Crowdfunding can be an overwhelming process. Picking a platform, learning how it works and even amplifying reach all seem like pretty daunting tasks, but they don’t have to be.
At Make Giving Happen, digital giving is our specialty. We work with our customers to personalize their digital giving strategies to amplify reach and deepen impact. For our first post of 2020, we’ve come up with helpful tips and tricks to help you amplify your crowdfunding campaign with the help of Google Analytics.
Develop a personalized Marketing Strategy
As a marketer, you are likely searching for new ways you can improve your non-profit’s presence in the digital world. Most, if not all, organizations have begun to shift their focus to a hyper-personalization approach to customers and donors by creating more individualized content to donors through data collection and analytics. The end-goal is to engage with prospective donors by communicating with each as an individual and reach out to them with giving campaigns that will mean the most to them.
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that can help to achieve this goal.
How does Google Analytics help?
Since your website is the central hub of your digital presence, Google Analytics is the best way to have a holistic overview of your marketing efforts and the effectiveness of your digital campaigns. Having access to captured website data (like geolocation, demographics, and CTRs) helps to inform your decision making and enables you to act upon insight and results.
With a bit of analysis, you can use your data to boost traffic and convert traffic into donations. Google Analytics also allows you to keep a close eye on your return on investment (ROI) and based on this, it helps you to understand what you should keep doing and creating and what isn’t worth your time and effort. (Donorbox, 2018)
Create a Google Analytics Measurement Plan for your Non-Profit
To gauge the effectiveness of your non-profit website you need to begin with a measurement plan that outlines clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). In most cases, increasing donations is a suitable goal and measuring the traffic and drop off rate on the Donation page are good KPIs. Without a proper plan, all the data can be overwhelming. A successful plan should implement the following 5 stages:
- Outline your charitable objectives
- Align your online strategies and tactics
- Define your KPIs
- Segment Data
- Set appropriate targets
Once this plan is in place, you’re ready to get started!
Outline your charitable objectives
The objective of the measurement plan is to determine the best way to make your website work for your organization. Ask yourself, how can the website help me achieve my organization’s goal either directly or indirectly? Let’s use a University crowdfunding platform as an example. For the development of a crowdfunding campaign, the objective needs to be clear and concise. In most cases, it will be in line with the organization’s mission statement.
Objective: To provide students, staff, alumni and friends with a crowdfunding platform they can use to support their education and make unique contributions to the University community collectively.
Align your online strategies and tactics
Think about the strategies that best align with your objectives and how best to achieve your goal. Be sure to prioritize carefully.
Let’s say that your priority strategies are to:
- Raise money
- Increase brand awareness and recognition
- Increase visitor engagement
- Collect leads
For these strategies to work, you’ll need to employ the right tactics on their site. Here’s how the measurement plan could start off:
Table source: (Whitefuse)
Define your KPIs
Next, it’s time to think about key performance indicators, or KPI’s. These are the measurements of the effectiveness of your chosen strategies and tactics. Google Analytics allows you to review these numbers and regularly calculate your success rates.
Table source: (Whitefuse)
Segment data into meaningful streams
Now that you have these metrics, the data needs to be segmented into meaningful streams. This enables you to determine which streams are working and which are not and use this data to inform future marketing strategies. The typical methods of segmentation are:
- Demographics (age, gender)
- Device type (mobile, desktop, tablet)
- Location (country, region, city)
- Traffic Source (referral, organic search, social, paid search, etc.)
Data segmentation can even help you to spot and correct errors on your website that may have slipped through Quality Assurance. A common way to spot errors is to segment by browser type or by Android vs iOS. These reports usually identify disparities in how your website may load on different devices.
Set targets that make sense
Target must always be S.M.A.R.T
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Result-focused
- Time-bound
The first time around after implementing the measurement plan, your targets may not be very useful without anything to compare them to. The real benefit comes from the feedback loop. Once the plan is in place, see how the audience responds. Don’t be afraid to change and adapt. Through reiteration, continuous analysis, and improvement, you will refine the measurement plan over time ensuring the continuous growth and optimization of your organization.
And that’s it! (or, well the start) of how you can amplify your reach with Google Analytics. At Make Giving Happen, we live and breathe digital campaigns. If you have any questions about how you can get started with your own digital giving strategy, we’re here to help!