It's your storefront and as such it needs to be appealing. If your store front looks "dirty", unorganized or doesn't have what your visitors expect - they will leave and go to your competitors.
So first things first - define your target market. Next, make it easy for them to understand who you are, who you help and make it easy to navigate. Next test different content (such as stories, appeals etc) to increase success.
Once you are done with that - do it all over again. No amount of brilliant marketing can make up for a poor website.
2) Online is growing rapidly in new acquisitions, retention and amounts giving
3) Online demos overwhelmingly skew young up to the 40s. Direct Mail dominates the older segments
4) Online Donors have higher household incomes and give more
5) Life time Value is higher for online donors
6) About 40% of those who gave online, ended up donating again offline. The reverse wasn't true for those that used Direct Mail (When you think about the demos this makes sense).
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Shout out to Amnesty International - check out their brilliant use of video, pictures, blogs and many other apps on their Facebook page.
Pay special attention to their wall posts - the use of stories to personalize the issues, the use of questions to encourage participation. These are good tactics to keep in mind when you creating your own social media campaign.
If you have achieved enough mass, you can test each story and each question in your social media campaign and use the most popular in your other campaigns to increase the chances for success. If you don't have the mass yet, learn from Amnesty and other successful social media organizations by visiting their sites.
1) Cost Per Acquisition (use this to figure out the average cost of a conversion):
Cost/Number of Conversions
2) Simple ROI (use this to calculate the profit on an investment):
(Revenue-Costs)/Costs
3) Median: Order your list of values (for example donation amounts) and find the middle value. This tells you that 50% of the distribution is below that number and 50% is above it.
For lists that are highly skewed (where a few very high/low values radically change the average), this will give you a better idea of the "true" expected value of an action - such as a donation.
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Formulas should be used first as a benchmark - to find where you are now in your marketing program. From there, the you can find where there are opportunities to improve and continue to use the formulas to chart progress.
It can go beyond internal...this type of data can be shared with the board (if you have one) and large donors to communicate marketing successes.
Moving video from the Red Cross regarding the flooding that is devastating the midsection of our country. If you haven't already, please donate!
As a not-for-profit, video is a very powerful medium. Notice the personal story, it really brings home the issues people are facing more than any stats could ever do. If you click through to YouTube, you will see a donation link directly on the page via "Google Checkout".
Many good insights here - my only (minor) caveat I would advise you to keep in mind; the survey was administered online which may bias the results towards online slightly.
- Direct Mail is still very important but effectiveness is skewing older
- Over message saturation is the 2nd biggest reason for donors to stop donating - Online giving continues to rise and is a major slice of overall giving, especially for younger segments
- Donors expect to give more in 2011
- Media integration (offline + online) continues to be important
