When UJC approached the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington to participate in UJC's Federation Peer Yardstick (FPY) pilot, the federation's leadership was intrigued. UJC staff explained that FPY would offer information on the performance of other federations and insights into statistical relationships between federations’ activities and their fundraising outcomes. The Washington federation signed onto the pilot program and, based on what they learned, implemented new strategies to increase their donor base and successfully changed how they cultivated and solicited top donors and how they raised money from board members of beneficiary agencies.

“Federation Peer Yardstick was extremely helpful to us in benchmarking against our peers and in seeing if the areas we were planning to focus on had already paid off for other federations,” said Misha Galperin, executive vice president and CEO of the Washington federation. “It also helped validate our efforts in a concrete way that we could show to agency boards.”

The federation has participated in FPY activities since the initial pilot study in 2004, through a second round of intensive data collection and analysis in 2006, and a new initiative involving surveys of agency leadership and mid-level donors in 2007.

“Using data and customer survey information is critical in our business,” added Galperin, “We have a hard time comparing ourselves to other institutions because we are so unique. Businesses use these types of tools all the time, but until now, federations have been unable to do this. The robust data we get from Federation Peer Yardstick is invaluable for the whole system.”

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Contact Annette Powers at 212-284-6625 or annette.powers@ujc.org