Multi-Channel Analysis
Now native to Google Analytics 5, this series of reports allows you to see how your different marketing efforts are working together to drive conversions over a 30 day period. Of these reports the three most interesting are as follows:

Multi-Channel Conversion Visualizer

Assisted Conversions Report

Google analytics natively uses last click attribution. This means that the last click the user makes before making a purchase, donation or completing any other goal receives the credit. With multi-channel analysis, you can see how multiple marketing touches impact conversion and more important you can attach a value to the assist. This can be particularly useful in evaluating paid media where a user might visit your site, but come back later via an unpaid medium.

Top Conversions Paths

This report allows you to easily see the paths your users take to convert on your website. You can even create your own custom channel groupings (I’ve highlight the link above) to distinguish between marketing touches such as branded and non branded keywords or group your Social Media referrals.

2. Filters are much easier to manage in Google Analtyics 5. Create the filter once and apply it to multiple profiles.

While we are on the topic of filters, there are two filters you should consider applying to your data. The first solves the problem of untagged email coming through as referral traffic through any of the major webmail providers (i.e. google, hotmail and yahoo.)

The second solves the issue of organic social traffic (or social traffic that you didn’t place a campaign tag on) also coming through as referral traffic. These filters allow you to update the medium to Email and Social. You can see how this can help give more clarity to your assisted conversions report.

Remember that filters only work going forward and you should always apply them to a test profile and make sure they are working correctly before applying them to your profiles that you use for analysis.

3. Native Social Engagement Tracking

See how your users are promoting your brand and content.

It does take some work to properly tag tweets and facebook posts, page likes and unlikes.  This post does a great job of showing you how to set up this tracking: http://www.ian-thomas.net/tracking-social-engagement-with-google-analytics/. Also, tools such as Gigya and ShareThis can be automatically configured to push engagement data directly to Google Analytics.

Custom Report with Social Actions

Social actions can be applied to any custom report as seen here. In this case you can see how your content drives social interactions and ultimately helps you drive conversions.

4. Search Engine Optimization

Link your Google Analytics Account to your Google Webmaster tools account and see organic Google search impression data for your keywords. You may find you have high performing keywords with a low visibility. You might want consider optimizing these keywords or creating a paid campaign with them.

5. Site Speed Report

No one wants to believe that their website is slow. Most of us believe that our content is so compelling that our users will wait for it. Unfortunately, if your page takes more 4 seconds to load you will lose about a third of your users.

This report can help you find problem pages so that you can fix them.

Beaconfire is expanding its Online Campaigns and Marketing team! We’re looking for one or two smart, passionate interactive marketing professionals to join our family.

• Senior Interactive Marketing Consultant who can leverage their consulting expertise and leadership skills to help our nonprofit clients shape and execute online campaigns.
• Interactive Marketing Client Manager / Consultant who can leverage their marketing experience and project management skills to help our nonprofit clients make their campaign ideas a reality.

Check out our Career section on our website for more information on how to apply.

Or, if you know of the perfect person for the job, please pass this along.

Working in the email marketing space, it is difficult to know why someone isn’t donating because the objections aren’t overt.

In the online space, you have to spend more time inferring interest from things like open rate, click through rate, and donation rate. But is that person who opened your email and decided not to click a “hang up” or are they a “maybe next time”?

Thankfully, for what email lacks in anecdotes it makes up for in volume. And from reviewing campaign after campaign, it is clear there are a few objection thresholds that must be cleared before someone will ever give to an email campaign.

The secret is making sure that you’re answering these objections consistently in each message you send.

Here are three of the most common passive objections that you must be answering:

1. How is this cause or organization connected to me?
2. Do you really need my money right now?
3. What will my money go towards?

There are a lot of ways to answer each one of those questions, so here are a couple of strategies for approaching of them.

How is this cause connected to me?

People end up on your email list for a lot of reasons. Some are donors, some are just interested, some signed a petition on a topic that may not be related to your current fundraising appeal.

But there are still ways to make those people feel connected. First, you must have a strong voice in your mass emails. If the recipient feels like another person is on the other end of the email chain, they’re much more likely to give than if they think the message is coming from an institution.

