“Don’t be fooled – EVERY system needs maintenance.”

Nonprofits are often chronically under-resourced, and thus unable to put in the time, money, and expertise required to optimize their operational systems. The old comic of the guy pushing the square wheel because he doesn’t have time to invent the round one is painfully true for nonprofits everywhere!

Fortunately, we have Adam Kogeman here today from Good Bones Consulting to share his secrets of how nonprofits of any size can evaluate how they do what they do – and find more efficient and effective ways to accomplish the great work we’re all here to do.

Whether we’re talking about frustrating data systems or cumbersome program processes, Adam helps us understand how we all can continually improve. And when we as nonprofits get better at what we do, our communities benefit, too.

 


What You Can Do

Carry out a bi-annual activity audit. List out everything your team or organization does, and evaluate if you should:

  • Eliminate it?
  • Outsource it?
  • Adapt or repurpose it?
  • Expand it?

The activity audit should review your financial efficiency, your impact, the wellbeing of your humans, and the organizational capacity.


Click to read the auto-generated transcript of today’s episode.

Alexandra
Today we talk with Brian Piper from the University of Rochester all about a roadmap for helping you figure out how to use data to make your website and your content more effective. What I love about this conversation is we are able to take sort of an overwhelming question How do I know if my website is working? How do I know if my blog posts are working?

And Brian breaks it down into a series of steps where you understand the order that you need to make decisions and get information in order to optimize exactly what you’re going to do. Probably my favorite quote that Brian shares is that data without goals are just numbers. So I hope you enjoy this episode and learning why you need goals to make data actually helpful.

Hello and welcome to Heart, Soul and Data, where we explore the human side of analytics to help amplify the impact of those out to change the world. With me, Alexandra mandarins. Thank you so much for joining me for today’s conversation with Brian. I am going to let him introduce himself and tell us where he’s calling from.

Brian Piper
Thank you, Alexandra. My name is Brian Piper. I’m the director of content strategy and assessment at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York.

Alexandra
Awesome. And we are here to talk about exactly that. We’re going to talk about websites and strategy and where data comes into play with websites. So I want to ask you a little bit when it comes to managing a successful website using data. Where do you start? Where would you even begin to think about having that happen?

Brian Piper
Well, and the most important place to start is with your strategies, with your goals. What are your business goals and what objectives do you want to accomplish? We tend to use OKRs

Alexandra
I don’t know that idea at all.

Brian Piper
Yes. Key results. Oh my goodness.

Alexandra
Okay, so O is objective.

Brian Piper
Yes. And K, here is the key results.

Alexandra
Got it. Okay, perfect.

Brian Piper
So, yeah, those are your big business goals. Those are figuring out what it is you want to do, where you want to go. Do you want to increase subscribers? Do you want to increase your revenue? Do you want to build your audience? Do you want to become known for a particular topic area? So those are your business objectives and that’s kind of the essential thing to keep in mind when you’re framing any optimization process.

Brian Piper
And then the other key piece is to look at your user. You have to understand who your users are. So understand, you know, not just demographically where they are, but who they are as far as what problems they have to solve. What issues are they dealing with that you can provide expertise to help them out with? And then once you kind of know those to what we call kind of the foundational audits, the foundational principles that everything is going to be driven from, then you can start figuring out what data you can track and what tactics you can employ to help you reach your goal or to help your audience take some action that’s going

Brian Piper
to drive you towards reaching your goal. And that’s where you’re going to start really looking at measurement and looking for different ways to improve your progress.

Alexandra
I love that roadmap because it makes what can feel very overwhelming, right? I need my red site to work, but how do I know if it’s working and how would I change it into a much more step by step roadmap that for the most part, people probably know most of the steps along that way. You probably know, hopefully what your business goals are from the highest level, right?

00;03;38;24 – 00;04;00;09
Alexandra
If you’re there to make sure that you’re running a food bank or you’re there to run afterschool programs for kids, but you have those really high level business objectives, and then the next step down would be how are we achieving those business goals, right? So if we are running after school programs, people subscribing to our programs, probably a pretty high objective, right?

Alexandra
They’re going to tie into that. And so then you say, well, what do I need to happen on my website?

Brian Piper
Right, exactly. So what actions can a user take on a website, whether it’s filling out a request for information form, whether it’s making an appointment, downloading some new white paper that you have or some new piece of information, or even just coming to your program page. If you know that you want more people to come to your page to hopefully end up converting into more users, then you have to figure out, Well, now I need to figure out what search terms I need to optimize my page for to be able to drive more of that traffic.

