How to Analyze Your Year-End Digital Campaign
I hope you've gotten some time to sit down and start to evaluate all of the data from your year-end marketing and fundraising efforts.
But what digital metrics matter most, and what can you learn from those metrics?
Let's dive in...
(Note: This post is written for most small to mid-sized nonprofits who may not have GA4 conversion events setup. If you have those setup already, chances are you already know what metrics matter most. Another post is coming soon on how to properly setup conversion events.)
We're going to use the Spark Digital Journey to understand what metrics matter most for your year-end campaign, and it breaks down into 3 pieces:
Awareness
Consideration
Action
Awareness
This piece of the digital journey is meant to track how many people became aware of your year-end campaign through your awareness channels: Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.), paid ads.
Here you should track:
Reach (Facebook, Instagram)
Impressions (LinkedIn)
Open Rate (Email)
Consideration
This data tells you how many people are engaging with and considering participating in your year-end campaign through your social media channels and your website.
Here you should track:
Engagement (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.)
Page views (Website)
Click Rate (Email)
Action
This data tells you how many people are taking your desired action on your website. This year-end campaigns this would mean making a donation.
Here you should track:
Online donations
Offline donations
Conversion Rate on donation page (Website)
What Now?
Now, you have the essential pieces of the digital journey and the metrics that are tied to each of them. But now that you have all of this data tracked, what does it mean and what action should you take as a result?
Let's take a deeper look...
For the purposes of this post, I'll be advising you to use nonprofit industry averages as a measuring stick for what decisions to make based on your data. A quick Google search for "nonprofit industry average (insert metric)" should give you those averages. Or better yet, just use Google Bard and ask it for those, and you won't have to wade through a sea of links.
Awareness:
Reach - If your Reach or Impressions are below industry averages, this could mean a couple different things:
It could mean your content isn't resonating with your audience. You may need to experiment with different post types to see what reaches the most people.
It could mean your content isn't tailored to your channel. For example, Instagram has become much more video focused. You may be able to reach more people there if you utilize video to create Reels.
It could just mean you're not posting frequently enough. For a small nonprofit, I typically recommend posting 3 times per week as a starting point, and working up from there. The higher the frequency of your posts, the higher the likelihood that your Reach will increase.
Open Rates (Email) - If your email open rates are below industry averages, this could mean a couple different things:
The most likely reason is that your subject lines aren't optimized to catch people's attention. I use this tool to test all of my subject lines and I try to score a 100% every time.
Your emails may also be going to the "Promotions" tab in Gmail. There's no perfect way to avoid this, but when people donate or subscribe to your email list, one thing you can do is ask them to reply to one of the emails in your automation workflow, and it will signal to Gmail to move future emails from your organization to the recipient's inbox.
The other tactic to getting your emails out of the "Promotions" tab is by asking recipients to drag your email from that tab to their inbox.
Low open rates could also mean that you just have a disengaged email list. This is typical if you haven't kept people engaged through email on a regular basis, but that doesn't mean you can't reverse that trend. Continue to deliver high-value content and stories to their inbox with authentic attention-grabbing subject lines and you can start to see your list become more engaged.
Consideration:
Engagement - If your engagement on social media channels is below industry average, here are some potential reasons, and some next steps:
You may not be mindful of your audience on social media. Most people follow nonprofits on social media to hear stories of impact, updates on the work, and how they can get involved. If your content is delivering something other than that, then you may not get good engagement.
The content may not be tailored for the channel. Most social media channels are very visual, so if you don't have visuals to accompany your posts, then you may get low engagement.
Click Rate & Page Views - If your click rate from either social media or email is low, it could mean:
You're just not giving people an opportunity to take further action. Not every post should be promoting or linking to your website, but if you never give people the opportunity to take that next step, then they'll only go so far on the digital journey with you.
Action:
Conversion Rate on Donation Page (Website) - Your donation page conversion rate can be calculated using the following formula: # of donations on your donation page divided by the # of page views on donation page multiplied by 100.
So for example, if you had 400 donations through your donation page for your year-end campaign, and 2,000 page views on your donation page for that same time period, your conversion rate would be 20%.
Why is this relevant?
Because if your conversion rate was .2%, that could mean a couple different things:
It could mean your donation page isn't optimized to drive donations, meaning the call to action isn't clear, or the donation form is difficult to find, etc. If you optimize the donation page then you could increase your conversion rate, thereby increasing your donations.
Or it could mean that your donation page is optimized, but you're just not driving enough traffic to the page to gain a meaningful number of donations. In which case you need to employ strategies to drive more traffic to the page from sources like social media and email.
This may seem like a lot to digest, but if you have a clear way of tracking each of these metrics on a monthly basis, you can start to see trends and make decisions about how you implement digital marketing strategies to increase your impact and grow your organization.
Digital marketing is just one piece of the puzzle, but consider this: In 2023 51% of donors researched causes and charities online before making a donation (Source: Blackbaud), BUT only 17% of organizations have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy (Source: SmartInsights).
All it could take for you to stand out among the crowd of nonprofits in 2024 is building a clear digital marketing strategy.
This article was written by a human with fingers typing on a keyboard.
