Guest post by Philip Schmitz
As a nonprofit leader, you know that effective marketing is the key to raising support for your mission. Your organization’s marketing data is a powerful resource for guiding and optimizing your outreach efforts.
Analyzing fundraising data is critical to your nonprofit’s growth, but understanding and tracking marketing metrics reveals the strength of your engagement. Ensuring your messaging is hitting the right people at the right time with communications that resonate can improve reach, engagement, and impact.
The result? You’ll optimize your campaigns, attract more donors, and strengthen the bonds with your supporter base. Data-informed marketing will make fundraising easier and more effective. Here are five key metrics that will give you the data you need!
Image by Merhan Saeed from Pixabay
1. Total online donations
Any donation your nonprofit receives via your online donation form is an online donation. Most often, every communication channel you use (text, email, mail, even direct-response television) drives the audience to your donation page, where your form lives. So, online donation forms will be where most donations start unless it’s a mailed check, donated cash, or an in-kind gift.
Tracking these trends can give you accurate insight into the health of your campaigns. Not only will you want to look at your total online donations, but you’ll want to drill down deeper and see where that traffic comes from. If, for example, an email drives a significant number of donations, you might choose to double down on email in your next campaign.
A nonprofit CRM should help you track donated dollars and details about specific donations like donation matching or sustainer subscribing. Plus, these tools can help you segment donations by campaign, donor demographics, or other categories for deeper insights.
2. Website traffic
Notably, your website traffic data reveals how many visitors clicked on your URL. It also tells you which pages visitors viewed, how long they stayed on your site, and how they found it (such as a Google search, social media, or a direct link from an email.)
Analyzing website traffic gives insight into your supporters’ behavior, preferences, and engagement. In turn, you can share the content that guides them through the donor lifecycle and triggers conversions.
To track website traffic, your nonprofit should evaluate:
- Total visits: Total visits, or sessions, measure the overall number of times people access your website, even if it’s multiple visits from the same person. Tools like Google Analytics can show you the total visits to your website.
- Unique visitors: Contrasting with total visits, tracking unique visitors means you do not count the same person multiple times. This metric represents individual users who access your site and are counted only once during a specific timeframe.
- Page views: This number will show you which pages on your website are the most popular. It measures the total number of times pages are viewed, even if it’s repeat visits.
The easiest way to track website activity is to use a free tool like Google Analytics. Set it up to track your website and monitor various metrics to detect patterns and trends over time. Google Analytics also gives you insights into visitor demographics, traffic sources, and user engagement, which will help you better understand your audience.
If you start tracking your website traffic and are underwhelmed by the numbers, there are a few ways you can improve. For starters, you can leverage Google’s Ad Grant program, which is a free version of Google Ads for eligible nonprofits.
According to Getting Attention’s Google Ad Grant guide, the grant gives $10,000 in free monthly advertising credits, which can be used to bid on different keywords and promote specific webpages through text-based ads on the SERPs for those keywords. This way, potential donors can find your website naturally when they search for related terms on Google.
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3. Click-through rate (CTR)
Email click-through rate (CTR) tracks the percentage of people who click on one or more links in an email. This can indicate what information your audience is interested in learning more about or what resources they’re looking for. It’s a measurement of how much constituents engage with your content.
Most CRMs will track CTR for you, but you can also track it yourself using this simply formula:
- (Number of clicks on links/Number of emails delivered) x 100
For example, let’s say you send 1,000 emails, and 50 people click on the links within them:
- (50/1,000) x 100 = 5% CTR
If your CTR is falling short, your fundraising software is the perfect tool to help. A CRM tracks CTR and helps you optimize your campaigns to send better emails. According to CharityEngine, this platform can conduct A/B testing and automate emails to ensure you send your best email yet.
4. Conversion rate
A conversion is measured when someone takes the action you hope they will. Conversions can include any goal of your email campaigns, donation forms, or other communications—The action that constitutes a “conversion” depends on the channel you’re focusing on.
For example, you could measure donations as conversions on your donation page, while email conversions could refer to newsletter signups. Here are some other conversion rates you might track:
- Email links: Visibility and conversions are two different things. Track whether those who opened your emails took the desired action by following the links included.
- Donation form completion: It is important to know how often users click on your donation form, but it’s more important to see how many of those clicks result in a donation. Seeing where they abandoned the form can also illuminate areas of friction you can fix.
- Google Ads: A Google Ads conversion is when someone clicks on the ad and completes the desired action, such as making a donation. Tracking these conversions shows you how effective and engaging your ads are.
Calculate conversion rates by dividing the total number of conversions by the total visitors and multiplying it by 100.
5. Social media engagement
Social media engagement is critical to assess your reach and identify your audience’s interests. You’ll track different metrics for each social media channel, such as:
- Clicks and conversions: This will measure actions like clicking on a link in a post, which indicates the user wants to learn more about your cause or campaign. If the call to action is to donate, that will also be recorded.
- Shares and reposts: If users share or repost your content on their own accounts, it increases your reach and visibility and indicates you’ve published something that sparked interest with your audience.
- Comments or replies: This measures responses to your post and demonstrates interest or the desire to prompt conversations.
Be careful to track metrics that truly reflect your nonprofit’s social media presence. For example, one of your followers might like a Facebook post about your year-end giving campaign, but this doesn’t mean they’ll commit to giving in December. Instead, track those who clicked the link to your donation page.
As you track these metrics and see trends evolve over time, you’ll learn to adjust your campaigns and outreach to be more effective. Depending on the data, this might mean you invest more in text-to-give or pull back on it.
Regularly reviewing data and refining your approach ensures that your efforts are aligned with your goals and your audience’s needs. This ensures that your nonprofit has the tools to make informed, impactful choices.
Phil Schmitz is the founder and CEO of CharityEngine, a complete fundraising platform powering some of the nation’s largest nonprofits and associations. Phil has developed patent-pending anti-fraud tools and industry-leading recurring payment technology that allows nonprofits to retain more sustainer revenue than the industry average; clients have raised nearly $5 billion using these tools. Phil’s passion for leveraging technology to empower nonprofits is supported by more than 20 years of experience in building successful technology and e-commerce companies.
