Nonprofit leaders are becoming more familiar with the 2.0 tools and strategies that are creating a new paradigm for constituency engagement. A simple look at a nonprofit employment website shows a proliferation in new positions with titles such as "online community manager" or "new media communications associate". Even if an organization has yet to adopt the new technology, there is a growing awareness of a brave new world in which the organization must seek to engage.
A good deal of the trepidation is based on the fact that leaders are not entirely sure of the benefits to the organization for adopting such technology. Having been burned by previous technology investments, many organizations, especially small organizations, do not want to waste precious resources on change that may not yield results. For example, many organizations about 8 years ago rushed to build an online donation capacity thinking that donations would greatly increase. Most organizations who pursued online donations without a concerted strategy of linking communications and fundraising strategies to the online donation capability, were sorely disappointed.
Many leaders are asking: How can we ensure a better rate of success now? With all the different types of technology how do we know which tools will work with our constituents? How much should we invest and what's the expected return in terms of fundraising and other metrics? These are all important questions. While there are some issues that are particular to you organization, there are some generic metrics for success that we can articulate.
- Web metrics - The simple fact is that most nonprofits now receive a paltry amount of web traffic, even if they invested in a beautiful website. By using 2.0 tools your aims are to bring new traffic to the site and to give those visitors something to do once they get to your site. Finally, the tools ought to give hooks for people to come back to the site often. The following metrics should be increasing over time as you implement your 2.0 strategy:
- Visits - Total number of times people came to your site.
- Unique visitors - Total number of individuals who came to the site. This metric exludes those
- Page views - Total number of individual pages viewed during a given period.
- Hits? - Please don't talk to me about hits. That metric includes the total number of files called upon. Two different sites could have the same number of visitors and pages, but the graphically rich site could have exponentially more hits because each image file called on to create a page is consider a hit.
- Engagement metrics - While web metrics are fairly straightforward and are related to engagement metrics, the difference is that engagement metrics are attempting to get a better idea about attachment and use of the online community within your web presence.
- Number of registered users to your site.
- Number of blogs, discussion forum posts and comments.
- Volunteers who take a lead role such as feature blogger, discussion leader or community builder leadership. This implies you are creating these opportunities for constituents to volunteer for leadership position.
- Good web statistics packages such as Google analytics can also tell you who your most active registered users and what discussions and blogs are getting the most activity. Pay extra attention to those users and content areas that are most engaging.
- If you have a profile a social networking site such as myspace or facebook - number of friends or fans, amount of web traffic to your site that comes from those sites.
- Fundraising metrics - Web traffic and online engagement doesn't necessarily result in increased fundraising. In some ways, you would use the same fundraising metrics as for any fundraising strategy, but you may also look to the online engagement as a way to fuel your other activities (event or an annual campaign).
- Amount of money raised through your site and social networking sites (many social networking sites have their own online fundraising capability).
- Increase participation in annual campaign and fundraising events as a result of people moving from online community to offline events and response to annual campaign.
- Most importantly with 2.0, number of new donors and potential donors that your constituents brought into the fold through using your tools.
- Experiment - There's a lot more that we don't know than do know. Communities may respond to different tools and strategies in different ways. We'd love to hear about both your successes and failures. Comment below to let us know what's working and what's not working.
While other technology implementations often failed to deliver on its promise, 2.0 does not have to be the same. By being more strategic and clearly articulating the metrics for success at the outset, we can ensure a much higher likelihood for success.
Let's get our technology adoption right this time!