Alexandra
And how would somebody even start thinking about optimizing search terms?

Brian Piper
So there’s a lot of different tools that you can use out there. There’s a lot of different ways to kind of get into your data and do the research. But really one of the best ways is just by asking your customers. So when people come in, when you have your initial meeting with them to talk about, you know, whatever it is you’re trying to whatever services you’re trying to provide or goods you’re trying to provide to them, ask them where they found you and what questions they ask through a search engine to find you, if that’s the way they found you or what social posts they looked at or what channel they were on when they found you. Sometimes people remember that a lot of times they don’t. But you can get a lot of really good information from your users about what questions they were asking, what problems they were trying to solve when they found you. And then there’s a lot of tools that seem rash and Mars and graphs. Those are all great tools that you can do keyword research on and you can just go and find out.

It’ll tell you how many people are searching on different terms every month. But really, Google itself is a great place. Just go to Google and type in, you know, the main category after school care or whatever main area your business focuses on and just see that they have those people also ask questions. Those are all questions that people are asking the search engines.
So it’s showing you the answers to those questions. So those are all attentional pieces of content that you could include on your home page or create another page all about answering those particular questions.

Alexandra
That makes a lot of sense. And so let’s say you determined a big goal, get our kids into our after school program. So therefore our website needs to do what you were saying is it needs to get people on to the website when they’re looking for after school programs and then it needs to lead them to fill in a request for information form, let’s say, and then complete the form and then subscribe to a program.

What kinds of metrics would you use along that way? You know, you talked a little bit about are people finding you when they mean to you, but what other metrics would be important to consider as you start actually going down that road map all the way to the tactics of actually getting people to do the things you need them to do?

Brian Piper
So the main reason to look at your metrics is to figure out what’s working and what’s not working. So and initially, when you decide that this is your new mission that you’re going to go on, you’re going to drive more traffic to the site so that you end up converting more people into customers. So you want to start tracking your organic traffic coming from the search engine so you can pull that from Google Analytics and you want to watch that over time and you want to make sure that you’re looking at, you know, where you take action on your website, where you make optimization choices and whether or not that increases your organic traffic.

There’s also ways there’s tools that you can use to check which keywords you’re ranking for and what position you’re ranking for for those keywords. But then you also want to look at are people coming into those pages, finding your content, and then are do you have a call to action on that page? Are you driving them into a request for information?

Are you driving them to a contact form? Do your social channels point them to a landing page? And then you need to be looking at all of those different pages, all of those different conversions to see, is this actually working? Am I getting more people that are coming to my content from social or from search? And then once they get there, how many people are converting?

Are the people converting more from a social post or are they converting more from coming in from a search engine? So then you kind of get an idea of where you should double down on your efforts and maybe where you should not spend so much time focusing on.

Alexandra
I think that idea of understanding your full client, customer or potential connection journey gets missed really easily because we might focus so much on how many views of a post did we get right or a frantic search, how many people found our website. But then you just look at your enrollment numbers and they’re like, Oh well, they’re still low and you miss all those steps in between, which is it’s not just that somebody read the post or visits your website and then they automatically become a participant in your program or whatever it might be that like you said, there’s a lot of steps that happen in between that you’ve created.

You know, I think we forget that we architect that journey and that we need to stop and look at each of the steps along the journey and see if there, say, a bottleneck, a place where we lose everybody. I was talking to my mom, who is a very committed blood donor, and she talks about how they make her fill out the identical form every time she goes to fill out to donate blood.

And she donates like every three months. And one time she made like one mistake where she accidentally, like, rolled the little date dial too far into her birthdate was wrong, and she had to go back and redo the whole form. And she was so frustrated. She just walked out that day. She’s like, Nope, sorry guys, not today. And I was thinking about like, if you’re the blood bank, you want to make it as frictionless as possible for somebody to show up and get a needle stuck in their arm to donate blood.

And yet they lost somebody that month because they just made it so difficult to complete that journey. And so if you don’t if you don’t know that, if you don’t know where you’re creating friction for the people who are trying to follow you on your journey, you won’t know what’s not working where they might need to fix that.

