Technology is all about the Eyeballs

Submitted by Brett on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 7:58am.
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Jeremy Heffner, Avencia

[Ed. note: This article is part of NTEN's Member Appreciation Month spectacular. The most popular pieces will be featured in our newsletter. You can read all the details here.]

While working at NPower PA, I was often surprised by the nonprofits we were serving and and how they were using metrics. Some could tell us how many hits they expected on their new website (sometimes), but not what traffic source was driving donations. Others could tell us how many donors they needed to store in their new database, but not what the results of an email campaign had been. They knew the power that technology could unlock, but some had a hard time understanding how to tap that power.

Nonprofit technology is about eyeballs -- attracting eyeballs, engaging eyeballs, and reporting on eyeballs. Whether the goal is to raise funds, advocate for a cause, or engage constituents, it is all about eyeballs. And here is the thing, we don't spend enough time figuring out how to analyze those eyeballs.

Most of the tools we need to be successful today are free, we just need to find the time to use them -- and yes they take time and effort. Take Google's AdWords grant program for instance. Anyone who has spent time in AdWords knows it takes time to learn what a Quality Score means and even more time to find the right keyword that is well targeted but yet drives enough traffic to be worthwhile. If you ask an organization if they want 10,000 more visitors a month on their website, they tend to say yes, but for some it is difficult to explain what results they would expect from the added traffic.

A recent New York Times article outlined the increasing value of Statisticians in society. This sort of data-driven decision-making is becoming more critical to success and requires having staff with the skill set to interpret data. So here is my challenge to the nonprofit sector:

  1. See how many of these questions you can currently answer
  2. Decide what unanswered questions have the most value to you and implement the tools you need to be able to answer them
  3. Hire, train, bribe, beg, and experiment until you have the in-house skill sets you need to focus on data-driven decisions

A lot of smart people are thinking about these issues with tremendous results, but let me outline some tools I have used in my quest to be more data-driven (even at my current job, which is not a nonprofit). After all, what use are myriads of eyeballs, if we can't see.

My eyeball generating and tracking toolbox:

  • Website
    • What sources drive our online donations?
      • Google Analytics provides website tracking quite easily, but spending the time to setup e-commerce functionality for your donation processing allows real ROI calculations to emerge.
    • How do visitors who do X on our website differ from general visitors?
      • The advanced segmentation functionality in Google Analytics lets you define visitor segments based on actions -- visiting a particular page, being from a particular geography, etc.
    • What would an extra 1,000 web visitors a month mean to the organization based on our current statistics?
      • Use the reporting in Analytics to create a custom report that summarizes the metrics you care about and schedule it to go out monthly. Track what these theoretical 1,000 visitors mean to your organization over time to improve their usefulness.
  • Email
    • What happens after a constituent clicks on our email links?
      • By using an email client that adds Analytics tagged links to your email, you'll be able to segment email driven traffic and see what users actually do.
    • What time of day / what subject line format / what content format drives the most engagement with our email?
      • By experimenting with simple A/B split tests an organization can figure out the answers to these questions. It also doesn't hurt when your email system provides some native testing functionality.
    • What is a new email address worth to us?
      • While buying email lists isn't necessarily the best use of funds, knowing what the lifetime worth of an email address can help drive decisions. Does it make sense to spend time driving traffic toward email list sign-ups based on the worth you calculate?
  • Database