As a nonprofit, it can be difficult to come up with funding for marketing initiatives. So, when you do have budget to spend, it’s important to make the most impact with that money.  

But how do you know if your efforts have actually been effective? You need to measure, and you need to measure the right metrics.  

With so many metrics to choose from, reporting can feel overwhelming, or even mundane. But it can also be exciting. Analyzing data not only helps you understand if your hard work is paying off, it can also help you make more informed decisions. When you follow the data, your communications planning is no longer a guessing game, and you can use the stats to back up your recommendations. 

Here are the most important metrics to analyze in your communications department. 

Website 

You’ve likely spent a lot of money on your website, but do you know if it’s generating the volunteers, donors or awareness that you want? If you’re not analyzing your website analytics on a monthly basis, you could be missing out opportunities.  

Tools like Google Analytics can identify things like your most-visited pages, how people are getting to your website and how long they’re spending on it. All of these metrics can help guide decisions in your marketing plan, such as where to invest advertising dollars or what types of content to create.  

Be sure to leverage Google Analytics to its fullest by setting up goals. Goals are essentially actions that you want users to take on your website, such as downloading a resource or filling out a form. This will give you further insight on your most engaged audience. 

Social media 

Gone are the days of bragging about the number of Facebook “likes” your page has. The most important metric when it comes to social media is engagement – “likes” are just vanity metrics.  

Platforms such as Facebook are now making it harder for your posts to reach your organic followers, meaning that the number of “likes” your page has is irrelevant. In fact, your Facebook posts will probably only reach 10% of your followers, which is why measuring engagement is vital.  

Engagement is any time a user interacts with your post either by liking, commenting, sharing or clicking it. When you have high engagement rates, it means your audience is interested in your content. Have a look at what type of content gets the most engagement on your page and create more of that. Likewise, if certain types of posts perform worse than others, eliminate those from your social calendar. 

Email campaigns 

An email campaign is one of the most powerful marketing tools because you’re able to reach a highly-engaged audience right in their inbox. If you’re not already creating regular email campaigns, read this first, but if you are disseminating campaigns regularly, do you know how effective they are? 

You should evaluate your campaigns often to determine the open rate, click-through rate and email list growth. Have you noticed that certain days of the week or times of day result in a higher open rate? What about subject lines? A good subject line is almost always a guarantee to get a subscriber to open an email. Looking at these types of metrics can help you plan out your campaign schedule and also decide what type of content to include.  

SEO 

Often times charities don’t have the budget to hire SEO experts, and it’s a niche skill not often held in-house. SEO can be hard to measure, but tools like Google Search Console can help. It’s a free tool that allows you to monitor the ranking of your website on Google. It also shows you what keywords are generating traffic for different pages and has a comparison tool so you can see if certain keywords are dropping in ranking over time. 

Another way to look at your SEO is to use Google Analytics to check out the growth of your organic traffic. Is it increasing over time? If so, your ranking is likely improving on Google. 

Paid advertising 

If you’re leveraging paid advertising, then it’s important to determine your return on investment (ROI). With paid digital advertising on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Google, you’re given extensive data on the performance of your campaigns. Using tools like Facebook Ads Manager, Google Ads and Google Analytics can help you understand how much traffic your campaigns are generating, and whether or not they’re driving conversions. 

Traditional advertising on the other hand can be harder to measure. TV, radio, print and outdoor ads don’t have ways of proving how many people visited your website as a result of the campaign, unless you have a unique URL for each ad placement. This type of advertising is best used as brand awareness and should complement other types of advertising. You can use the number of impressions provided by the advertising outlet, but these types of numbers are often inflated and not representative of how effective the campaign is. 

Earned media 

Earned media is any news piece about your organization that you did not pay for, such as a newspaper article or a TV interview. Earned media is also nearly impossible to measure in terms of ROI, but it can be extremely valuable. Consider looking at your website metrics to see if there was a bump in traffic or conversions after an interview or media placement. This can often help identify if it was effective or not. 

Conclusion 

Taking the time to create monthly, quarterly and annual reports to measure your efforts on an ongoing basis can help you look back on what initiatives were successful and where there might be opportunities for growth. Look at reporting as an exciting opportunity to gain insights as opposed to a mundane task, and you’ll be an expert in data analytics before you know it. 

NFP Communications is a marketing and communications consultancy that aims to help the not-for-profit sector with its marketing and communications needs.