Bee Measure

Get Direction From Your Data

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My Favorite Advice & Data Viz of the Month

My Favorite Advice

How to Be Smart About Measuring Your Success.

After political pollsters failed to predict Trump’s 2016 election win, you might think that they have little to teach us nonprofit folks about metrics and measurement. Not true, says this article in PR Newswire. According to the author, at least, the Biden campaign has done an enviable job selecting metrics that actually correlate to campaign success – instead of simply being visible and easy to measure. How does that apply to your organization? Well, don’t let your boss talk you into padding your monthly metrics report with Twitter impressions and website page views. It’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics and false cause fallacy’s instead of collecting and analyzing the data that truly matters. I realize it’s easier said than done, but your whole organization should be on the same page about what matters and how to measure it.  Without a clear metric for judging the success of outreach or fundraising, you end up grasping at assumptions and are unable to correctly measure whether you actually reached your goals.

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My Favorite Advice & Data Viz of the Month

My Favorite Advice

How to Get Donors Coming Back for More.

My first meeting back after summer vacation was a planning call for a client’s year-end campaign. Even though 2020 has us all feeling stuck in a never-ending nightmare time warp, year-end fundraising season is indeed quickly approaching. That means now is the perfect time to think about overhauling your donation page. You want potential donors to feel confident when making a gift to your organization and ensure the process is simple. What does that mean about how you set up your donation page? It doesn’t mean include more text, more images or more donate buttons. It means include text that aligns with your organization’s mission, an image that speaks to your value proposition and an easy-to-complete donation form. If you’re looking for recurring donations, make a monthly recurring donation the default choice. It will help your organization stand out since “most nonprofits that offered monthly donations did so as an optional step.” And if your nonprofit has a lengthy donation checkout process (and you want to find out where users are dropping off and how to prevent it), check out this article on setting up a Funnel Visualization report on Google Analytics.

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What Companies Are Doing With Your Data, A World Without Cookies & Banner Ads Are Back

Content Marketing for Dummies

This article from Search Engine Journal touches on something important: Content that doesn’t convert is just that… content. If you want content that drives interest and donations, you need to look at your metrics. If you’re creating content, it should have a clear purpose and lead people to take another action — whether that’s to learn more, sign up for an event, download research, or donate to your organization. And don’t forget that content drives SEO… just make sure you’re writing like a human and not keyword stuffing in the hopes your post ranks higher on Google.

No More Cookies… Now What?

With the new restrictions browsers are putting on cookies, I wonder if we need to prepare for a cookie-less world. It’s better we accept it now and learn how to survive rather than be annoyed and taken by surprise when they are *actually* blocked. This article offers great advice with specific tactics to successfully advertise without cookies. Which one are you trying? I’ll definitely be using my own first-party data since it’s proven to drive higher conversion rates.

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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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Facebook Fundraising Changes, Automating Your Ad Grant & Analyzing Mario Kart

Advertisers and Audiences: Destined to be Frenemies?
I hate to even bring up the E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation, after I spent late May drowning in emails. (I’m still cleaning out my inbox!) However, I wanted to highlight this New Yorker article by Ken Auletta, which puts the issue into a broader context. He examines how the use of Big Data to improve targeting brings to light the tensions between the desire for personalized content and concerns about consumer privacy. The article asserts that: “The advertising and marketing world scrambles for new ways to reach consumers. Big Data, they believe, promises ways they might better communicate with annoyed consumers—maybe unlock ways that ads can be embraced as a useful individual service rather than as an interruption.” What do you think? Is it possible to meet the needs of both audiences and advertisers?

Get Verified! Facebook Political and Issue Ads
Facebook has started enforcing their new ad verification rules. As this article explains, all advertisers wanting to run political content need to verify their identity and location (aka Facebook sends you a postcard in the mail). This is meant to allow users to clearly identify the organization that has paid for an ad. Facebook is also creating a searchable archive of political and issue ads. If your nonprofit runs ads on Facebook, I recommend getting verified. Even if you think your ads aren’t political, Facebook might think they are.

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