New School Analytics

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Non-Profit Website Goals

Every website needs concrete goals and a non-profit website is no different than a e-commerce or business website. Think about your purpose, what you are trying to achieve, set-up your goals and start measuring how well you are doing in achieving those goals.

I generally I like to divide goals into macro and micro goals. Macro goals are your mission critical goals. That is, the one thing your organization cannot live without. If your key event of the year is to organize a conference than you macro goal is to have as many people as possible sign-up for your conference. If you are selling shoes, you want to sell as many shoes as possible.

Micro goals are the goals that also contribute to your success and make people aware of who you are and what you do. Since only a small percentage of all your visitors are actually signing-up for your conference or buying a pair of shoes from you, it only makes sense to also measure a few smaller goals that eventually lead somebody to achieve your main, or macro goal. Micro goals could be your “about” or specific product page. It could also be how many people contact you with questions about a certain product or service. All of those goals measure engagement and how interested your visitors are in what you do.

For a local non-profit the web analytics team agreed on several macro and micro goals.

Our Macro goal was conference registration hands down. Without anyone showing up for the conference all the work organizing would be for nothing. So registration was mission critical.

For micro goals we measured visitor interest in the conference material, the our keynote speakers and in our half-day workshops.

The results speak for themselves. The Non-profit converted 10% of their website visitors. Meaning that 10% of all visitors to the website registered for the annual conference. That’s an absolutely great result and deserves a high five! Macro goal – check!

For the micro goals, the interest in the conference material was great. About 61% of visitors showed interest in the conference material, followed by 22% for workshops and 7% for keynote speakers. You may ask, why did only 7% of visitors show interest in the international conference keynote speakers. Good question. My take is that many specialists in the field already knew the keynote speakers by name and had little use of looking at their short bios (which are on a new page). If that’s the case, then the bios of the keynote speakers, which I assume are a sure highlight of the conference, should be placed somewhere more prominent on the website. That way visitors who are not familiar with the names (maybe newbies in the field) might be enticed to give the conference a try that year.

So what did I learn from the all of this?

• Set macro and micro goals and start measuring your website goals
• Interpret the results of your website goals and figure our what that means to your website
• Start making adjustments according to your results and improve your website

What did you learn from this goal setting project?  Did I miss anything important to you?

PS. Part 3: “Optimizing the Conference Registration Process for a Local Non-Profit” is coming soon.