Second, send geotargeted emails so that you can talk specifically about the work your organization is doing in someone’s city, state or community. A potential donor’s threshold for giving is much lower if they feel like you’re having an impact in their area.

Do you really need my money right now?

Everyone knows to take advantage of year end or quarterly deadlines. Calendar year deadlines work because New Year’s Eve and taxes are shared experiences.

Connecting your issues to the calendar, or better yet the news cycle, is the best way to consistently raise more money.
Everyone knows disaster response organizations need to be ready to act as soon as a tornado or earthquake occurs.

But for an organization like, say, Big Brothers Big Sisters it would mean fundraising at the start of summer vacation when kids may need a role model more than ever.

What Will My Money Go Towards?

Fundraising for a general fund, or for something that will happen in a few months or few years, is difficult with email fundraising. You can send email quickly, and, it seems, people expect results just as quickly.

It’s a lot easier to get people to give to something tangible.

If you’re an advocacy organization, and are putting a new TV ad on the air soon, make sure your list sees the ad and tell them to contribute to help put it on the air. When they see it on TV, they’ll know they helped make that possible and will be more likely to give in the future.

If you’re an international aid organization, talk in terms of one person who needs help right now. If someone is giving $25 or $50, they know they can’t make a huge impact on a multi-billion dollar problem. But they can make a difference in the life of one person. It gives a human connection that builds lasting relationships.

This should be self-evident, but in the heat of the moment, when you’ve just launched your darling new website or campaign, it’s easy to forget that the rest of the world isn’t as excited about it as you are. They probably don’t know it exists. Most of them will never stumble across it on their own; and if they do, most of them won’t help promote it for you.

I don’t mean to discourage you from taking on bold projects! Certainly, plenty of nonprofits struggle to get buy-in on ambitious web projects, even ones that will have major benefits for the organization, and you don’t need another obstacle in your way. But if you’re going to build it, you should make sure it gets the attention it deserves.

There are few things sadder than building a cool site or campaign launch, and then watching it sit there, and eventually be forgotten about. It’s always disappointing for the project team to see the potential of a great project go to waste, and it doesn’t make a good argument for doing similar projects in the future. If you’ve put in lots of time and energy on a project, you should expect to see some results.

There’s a financial argument for doing good marketing on your projects, too. On its own, marketing adds to your budget, and it takes extra time. But it usually takes far less time and money than building your website or campaign in the first place, and it’s essential for driving new audiences to it.  If your goals for the project require an audience beyond your staff and your email list, the only sure way to get it is through well-planned marketing. If one of your goals is, for example, to acquire new supporters, then if you don’t follow through on marketing the campaign, it’s a wasted effort.

Consider how much money and energy you’ve already invested in your project, whatever it is. Is it worth spending 10% or 20% more (time, or money, or possibly both) to make sure people see it, and that it accomplishes its goals? In almost every case, the answer should be “yes”.

Yet, still, marketing often gets left by the wayside. There are a few common reasons this happens.

1. You’re too busy:

You know you need to market your site, and you may even have a marketing plan, but you never got around to it. Or, you’re short-staffed and other priorities got in the way.

This is probably the most common reason that a new project doesn’t get properly promoted. It can be avoided, but it requires active planning to make sure you’ll have the staff resources available at the right time.  It also requires that your organization prioritize the marketing just as it prioritizes the project itself. Make sure your leadership is behind you and gives you the tools and time to do the job right.

Consider this: it’s rarely too late to start promoting a new project. Unless it’s tied to a current event or legislative issue, it’ll be new to your visitors no matter when they first see it.  Of course it’s best to do marketing while your own enthusiasm is still strong. However, if you’ve got a neglected marketing plan for a site that launched a couple of months ago, dust off the plan and call your earlier launch a “soft launch” – then get busy bringing in new visitors.

2. Lack of planning:

You’re caught up in the moment, you launch your site, and then you’re so relieved that you don’t even think about a marketing plan. In the back of your mind, maybe you thought that word of mouth alone would be enough, or that someone else was taking care of it. Months later, you realize that traffic to your new site is a tiny trickle compared to what you hoped for.

