[GUEST POST] Data for Nonprofits: 5 Online Engagement Metrics to Track
GUEST POST:
We value collaboration, accessibility, and the sharing of ideas and expertise to allow more organizations to uplevel their fundraising, improve donor relations, and increase fiscal sustainability. We are delighted to share our inaugural guest post by Craig Grella of Salsa Labs.
Data for Nonprofits: 5 Online Engagement Metrics to Track
No matter the size, scope, or mission of your nonprofit, increasing and maintaining engagement should be prioritized — especially when it comes to engaging major and legacy donors on a limited budget. Successfully encouraging supporters to interact is crucial for spreading awareness about your cause, raising money, and securing volunteer support. As such, nonprofits should pay close attention to the metrics that indicate how well they are connecting with their supporters.
After more than a year of all virtual interaction, you need to take stock of your ability to engage your committed supporters online if you haven’t already been doing so. Online channels are vital for communicating with your donors, volunteers, and advocates, particularly those who invest substantially in your cause.
We’ve taken a few of the most essential online engagement metrics from our Salsa guide to nonprofit key performance indicators, and we’re here to explain what they are and why they’re so important for your organization to track. Here’s what we’ll cover:
Email open rate
Email click-through rate (CTR)
Conversion rates
Social media interactions
Planned giving data
Reaching supporters online can help you meet (and exceed!) your nonprofit’s goals, and analyzing these metrics will give you insight into the best steps to enhance all interactions with current and potential supporters. Let’s dive in.
1. Email open rate
Nonprofits heavily rely on email to reach current and prospective supporters. Whether you’re using email marketing to acquire new supporters or engage existing ones, open rate is an important metric to measure and to assess the efficacy of your outreach.
Your email open rate indicates the percentage of people who open a given email out of the total number of people who received that email. Email open rate gives you an idea of who is interested in the content of your emails, not just who receives them.
When you’re looking at your email open rate, consider what recipients see before they open an email. The fields that are visible on an unopened email are:
The sender’s name or email address
The subject line
A brief preview of the email’s text
These are the fields that every recipient will see when an email arrives in their inbox, so focus on improving these featured details to increase your open rate. For instance, is your subject line personalized and enticing? Could you change the name of the sender to better connect with recipients?
Experimenting with A/B testing can help you reach an optimal marketing configuration. A/B testing is the process of changing one variable at a time to see if the change leads to a more desirable outcome.
For example, in a marketing campaign targeted at legacy donors, you may send one batch of emails with your organization listed as the sender and another batch of emails with a well-known individual (likely your major gifts officer) listed as the sender.
Keeping everything else the same, the results should tell you which sender name leads to increased open rates and better outcomes for your organization. Continue experimenting with the other fields, like subject line and text preview, to arrive at even better results. Don’t forget about the timing of the email as well, which can also influence open rate and the overall success of your marketing efforts.
Along with other email metrics, open rate can help you refine your messages and improve fundraising and engagement.
2. Email click-through rate (CTR)
Nonprofits use email to communicate with supporters about many engagement opportunities. Regardless of the specific purpose of the email, your nonprofit should always include links that encourage supporters to deepen their involvement. For example, you can encourage supporters to interact by linking to the following pages:
Donation forms
Volunteer sign-up forms
Your planned giving information page (particularly effective for major donors)
Blog posts
Your organization’s social media accounts
When someone clicks on a link in your email, that counts as a “click-through.” Accordingly, “click-through rate” describes the percentage of email recipients who click on a link or image in your email. Note that click-through rate is not taken as a percentage of people who opened the email, but rather, it considers everyone who received the email, regardless of whether or not they opened it.
If your click-through rate is lower than expected, consider the personalization of your emails. You can use your nonprofit CRM software to create personalized emails that reference supporters’ names, engagement history, and other key details to create a tailored communication experience.
Personalizing outreach will make your content more relevant to any given audience, increasing the likelihood that they will read and engage with your content. For instance, someone who consistently gives $3,000 each year will likely be more responsive to planned giving appeals than a one-time donor who only gave $20.
Another way to enhance your CTR is to make sure your digital communication strategy intentionally drives the audience to take action. Can you draw more attention to your calls-to-action with more streamlined design? Is there more powerful and attention-grabbing language you can use to drive your audience to click through?
3. Conversion rates
Once a supporter has opened your email and clicked through to a page on your website, the next step is conversion. “Conversion” generally refers to the completion of a desired action. The exact action depends on your nonprofit’s current goals but often includes activities such as:
Donating
Sharing a link or post
Subscribing to a newsletter
Signing up to volunteer
Signing a petition
To successfully convert, a supporter must go all the way through the necessary steps to finalize their engagement. Depending on the action, this could mean filling out an entire donation form and clicking “submit,” entering personal information to volunteer and clicking “sign up,” or filling in their email address and clicking “subscribe.”
The data you use to calculate your conversion rate will provide insight into what steps you need to take to improve results. One popular application of conversion rate is to calculate your organization’s landing page conversion rates. “Landing pages” refer to the pages that users land on when they click a call-to-action, like “Donate now” or “Get involved.” They are often configured to collect information about the user and then finalize the user’s engagement with another click of a button.
