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October 8, 2019 By Erin Cafferty

Data on a Budget, Running Better Search Ads & New Help With GTM

One of my favorite shows, The Great British Baking Show, is back on Netflix. While watching this season, it struck me that host Paul Hollywood seemed to mostly give handshakes — a reward for a contestant’s top-quality baking — to men. Investigating this theory led me down a data rabbit hole.

First, I found Buzzfeed documenting all of Paul’s handshakes. But Buzzfeed wasn’t quite giving the whole picture because women tended to go father in the competition than their male counterpoints. Then, I found Wikipedia graphing how individual contestants performed. This would make it possible to chart the ratio of male/female handshakes for individual episodes! I had to cut myself off there, though (my husband wanted to finish the episode).

Although my current theory remains unproven, I was impressed by the data already available online. Do you have any theories you’ve been longing to prove?

Exploring Engagement Beyond “Likes”

This was such a great article to read, especially with the news of Instagram hiding “likes” swirling around. While measuring engagement is helpful for reporting purposes, it’s important to think about engagement as more than just “likes.” This article got me pondering the importance of looking at content as a whole package — rather than a single post or article — and how to quantify those important intangibles, such as thought provoking-ness.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: newsletter Tagged With: Avanish Kaushik, data analytics, data storytelling, digital marketing, engagement rates, google tag manager, nonprofit, Pay-per-click, search queries, website analytics

September 27, 2019 By Erin Cafferty

My Favorite Advice x2 & Data Viz of the Month

My Favorite Advice

Absolutely Everything You Need To Know About Form Design

Getting ready for Giving Tuesday is about more than Facebook ads and email blasts. It’s also a good time to make sure potential donors aren’t so baffled by your donation form that they fail to complete it. This article about web forms is long and heavy on the usability jargon, but don’t let that scare you off! It’s really just a fancy way to describe the effectiveness and satisfaction of users when trying to achieve specific goals on your site. I really like the screenshots of good and bad form design. I also enjoyed the writer’s tip about forms following the same logic as a conversation: “For example, wouldn’t it be weird to ask someone their name only after having asked a number of other questions?”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: newsletter Tagged With: community outreach, data analytics, data visualization, digital outreach, form design, fundraising forms, giving tuesday, government organizations, GovLoop, NextDoor, nonprofits, web forms

September 13, 2019 By Erin Cafferty

Decrying Fluffy Metrics, How to Elevate Your Engagement Rates & SEO Changes

I adopted an, um, energetic dog early this summer. The seemingly endless walks around my neighborhood with her have given me a lot of podcast-listening time. I’ve found a few new favorites.

If you are familiar with this newsletter, I obviously like my tech news with a good dose of skepticism. Loving Recode’s Pivot for a mix of tech, politics and business updates… and some major sarcasm. It has me LOLing about IPOs and income inequality ⁠— something I didn’t think was possible.

How Are Other Orgs Doing? Here’s The Answer

It’s my favorite yearly opportunity to snoop on other nonprofits! The 2019 M+R Benchmarks Study includes data from 135 nonprofits across a variety of sizes and sectors. This report has so many good takeaways, it’s hard to choose what to call out here. An interesting fundraising stat was that the revenue from one-time gifts decreased by 2% in 2018, while monthly giving revenue increased by 17%. Focusing heavily on recurring donors could be a winning strategy moving forward.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: newsletter Tagged With: data analytics, engagement rates, evaluating and reporting data, fake PR metrics, fundraising, google analytics, link attributes, newsletter, nonprofit, SEO

August 27, 2019 By Erin Cafferty

My Favorite Advice & Data Viz of the Month

My Favorite Advice

Keep It Positive (and Personal)

In a world where it feels like everyone and everything is vying for our attention, what does it take for one message to stand out? Well, Change.org analyzed 164K online petitions and figured out which best converted scrolls to clicks and clicks to donations. My main takeaway (there were a lot, really) is that knowing your audience is key. Supporters are already passionate and motivated to act. So how petition creators framed their call to action — for example, whether they put it in positive or negative terms — often made the difference in supporter numbers. According to this study, the most effective headlines start with a strong action word and signal “the ideas of restoration of rights or coming to the aid of others.” Check out the study for many, many examples.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: newsletter Tagged With: change.org, CTAs, data analytics, data insights, data visualization, my favorite advice, online petitions, ugly gerry font

August 13, 2019 By Erin Cafferty

Big Changes to Google Analytics, Spending for 2020 & the Male-Dominated World of Data Viz

App and Website, Together At Last

Have a website… and an app? Well, I have news for you. It’s still in beta, but Google Analytics now has a way to combine app and website data into a single property. This is a particularly exciting development because it deviates from the traditional session and pageview method Google Analytics has used for the past 15+ years (listen to me complain about that here). The new measurement model uses events and parameters instead. And, Google’s created a new feature to make tracking the most common events, such as scrolling and outbound link clicks, a lot easier. This is a huge shift for GA and I’m sure I’ll be covering it again very soon.

Gettin’ Cozy With Data Analytics

An understanding of data analytics is important for everyone in an organization, regardless of your role or position. This Harvard Business Review article breaks down 4 crucial concepts you may have forgotten from your freshman year course in statistics. My favorite tip: Always have a control. You probably know about controls from drug trials, but this doesn’t need to be costly nor time-consuming. Although we may be testing new subject lines or web copy (rather than life-saving drugs), this is a concept that communicators should master too.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: newsletter Tagged With: data analytics, data visualization, digital advertising, google analytics, measurement, newsletter

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