This is a more challenging situation than if you’d had a marketing plan ready to go, because you’ll need to do some planning before you start promoting. But, again, it’s probably not to late. Start with any of the obvious channels that you haven’t hit yet: your email list, Facebook, Twitter. Ask your supporters to share the site with their own networks. Next, figure out what budget (if any) you have to promote the project.  If the answer is “none”, try using your Google Grant, if you have one, and reach out to partners and bloggers who might be interested in what you’re doing.

3. Misplaced faith in Viral

You believe that your new campaign is so wonderful that it will inevitably go viral, all on its own. That people can’t wait to share your content.

We’ve all seen examples of things that go viral on their own, to the great surprise of their creators. But they’re in the extreme minority. For every YouTube video of a dancing child that spreads like wildfire across your social networks, there are literally millions of videos that no one ever sees. And of the ones you do see, especially if they were created by a company (instead of an individual), you can bet that most had a solid marketing plan to help them on their way.

If you have serious dreams of your campaign going viral, you need to put in the work to help it happen.  Hard work is no guarantee of success in social media marketing, but it goes a long way. If you believe that everyone (at least, everyone in your audience) should care about your project, then tell them about it! Put in the work it takes to spread the word.

Learn your lessons

Has this happened to you before?  If you recognize these situations, you can confront them head-on when you’re starting a new project:

• Make sure that you allow enough time, budget, and staff resources to do proper marketing after you launch.
• Be realistic about how much organic traffic you can expect, and how much you can drive via advertising and word of mouth.
• Set goals in the planning phase. Make sure those goals are specific (for example, how many visits, and how many conversions) and realistic, and that you create a plan to help you meet them.

When you plan and follow through on promoting your newly-launched campaigns and sites, you can make sure that they not only look and work great, but also accomplish your goals.

Reports show that on average, close to 50% of a nonprofit’s online fundraising occurs in December. This is serious business.  For an organization that averages $1 million in online fundraising a year, one day in December with a broken donation form or mass emails going to spam could mean missing out on $10,000 to $50,000.

Here are 6 things you can do now to get started on your year-end fundraising.

1. Analyze Last Year’s Results

Too many organizations wait until fall to take a look at how the last year-end campaign performed.  By that time, none of the information is fresh — staff has changed and emails explaining test groups have been lost. If you’ve been putting it off, don’t. Get going on it today.

2. Grow Your List

Do a list swap.  Send out some action alerts.  Take advantage of what’s timely.  With spring and summer months being slower on the fundraising side, now is the time to grow your list so that it is maximized for year end, when you must focus first and foremost on fundraising.

3. Collect Information

Take an organization like the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).  Some members of their email list support WCS because they enjoy WCS’s network of zoos.  Others support WCS because of its worldwide conservation work.

If your organization works on Issue A & Issue B, which don’t necessarily overlap, and your year-end campaign is entirely focused on Issue B, you are losing out on all those Issue A people who are interested in the other great work that you’re doing.

Even if your organization only works on one issue, you may have a year-end campaign that incorporates local information based on supporter state or zip code – information you may not have on everyone.

Take the time now to figure out what information will be useful to run a successful year-end campaign, and spend the next few months extracting it in different ways: Do a supporter survey that collects demographic and interest information, run action alerts on multiple issues and see who responds to what, and incorporate a variety of donation asks.

Not everyone opens every email.  Starting now will help ensure that you have information from as many of your users as possible.

4. Do Major Testing

Some new/exciting email, website overlay and online advertising tests work great.  Figuring out a new approach that increases fundraising 10% or 20% is one of the most exciting parts of working online. But for every new approach that works, there’s a flop.  That’s why you need to get them out of the way now.

Think of it this way.  Our hypothetical organization that raises $1 million a year raises $500,000 every December, but only $25,000 every July.  A month long test that flops, performing 20% worse than last year, will only cost you $5,000 in July.  If that same test was run in December, you’re losing $100,000.

Now is the time to lay out the major pieces of your year-end campaign and figure out what pieces you’ll need to test between now and October.  Then, in the year end, you can focus on more nuanced optimization tests to maximize every last dollar.