Landing page conversion rate can provide insight into how well your nonprofit’s landing page is functioning to drive your audience to convert. High click-through rates but low conversion rates indicate that supporters are arriving on your landing pages but failing to complete the intended action. This could signal a possible weakness in the layout, design, or content of your landing page.
Landing pages should prioritize simplicity and ease-of-use to maximize conversions, but landing page conversion rate is not the only application of conversion rate. For example, you may want to know how an email campaign impacted conversions to get a big picture view of the campaign.
In order to do this, you can create a unique landing page as the click-through target for a specific email campaign. Then, divide the number of conversions by the number of emails sent in that campaign to get that email’s conversion rate. For example, let’s say you email 1,000 potential volunteers and get 55 sign-ups. The conversion rate of that email is 5.5% (55/1000*100% = 5.5%).
Consider if that same page was used in a social media post’s call-to-action and drove 300 visitors to the landing page. If 9 people signed up to volunteer, that social post would have a conversion rate of 3% (9/300*100% = 3%).
You can compare conversion rates of the different communication methods you use to determine which marketing method is likely the most effective for the type of action you are promoting.
4. Social media interactions
According to Double the Donation’s nonprofit fundraising statistics report, content on social media inspires donors to give to charitable organizations more than other communication channels such as email, direct mail, and website content. Social media is a valuable channel for your nonprofit to raise awareness, drive donations, and increase engagement with your organization’s website — whether you’re focused on increasing awareness of or participation in your planned giving program, volunteer events, or some other area of your organization.
In general, your nonprofit should seek to reach as many people as possible with the content you post on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. With every post or campaign you promote on social media, pay attention to the metrics it generates, including:
Likes: To get an idea of the reach of your social media post as well as the figurative “applause” it gets, pay attention to likes. Posts that receive more likes clearly resonate more with your audience, so try to learn from posts that do well in this arena. Pay attention to details like the kinds of visuals you incorporate, amount of text you use, and types of content you share, and note how each one influences the number of likes you receive.
Shares: Shares greatly amplify your nonprofit’s message and reach. See what type of posts get the most shares, and try to learn from those posts as well. What tone do you use in them? Are they more interactive than others? For example, you may discover you get more shares on video content, which should encourage your team to create and post more videos. Take a look at your network’s analytics and try to determine the time when most of your content is being shared. If there is a specific time of day when your followers are online, you can better plan future posts when your audience is most likely to engage.
Comments: Inspiring conversation is another desirable outcome of nonprofits’ social media posts. This means your content is relevant enough to warrant a discussion, which encourages engagement among supporters as well as between supporters and your organization. Actively keep up with replies on your social media posts to directly interact with your audience.
As fundraising has shifted to the virtual sphere, it’s especially important to engage with your audience on social media. Doing so will help you spread awareness about your mission and acquire more supporters over time.
5. Planned giving data
Metrics that reflect the efficacy of various organizations’ planned giving programs have evolved over time. Organizations need to make the case for planned giving to make their efforts worth the investment and to get other team members involved in planned giving efforts.
Traditionally, these metrics have been dollar-based. That is, how much was raised in realized bequest income, life-income gifts, and so on? Dollar-oriented performance metrics don’t necessarily address the whole picture though. Planned giving requires a substantial time investment. It might be years before you ever see evidence of a return on investment, and in some cases, it may be difficult to determine the anticipated size of a planned gift, such as in the case of an estate gift that requires the donor to provide an estimate.
For that reason among others, the planned giving metrics that organizations track have shifted significantly from dollars raised to activity based on the assumption that the right engagement will result in dollars later on. However, you should still measure the dollars your planned giving program brings in.
Some obvious (and not-so-obvious) ways to measure your planned giving program’s performance with your online fundraising and marketing tools include:
Click-through rates for planned giving emails
Clicks on your planned giving webpages
The average time spent viewing your site’s planned giving pages
Number of new program members each year
Increases in the dollar amount of planned gifts
Requests for information and follow-up
Of course, there are plenty more metrics your team should be monitoring — both online and offline. It’s just a matter of determining which metrics your team thinks will best reflect the growth of your program.
Online engagement is vital to every nonprofit’s success. To objectively measure the success of your outreach, make sure you are tracking and analyzing these five data points. By regularly maintaining this data and drawing insightful conclusions, you’ll empower your nonprofit with the most accurate information that can guide your future fundraising and outreach efforts. Good luck!
Author: Craig Grella
Craig Grella is a Content Marketer at Salsa Labs, the premier software for growth-focused nonprofits that combines CRM and engagement software with embedded best practices, machine learning, and world-class education and support. In his role, he serves thousands of nonprofits and advocacy organizations across the U.S.
Craig focuses on digital strategy using email marketing, online advertising campaigns, SMS campaigns, CRM management, reporting/analytics for KPIs, and more. He’s also the founder of Think Big Campaigns, a full-service consulting firm that specializes in political consulting, digital organizing, and issue advocacy.