Brian Piper
Yeah, and a lot of that is just making sure that you’re focusing on the right data because, I mean, it’s important to increase your search rankings to drive more traffic. But oftentimes we’ll be working with a school or a department and they’ll come up with, you know, here’s the terms that we really want to rank or and some of those are great because they have they’re really high volume.

They have a lot of people like tens of thousands of people every month searching for this one particular term. But then when we start looking through their list, we’ll find other terms that are much more appropriate to answering the questions that their particular users have. And then when we start looking at the data, we can see that even though there’s a fraction of the volume in those searches, the conversion rate is much higher.

So I would much rather target a term that has 100 people a month searching on it, but 20 of them convert versus 20,000 people a month searching on it and two of them convert.

Alexandra
That is a really important point. The idea that we do sometimes focus on the wrong part of the equation, right? We’ll focus on inputs rather than the output. And so yeah, it doesn’t actually matter what numbers are on the input side of your equation. What matters is that final. How many people signed up for your program?

Brian Piper
That’s one of the issues a lot of times that you find with reporting. People will be reporting on these metrics that don’t really align with your final goals. And if they don’t, then they’re just, you know, I always tell people, you know, data without strategy or data without goals is just numbers. Doesn’t really mean anything. It doesn’t do anything for you. It doesn’t add any value.

Alexandra
That is so true. So true. And I think it’s really important to remember, I think people sometimes call them vanity metrics. When you look for numbers that are just counts of things and you’re like, Here we got counts of lots of cool things, and you’re like, So what does it mean?

Brian Piper
That’s right.

Alexandra
Right? What does it mean? And I think that’s a really important step, whether you’re talking about website metrics or metrics of any kind that you should be able to ask, So what? After seeing a number and there should be an answer that directly connects to success in your business, right? We got 10,000 page views. So what?

Brian Piper
Right. Yeah. And sometimes it’s not it’s not even that it directly equates to success, but it equates to an insight that will allow you to experiment. And a lot of times that’s what we do with our content is we have to experiment, try things and see what works. But if you’re not tracking the numbers, then you’re just kind of trying things and just throwing them out there and you don’t really know if it’s working or not. So that’s why it’s so important to be watching those numbers and to be and to know what your final goal is. But your objective is.

Alexandra
Write the number, the data should lead to an action you can take rather than adjust. Well, that’s nice to know. My brother learned to fly. He has his pilot’s license for her small aircraft and I was talking with him about like, well, what data do you need when you fly? Like, what are the instruments that are required while you’re flying?

And the interesting thing is there’s only like six or eight instruments that are required by the FAA. Like, you need to know, like you need to know your altitude, you need to know the position that you’re pointed the compass direction like a few other things, but a lot of stuff they don’t require you to know because it’s not something you could react to.

Brian Piper
Right?

Alexandra
It’s not an action point for you, right? You don’t have to know what temperature the air is outside. Might be nice to know, but you don’t have to know it. It doesn’t you’re not going to act on that information. And I think that sometimes people are surprised by how little information they would actually need to be able to make a decent decision or, to your point, a guess like a good informed guess of let’s try this and tell if it works because we’re tracking it.

We may not know for sure if it’s going to increase sign ups, but if we’re tracking signups and we try this thing and we see signups go up, that’s a good piece of information to help us as we refine that process.

Brian Piper
Absolutely. Yup.

Alexandra
You mentioned understanding your audience and understanding how they find you. And I really like that idea that you can just ask them, right? I think sometimes we think we have to like engineer exactly how this works, but you can actually just say, How did you find us? What problem where are you trying to solve that led you to us as your solution? But I know that there’s also different ways you can try to reach your target audience, different ways that you can try to locate them and connect with them. And you talked a little bit about figuring out how your content performs in different places. So can you talk a little bit more about how you might do that and what that means?

Brian Piper
Yeah, absolutely. So a key part of that is keeping track of who you’re trying to target with different pieces of content. So one of the things we do at the university is we tag every story, every social post with what audience we’re trying to reach with that particular piece of content. And so then we’ll try putting that piece of content out on a variety of different channels.

So we may have a news story that comes out about some research that we’re doing, and we know that research is kind of technical, so it really leans more towards, you know, either graduate students or maybe faculty or potential faculty. So that’s really the audience that we’re targeting with that. So we may, you know, we’ll put out the story, will promote it in our newsletters, and then we’ll try it on several different social channels.