5. Complete Any Landing Page Changes

It’s the same story as testing.  Don’t risk a new landing page or tell-a-friend page that could have unforeseen breaks or security issues.  Update templates and complete any technology changeovers now so you aren’t spending the holidays fixing code while donors fret over whether or not their donation was successful.

6. Say Thank You

Don’t forget to say thank you in some way, at least twice, between now and November.  A quick, personal looking email with no “ask” is always a great way to go.  Or, try sending a YouTube video showing supporters what they’ve made possible. Make sure they know they’re appreciated.

Here are some questions to keep in mind when evaluating tools:

• Who is my target audience and where do they hang out online? Some tools are better at helping you manage multiple accounts (e.g. your organization’s CEO and a subject matter expert both have Twitter profiles) and connect with various platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, Ning, etc.), while others are better at analyzing data.
• Why do I want to use a tool to manage my social media outreach? Perhaps you need a way to start scheduling posts or you want to know exactly what your outreach efforts mean for your organization.
• What specific information do I want to learn about my constituents? You may want to track conversation or article topic trends, or determine the social network that a majority of your constituents use and advertise on that website. Think about the answers you want to learn and make sure that you’re choosing a tool that can help you reach those goals.

As reported in a recent article on eMarketer, InformationWeekAnalytics released a survey showing that most companies are relying on relatively low-tech solutions to monitor social media.

But, the game is changing and marketers need to change with it.

eMarketer also reported that while site traffic was the top metric for social marketing success in 2010, the number two spot will shift from just tallying fans, followers and positive buzz to tracking conversions.

As technology improves and professionals recognize the need to track their social media outreach to a bottom line, these monitoring and analysis tools will be in high demand.

Ask yourself, what does your organization need? Most tools on the market have a set of common features: they allow users to register profiles across multiple platforms (i.e. Facebook and Twitter), provide a way to help with planning and scheduling posts, report analytics and offer ways to shorten URLs to maximize trackability.

In addition, each product may have its own set of special features or a unique focus. For example, products like Small Act and Spredfast offer personalized setup service and ongoing support with a live person versus an online help desk. Explore other cool features like social profiling from Small Act to help you identify how many of your current constituents are already using social media and where they spend their time. Or connect with Spredfast to acquire sentiment analytics to easily measure overall online brand awareness and activity.

Tools like HootSuite allow you to track the online activities of your influential social media constituents, and Radian6 offers sophisticated analysis of how people are talking about a topic (i.e. tag clouds of related words). Plus, the selection of tools is growing, offering a variety of options to fit every budget.

Both HootSuite and Small Act offer free versions to start, allowing users the option to upgrade ($149-$1,500 a month, depending on the tool) to receive extended customer support, additional data storage and more. Furthermore, packages for high-end products like Spredfast and Radian6 may start at a few hundred dollars a month, but offer features like in-depth training for your staff, dedicated account managers and the ability to monitor and analyze unlimited social media accounts.

Remember, when you’re selecting a tool for your organization, think about future growth and what other opportunities you may want to pursue. Even if you’re just starting to use social media, you should consider selecting a tool that will help you expand your marketing efforts. Don’t be afraid to try tools, request demos and talk to other tool users to see what will best fit your organization’s needs.

For additional information about other social media monitoring and analysis tools, check out this article “5 Superior Social Media Management Tools” from Mashable.

But, you could get even better data about donations.

There’s a serious limitation that comes with Google Analytics goals: they track key actions, but no related information. You can know that someone made a donation, but not how much, or even what form they donated to.  With many actions (for example, email signup), that’s just fine. But for donations, wouldn’t it be nice to know if your high-converting segments are donating $5, or $500?

Of course, there is a “value” setting that you can set for each goal.  The downside is, it’s purely symbolic.

You choose the value of each goal, and it’s the same every time the goal is completed.  This is a great way to account for the potential value of non-donation actions – for example, if you feel that a new email address is worth about $5, but your average donation is $60, you can compare the value of content that drives email acquisition, versus content that drives donations. But you won’t see the differences in actual donation amounts.

