fundraising Archives | Bee Measure

November 26, 2019 By Erin Cafferty

My Favorite Advice & Data Viz of the Month

My Favorite Advice

Getting Ready For Giving Tuesday.

With year-end giving season upon us, I thought this was a very relevant article on how to test fundraising copy. Nonpartisan fact-checking website PolitiFact helps the public know when they can trust a politician. This summer, they decided to incorporate that same message of trust and transparency into their fundraising language. They found that when language about their brand’s values, goals, and processes were added, it encouraged more, higher dollar amount donations.

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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.

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April 26, 2019 By Erin Cafferty

Better Brand Awareness, Tracking Abandoned Forms & Unraveling the Marvel Universe

Cookies: Sinful or Secure?

This article is a TLDR version of Safari’s latest ITP (Intelligent Tracking Prevention) initiative. If your job involves digital communications, it deserves at least a quick glance. These changes are great for user security and privacy, but not great for people trying to understand their website users. Prior to this change, Google Analytics cookies expired after two years. That means — theoretically at least— you’d recognize a repeat visitors to your site even if their previous visit was 23 months prior. ITP means that cookies expire after a week. Now when someone doesn’t visit your site for two weeks, their next visit is counted as a new user all over again. Basically, if your organization has goals around growing an “audience of loyal users who visit the site once or twice a month,” Safari’s making it a lot harder to measure your progress.

Europeans, They Are Just Like Us

This newsletter is a sucker for survey results. This time, European charities tell Salesforceabout their marketing challenges. Here are my favorite stats: For 75% of nonprofits in Europe, “raising awareness of their cause” was the top reason to use social media. But 96% (!) said they aren’t using digital marketing “to its fullest potential.” What’s holding them back? These organizations report struggling with selecting the right social platforms, using paid search (including their Google Ad Grant) and measuring outcomes.

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January 18, 2019 By Erin Cafferty

Your Website Redesign, Online Fundraising & Building a Data Culture

Not Another New Year’s Article

I know it sounds cheesy, but put better data collection at the top of your list of new year’s resolutions. This article is written by Salesforce to promote Salesforce, so take it with a grain of salt, but they have good suggestions about what organizations should be focusing on in 2019. For example, committing to a data collection tool and making sure it is set up correctly ensures your nonprofit can be confident in the data you collect – and the decisions you make from it.

When It’s Time to Redesign

If you want to start fresh in 2019, this handy UX research process explains the steps and timeline for redesigning your website with users at the forefront. One thing that stuck out to me was their emphasis on the importance of combining generative (user interviews) and evaluative research (A/B testing, mouse tracking, remote usability testing). Hot tip: since you want the research to define the direction of your design, “put generative techniques at the beginning.”

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