We’ll put a post out about that story and then that kind of over time, we can see by tags which stories, which posts perform better on which channels. So now we know when we’re targeting faculty or graduate students, we tend to focus more on LinkedIn. When we’re targeting undergraduate students or potential undergraduate students. Then we look more on Twitter or TikTok.

So it’s just kind of understanding which audiences tend to be active on which channels and then feeding that content out to that channel. Now you can also take the same message that you’re going to put out on LinkedIn for your graduate students. You can spin that particular post and put that out as a post focused more on your potential undergraduate students on Twitter, so they all link to the same story.

And it’s just one story that’s written to, you know, one target audience. But you can still promote that research. You can promote those concepts in that story to different audiences on different channels, but you have to use different messages.

Alexandra
One of the things I really enjoyed of what you just said was the idea that you start a piece of content already with the goal in mind, right? You’re not just creating content to create content, you’re creating content because you’re saying this is going to provide value to our graduate students because X or this is we’re going to target towards our undergraduate graduates because they’re going to benefit with Y or we want to share about a new research project we did because we want to, you know, get new postdocs to participate in or we’re looking for funding or whatever. If you’re starting with that goal in mind. And I think oftentimes that’s not how content really is done. At least I can admit that is not always how I do. Content.

Brian Piper
Yes, absolutely. When I started at the university came in and what that was one of the first questions I had every time a news story would get recommended to the editors, I’d be like, Yes, this is a great story. Who’s the audience? And the writer would say, Everyone. Everyone is like, No, everyone. It is not an audience pick.

I know. Yes, everyone should read this story. Absolutely. But which audience is going to be able to take an action that’s going to have the biggest impact on getting you towards your goal? That is your primary audience. Focus on them. Write the story for them, promote it to them, and then, yes, other people are going to read it.

And you know, there are pieces of content that have multiple audiences, but you still want to put your calls to action and your key pieces of information and to your primary audience first, even on like our admissions pages, we know who our target audience is. We put that information right up front. It’s potential undergrad, you add students, but then we know that parents are also a huge part of that audience.

Put content on that page for them, but make sure it’s separate. It’s not the target first primary piece of content up there, but you want to make sure that you’re tracking, to make sure that, you know, maybe you have a call to action for your undergraduate students on your admissions page. And then under that you have a call to action for your parents.

Which one of those gets more clicks? You know, which one of those is driving more traffic? Which one of those creates more conversions? Maybe you learned that parents are your primary audience, so you switch the content and put them first. But if you’re not tracking, if you’re not measuring, you’ll never know.

Alexandra
I think that’s one of the problems people have with optimization, is that by definition, if you were optimizing right, trying to maximize the outcome we talked about, we don’t care so much about the inputs. What we care about is the outputs, the outcomes that happen. But if you’re trying to maximize that outcome, it means making decisions that will get rid of or reduce your engagement with a particular part of your group.

Right? So like with parents versus undergrads, Right. Parents are going to want to know, like, are my kids going to be safe? Are they going to be cared for? Kids are going to want to know, am I going to be empowered? Will I get to make my own decision? But it might be likely limiting desires there. And so if you tried to optimize for both of them, you’d end up having to say something really bland that would by definition not be optimized.

It wouldn’t be geared towards that one specific audience. And so we hesitate to do that because we’re like, but that’s going to alienate this group or this group might not like it. And the point is, yes, that’s the only way that you’ll get really good at reaching a certain audience or advancing a particular goal.

Brian Piper
Absolutely. Yeah.

Alexandra
And as you said, if you’re not tracking it, then you also won’t know how effective your optimization choices were. So you might think that parents care about a certain thing, but it turns out they don’t care about that at all. And in fact, what they want to find out is this other piece of information that you’ve been leaving out. And so you you need to be tracking to make sure that you actually are optimizing your succeeding in that optimization.

Brian Piper
Yeah. And if you don’t provide those action points, if you don’t keep those calls to action on the page close to your targeted content, you’re not going to have a way to measure whether or not your content is successful or not. So that’s another, you know, key element is you want to make sure that you every piece of content should be driving the user to do something, even if it’s just consume more content. There should be an option at the end of every page or buried within every page to say, read more or take an action or do something, or fill out this form or give us your email.

Alexandra
That’s another really good point. Again, and it goes back to you started that piece of content with a goal in mind. Hopefully or maybe you’re going to start creating content with goals in mind, which means that the goal tells you what the call to action will be.

Brian Piper
Exactly.