There’s a better way to track donations: instead of goals, use eCommerce tracking.

eCommerce is built into Google Analytics, but it requires some technical know-how to set up – as a result, it’s less used than goals. But it captures a wealth of information about transactions, including transaction amount, that gives you a richer view of your donation data.

Not only do you get better data on your transactions, but it opens up access to a world of useful reports: most valuable traffic sources, most popular products, even the number of visits made before a user donates. You can view eCommerce data as a separate tab in most reports, and measure the value of landing pages that contribute most towards conversion.

“Wait a minute,” you might say. “We don’t have eCommerce on our site. We just take donations.” No big deal. A transaction is a transaction.  Where a robust eCommerce tool might send back data about a cart full of multiple products, your tracking treats the donation as basically an eCommerce transaction with a single item.

To set up eCommerce tracking, you follow these steps:

1. Enable eCommerce in the settings on each profile where you want to use it.  (That’s easy.)
2. Write some code. This where the technical know-how comes in – you’ll need to edit javascript to do this.  Google has good documentation and examples that you can build on.  In your code, you’ll create a transaction (defined by a transaction ID), and add a single “item” (your donation). Then, you’ll submit the transaction to Google Analytics.
3. Add the code to the thank you page of your donation form, and add whatever hooks you need to plug in the appropriate information about the transaction.

Depending on your donation management tool, it may be easy to pull out transaction details, or very, very difficult. We’ve had fun doing this recently with Convio, which has a handy shorthand for displaying transaction information. If your system has something similar, just drop that shorthand into your eCommerce code, and you’re all set. (If it doesn’t, you may need to do some more serious coding, either to pull data from an API, or in the worst case, scrape it off the confirmation page.)

What data do you pass to Google Analytics?  The details of a donation aren’t a perfect fit for the parameters in the eCommerce tracking. This means you need to be a little creative about mapping your fields – but it also gives you an opportunity to pull in data you might not otherwise.

For example, the Item details allow for a product code, product name, and a “category or variation”.  Your “product” is just a donation, but you can use these fields in whatever way best meets your needs. If you run many different campaigns, you might use the campaign name as the product name. If you’re testing ask strings, maybe the donation level name is the product name.  The category field is open-ended and could capture any other aspect of the donation. Are you interested in honor gifts? Monthly gifts? You can catch that information in the category.

Once you’ve set up eCommerce tracking, you’ll be able to assign a real dollar value to almost every interaction, segment, and source in your analytics setup. If you’re an analytics geek like me, be prepared to have lots of fun digging into a whole new dataset.

1. Encourage links from supporters

One of the most important factors for SEO is having incoming links from reputable external web sites. As a non-profit, you have an advantage in this area, because you likely have supporters who are happy to promote your cause with a link. Take advantage of this — if your organization has a blog or makes announcements online, make sure that content is easily shareable. Provide logos, badges, or widgets that your supporters can easily plug into their own web sites.

Beware of linked badges/graphics that don’t give search engines enough information. From NTEN’s Blog:

Badges are an excellent way to get your supporters linking to you, but too many nonprofits make a common mistake: they fail to incorporate text links into their badges. Search engines prefer text links to graphics, as they signal which keywords are related to the linked page. (Remember, search engines can’t read graphics. Yet.) So, ask your supporters for links and be sure to provide them with SEO-friendly badges.

2. Don’t forget about pages hosted elsewhere

If your donation form isn't hosted on your site, it won't appear in your Google Sitelinks.

The pages stored in your content management system may already be search engine optimized — but if some of your most important pages are hosted elsewhere (through your CRM system, for example), they may not be optimized in the same way.

• The externally hosted page may have a different domain name than the rest of your site, which makes it difficult for search engines to associate it with your organization. For example, a donation form hosted on a separate domain cannot be listed as one of your Google Sitelinks. However, if you create a “Donate” page on your own site that directs users to your donation form, that can appear as a Google Sitelink.
• You may not have as much control over the format, URL, title, heading usage, and meta tags for pages hosted elsewhere. Take the time to identify workarounds or dig deeper into the customization options for your highest priority pages.

3. Evaluate the calls-to-action throughout your site

• Identify the pages on your site that already receive plenty of traffic from search engines, then make sure your most important calls-to-action are featured or at least accessible from those pages.
• Make your calls-to-action SEO friendly by incorporating text links containing strong keywords and using alt tags for banners/images.

