Why Nonprofits Need to Start Measuring Trust — Not Just Donations

Pamela Geller
Oct 5
3 min read

Updated: Oct 8

As donor loyalty declines, the sector’s most valuable asset—trust—remains invisible. Semora is building a new way to measure what keeps communities connected.

Nonprofits can measure dollars, clicks, and campaigns—but not connection.And that’s the problem.

Trust is now the most valuable currency in philanthropy, yet it’s the one thing most organizations can’t see. Donor files are shrinking, participation is fragile, and loyalty is harder to earn. It’s not that people stopped caring; it’s that our tools stopped listening.

Across the sector, 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. We know how to raise money, but we don’t know how to measure belonging—the feeling that keeps people showing up.

The Missing Metric

For decades, philanthropy has managed outcomes like baseball before Moneyball: tracking the score after the game instead of the stats that predict who stays in it. We celebrate dollars raised, but we rarely ask why someone gives—or why they stop.

Traditional dashboards show activity: emails sent, gifts processed, events held.What they miss is the emotional and relational health of a community.Without that visibility, communications—the very function responsible for connection—gets labeled “overhead” instead of the engine of resilience.

That’s why we’re building Semora Commons.

Making Belonging Measurable

Semora is a communications-intelligence system designed to make belonging and trust measurable.At its core is one repeatable KPI: the Belonging & Trust Score (BTS).

BTS tracks two journeys side by side:

The Action Funnel – what people do — donating, advocating, volunteering.
The Belonging Funnel – how people feel — trust, identity, and resonance.

When those lines move together, communities thrive. When they drift apart, pipelines weaken.

Our goal is to make BTS the sector’s first board-ready metric for belonging—simple enough for small teams, credible enough for funders, and powerful enough to redefine ROI from “dollars this year” to “relationships that last.”

Why Trust Must Be Measured

Trust isn’t soft. It’s infrastructure.It determines whether people believe your mission, forgive mistakes, and stay engaged when times get hard.

Research across philanthropy and behavioral science shows that belonging is the strongest predictor of long-term giving. Donors who feel connected give more frequently, advocate more boldly, and remain loyal even when economic conditions shift. Yet most organizations don’t have a shared language—or data—to understand it.

By turning trust into a measurable indicator, nonprofits can finally connect the dots between communication, participation, and revenue.They can prove what many of us have always felt: when people feel seen, they stay.

Where We Are Now

Right now, Semora is in its MVP stage, and that means the first product isn’t software—it’s listening.

Through SemoraCommons.org, we’re gathering input from nonprofit and Federation leaders to shape the first version of the Belonging & Trust Score.Together, we’re testing survey language, refining the core questions, and ensuring that measurement serves people—not algorithms.

This early collaboration will form the foundation for the Semora Core Index and, eventually, the dashboards that connect belonging data to donor pipelines in real time.

How You Can Be Part of It

If you lead a nonprofit—or simply care about how we rebuild connection in a fractured age—we invite you to add your voice.Tell us what belonging means in your community. Share where trust feels strong and where it’s slipping.

Your feedback will shape a framework that any organization can use to see what truly drives participation and loyalty.

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

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