Alexandra
And so then you’re able to measure a person came to this page. Did they do the action?

Brian Piper
Yeah. And you even even go back a step farther. What words? What questions are we trying to answer with this page? What words are we optimizing for? That should also feed our call to action that should feed whatever, you know, action we want the user to take, right?

Alexandra
So it’s all aligned.

Brian Piper
Exactly.

Alexandra
Seamlessly aligned. That makes a lot of sense. Now, one question I had, you know, we were talking about that for you. You target undergrads more on Twitter and your graduate students, students more on LinkedIn. Does that idea of targeting also work like with specific content types or topics, I should say specific content topics or particular calls to action, like might you optimize where you say, Oh, when we’re looking for, you know, people to sign up for a program versus looking for people to read an article that, you know, people on Twitter just are not going to read an article maybe, or something like that. Do you also optimize in that way?

Brian Piper
Absolutely. So we’ll track other elements within all of our pieces of content. And we look at, you know, we’ll tag each piece of content based on which strategy it supports, which audience it supports. But then we’ll also look at things like title length and the reading level of the piece of content. And there’s all sorts of tools that you can use to help you determine those things and you kind of figure out what the sweet spot is and you hope that’s right.

And then you start making changes within your system, within your workflow to accommodate that, and then you see if that helps improve. So that’s that tracking data to get that baseline coming up with an insight based on what you see working and what isn’t working. A lot of times that’s, you know, it’s kind of correlation. You hope that it’s going to make an impact and then you start experimenting.

Brian Piper
And then as you’re tracking data through these experiments, you’re going to see, Oh yes, this does actually work. Now we can make this shift within our entire workflow and have everybody jump on board with this. And now we’re going to see much bigger improvements.

Alexandra
Right? And now you have a whole university’s worth of data to be able to experiment with, which means that you can get pretty granular in terms of those questions you pose because you might have thousands of articles And so you can look at title links, for example, because you know you’re going to have enough titles of different lengths to give you some meaningful insights.

If you’re a smaller organization, might you have to make some different choices about what you look at because you just might not have enough content or enough people visiting your content to be able to get some meaningful insight.

Brian Piper
Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of times with data, we run into issues where you just don’t have a big enough data set. So sometimes you’re going to be making changes, you’re going to be trying things out, you’re going to see improvements. It’s hard to know if it’s directly related. See, I mean, correlations, not causation. It’s not necessarily directly related to the changes you make, but over time, if you keep trying that and you keep seeing those results, then eventually you’re going to kind of build your dataset big enough.

So a lot of times it’s just trying to narrow down the one thing that you’re going to consistently work on changing and you experiment with that for a month or two months or however long it takes to kind of get an idea as to whether or not that is the deciding factor that’s changing your effectiveness. And then you can, you know, add that into your workflow, right?

Alexandra
I feel like it’s an important time for a public safety announcement of the idea that changes in small numbers are not always meaningful, right? Like when we talk about people reading content or visiting your web page or whatever, that just because you see like three more people than you did last week doesn’t necessarily mean that something you did made those three extra people show up.

It could just be random variation. So I like your point that you might have to track this over time and see if those changes persist. So if you see that or run some things in parallel, right like that, maybe you have either two versions of the landing page that you put out there or you might sort of alternate a newsletter style and see if the weeks that have, you know, the pictures at the top do better than the weeks where you don’t have the pictures at the top and you can kind of try it that way just over time until you accumulate enough data points that the differences become a lot more meaningful.

Brian Piper
Yeah, and there are also a lot of different tools out there that you can do those kind of AB tests. So you could release the exact same article with two different headlines to, you know, either different geographic areas or different. You could random randomly serve the different article to different audiences. So those are just different ways to try and experiment and play around so that you’re only changing one element between these two different articles and you can kind of see how that affects calls to action or consuming more content, those sorts of things.

Alexandra
Absolutely. Yeah. I’m a huge fan of AB testing. I think it’s one of the only ways to really figure out for sure if there’s a meaningful difference in a change that you’re trying to make to a web page or to a form. And you’re right, you have to make sure you make one change, right? So that, you know, if it’s not one change or not, and if you see no difference, then all right, then that one didn’t matter.

And you can try a different change. Exactly. What do you use? You said you talk about you tag your content and you track how it performs. What do you personally or professionally, I should say, use to tag and track the performance of your content.