4. Manage your online identity

• Which is more recognizable to your target audience: your organization’s full name or its acronym? Or maybe neither — are people most likely to be searching for a well-publicized project or campaign you’ve run recently? Does it depend on the audience? Account for these variations in your SEO strategy.
• Be sure that your website is listed where it should be, both in broad non-profit listings sites (Idealist, Charity Navigator) and in topic or geographically-focused resources.

5. Do your keyword homework

• When branding new campaigns and projects, do keyword research. Does the title of your new campaign align with the terms that your audience is searching for?
• Identify the keywords that are most specific to your cause and be able to differentiate yourself.

Do you have other SEO ideas that non-profits should have on their radar? Post them in the comments.

Other key findings:

• 75% of nonprofits say they’ll email supporters at least monthly.
• Facebook comes after only websites and email as important communications tools for nonprofits.
• Quarterly is the most popular frequency for nonprofits to send direct mail to the average supporter.
• What excites nonprofit communicators: new ways to connect w/ supporters, social media & better comm integration.
• What scares nonprofit communicators: money woes, hard-to-implement comm strategies & lack of staff time.

Facebook

• Understand the FB algorithms: The default view on Facebook, Top News, shows only a small selection of posts from your friends (and pages you’ve “liked”). If you switch to the Most Recent tab you’ll see how much content isn’t included. Facebook uses a sophisticated set of algorithms to determine which content you see on the Top News tab. An important factor is the number of likes and comments the content has received, so you’ll often want to ask questions in your posts and phrase updates so that it’s more likely people will “like” your post.
• FB Advertising: Facebook allows you to advertise either Facebook pages or websites that are external to Facebook. When you advertise your pages on Facebook, a “like” box will appear next to your ad, allowing people to become fans of your page with a single click.
• Facebook tab as landing page: Since your primary goal on Facebook is likely not to simply increase wall posts, you may want to create a custom default landing tab on your page. Many custom tabs include an arrow pointing to the like button or a registration form (possibly with an offer to induce signups). It’s also possible to show different content to Facebook fans and non-fans. Exclusive content and special offers that are only available to fans can be a great way to induce people to “like” your page.

Twitter

• Following others: Twitter users will often follow you after receiving an alert that you are following them. When using this strategy you may want to target your universe by searching for tweets with relevant words or hashtags, or follow reporters, bloggers, and others who are influential players in your field.
• Hashtags: You can tweet using relevant hash tags or use trending topics to increase the number of people who will see your content. You can also start a tag for a contest or conversation and encourage others to include it in their tweets.
• Write for RTs: Tweeted responses (i.e. tweets starting with @name) only appear in the feed of people who follow both you and the person you are responding to. While good for relationship-building, these messages do not show up for your full potential universe. Retweets, on the other hand, will show up for everyone who follows the person who posted the RT. Encouraging responses through questions can be less useful than brief tweets designed to be retweeted (thought they can help to build relationships)

Email

• Petitions and letters to legislators: This time-honored technique can help you build targeted lists while simultaneously engaging in efforts to support your lobbying initiatives. An eCRM advocacy tool like CapWiz and Salsa can help strengthen your grassroots advocacy program and make it easier to manage. This is an especially good tactic if you are encouraging compelling actions since the new emails you get are likely to take action again in the future.
• List acquisition: While blanket spamming can be counterproductive, acquiring targeted lists from trusted vendors like Care2 or Change.org can be a great way of expanding your audience. Be sure to segment your lists! Where it makes sense, you could also ask a strategic partner to send out an email to their list on your behalf, with a call to action that will help build your list. It’s recommended to use URL sourcing codes so you’ll be able to use your website analytics software to identify whether this tactic was effective (and should potentially be repeated).
• Special offers: Providing special access information on your website (possibly in conjunction with search engine marketing) can be a great way to expand your email lists. You can offer white papers (targeted to strategically desirable demographics), or allow people to sign up for webinars once they have provided their email address.

Do you have other techniques that have helped you to build your outreach capacity? Leave your tips in the comments.