re in the MVP stage — and that means the first product isn’t software.It’s this website.

SemoraCommons.org is the listening post — the place where nonprofit and Federation leaders can help shape what the Belonging & Trust Score should capture, test language, and share what belonging means in their own communities. The insights gathered here will shape the first version of the Semora Core Index and guide how we measure belonging in a way that’s useful, credible, and fair.

If you work in communications, development, or community engagement, we’d love your perspective.This project will only work if it’s built with — not for — the people doing the work.

Why It Matters

Belonging isn’t soft. It’s infrastructure.It’s what keeps organizations resilient when the world gets noisy or divided.It’s the difference between a donor base that drifts away and one that shows up again and again.

When we can measure belonging, we can strengthen it.When we strengthen it, we build communities that hold.

Because the future of philanthropy won’t be written in spreadsheets.It will be written in trust, belonging, and the stories that bring us together.

Add your voice → [Share feedback on the MVP survey].