This week, as part of Member Appreciation Month, we're talking about technology that supports communications and information, so I thought I'd share some of the metrics we use to track our effectiveness that don't really warrant a complete blog post in-and-of themselves.

We'd also love to hear about your favorite metrics. Share with us, and we'll pick a commenter at random to win a prize.

E-mail Metrics

Click by Interest. Aggregating data over time will give you a much clearer picture of your subscribers' interests. Let's say you work for an animal welfare organization. You may send out 10 e-mails featuring cats, 10 about dogs, 5 with a picture of a horse, and so on. If you start broadly, sending every message to your full list, you should be able to go back and aggregate the clicks they generate across your subscriber base. You'll probably find some supporters who click-through equally from everything you send – but also some who click 7 of the cat messages but only 2 of the dog. So, build a list of people who respond to cats and target your cat messages at them. You can do the same for message opens, but clicks will be a better indicator of engagement. (We do this with CRMs, web sites, and all sorts of geeky goodness, but, as with most things, cats make a better example.)

Click-through by Open. Awhile back, I wrote about "Unweighted Open Rates"; "Click-through by Open" is that metric's compatriot: a measure of how effective your copy is at generating an action. The general open rate calculation – links clicked ÷ messages delivered – is fine for monitoring the general health of your lists. But you'll also want to know which messages resonate with your subscribers. That's why we keep track of the subset of folks who open a message and click-through: unique links clicked ÷ unique message openers.

You'll find that this number is fairly stable across messages for the most part, so it's the outliers you want to analyze. If your average click-through by open is 15% – if 100 people open a message on average, 15 click-through – but you suddenly get a 42%, you'll want to take a close look at the content to try to figure out what made your subscribers respond.

Web Analytics

E-mail Campaigns: Okay, I've already written a full post about this, but it's important enough to warrant another paragraph. By including tracking codes in the links you send out, you build a bridge between the data in your email platform and your web site analytics. Here's how to do it. And you really should. We code almost every link we send out. I especially like to look at the "% New Visits" metric, to find the topics that are encouraging more people to look into NTEN's resources.

Hourly Visitors: Google Analytics now lets you see your website traffic on an hourly basis (if only in the "Visitors" section). To get the most bang for your buck, post content during high traffic times. Your results may vary, but we generally see the most traffic around 11:00 am Eastern, then again at 11:00 am Pacific. Towards the end of the session submission process for the 2012 NTC in August, I could see that folks were coming back from lunch and finally deciding to cross that off their to-do lists.

Social Media Engagement: The latest GA also lets you track how your website visitors interact with the various social media widgets on your site – and it just goes to show there's always something to learn. In making the screenshots for this piece, I was surprised to see how many people use the "Share This" widget instead of the straight "Like" or "Tweet" buttons. They even use the "Email Share" feature. People still send links to each other via email?

Social Media

Percent of Conversation: It helps to know how much people are talking about you in the social media spaces; it helps even more to know how much they're talking about you vis-a-vis the other players in your space. If your org uses Facebook to raise money for animal adoptions, even if 50 shares are a record for you, is that a good number comparatively? Make a list of the other organizations doing something similar with social media, track their number of mentions, and throw them all into a spreadsheet with your own. If another org is getting 1,000 mentions in the same time frame, you need to do some work on your outreach.

Staff Engagement: Everybody at NTEN is encouraged – some might say required – to comment on other nonprofit tech blogs. We track the number of comments we leave elsewhere each week in the belief that by engaging more actively with our community, they're more likely to engage with us. Also, the community knows more than we do individually, so we need to keep up with what you're doing in the space.

So, how about engaging more with us right now, by telling us about your favorite metric? One comment will be selected at random to receive a fabulous prize.