Brian Piper
So a lot of that will do with using a data data layer within WordPress. So that’s one way you can do it. Another way you can do it is just in Google sheets. Just create a Google sheet with your, you know, here’s the social post that we put out today. Here’s the articles that we published. So you have your calendar, your editorial calendar, and then as part of that calendar, and this is a great way to when you’re planning out articles or posts, that’s how you’re going to identify who your audiences are, what your key strategies are, so that you’re going to have those all listed in that form already.

So then when you start going back and looking at performance numbers and what’s working and what’s not, you’re already going to have those data elements in there.

Alexandra
Now, let’s say one of your calls to action is to buy a bookbag for a child, right? You have this like purchased form or something like that. And you you have that call to action in an article. You have that call to action in a tweet. You have that call to action in an email that goes out. How do you know if that all gets sent to the same, like purchase a book bag? How would you know which one of those channels sent the most people?

Brian Piper
So UTMB tags are a great way to tag any link that’s going from outside your website into your website. So that’s a great way. It just creates a little campaign within Google Analytics and there are lots of UTMB code generators out there. Google’s got free ones you can use where you just go in and you say, you know, here’s the link that I want this to go to.

It’s coming from social channel, it’s coming from Twitter. And then that way you can go right into Google Analytics and you can say, Oh, you know, I got 30 people that came to my shopping cart from Twitter, but only one of them bought 20 people, came to my shopping cart from my Web page and 18 of them bought.

Alexandra
So yeah, okay. So you’re right. So this idea of a called a UTMB tag, meaning you create a link that you put it you include in your Twitter call to action or you could your email, but there’s a little bit at the end of the link that says this link went out in Twitter, this link went out in your email. And so then whether you use, like you said, there’s free options within Google, within Google Analytics that you can create these links and track and then you’ll see in a dashboard where people came from or there’s other oftentimes paid, but sometimes easier to navigate, ones that will create those link trackers for you. And you can see what happens and where they go.

Brian Piper
Exactly. Yeah.

Alexandra
Awesome. Well, I always like to end with like a near time action that people listening could take right now that would sort of move them to that next step around what we’ve been talking about. So we’ve been exploring how we can optimize the effectiveness of our website and our content using analytics. And I’m curious what would be your one action step with people? We’re only going to do one thing after listening or the first thing that they should do. Hopefully they’ll do more than one. But what would be the first thing you would recommend they do?

Brian Piper
I would say, you know, the key thing to focus on is your overall goals. What are your strategies? What are your objectives, and then how can your website or your social channels help you reach those objectives? Those are the pieces of data that you want to start tracking. You want to start looking at, you want to start monitoring, and then over time you’re going to be able to start making these changes that we were talking about. And if they work.

Alexandra
That makes so much sense that you would start with just monitoring. You don’t have to make any changes yet, but get the monitoring in place so that you can see those changes that might happen down the road. And I’ll bet that there’s a lot of people who haven’t said, how can my website help? Or they haven’t thought about all the ways that their website might be able to help achieve, you know, their whole organizational goals and different capacity. So that’s a great place to start. Awesome. If people wanted to connect with you further or follow up with you, where could we send them to find you?

Brian Piper
You can go to Brian W Piper Ecom or basically any social channel. Brian W Piper will find me.

Alexandra
Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. Brian.

Brian Piper
Thank you. Alexander This is a great conversation.

Alexandra
So that was Brian Piper from the University of Rochester. I hope that you feel more empowered to actually break down how your organizational goals, whatever your organization is trying to achieve, can be better served by your website and the content that you create. I think taking that step to realize that it’s not about measuring all of the numbers and it’s not even about getting the highest numbers, the most web page views, or the highest number of, you know, impressions on your post.

But what it actually is about is making sure that you get the outcome you’re trying to get. What is the action that you need from the people you’re engaging with in order to be successful in those goals that you determined at the beginning? So taking the time to be clear about how you need to use your website, what is it that your website could do?

What are the actions that people could take that would help you achieve the things that you’re trying to achieve? And that’s why data without goals are just useless numbers. You need to know what you’re trying to achieve in order to know what you’re measuring and how those specific numbers you get back are going to impact the choices that you make.

Right? So if you focus on driving up views on a page, but actually what you need are people to sign up for a program or make a donation. Getting that information about how many people viewed your page isn’t all that helpful. Now, if you consistently convert a certain proportion and you just need to increase the number of people in your funnel, fine, But you’ll probably find that there is a difference in the quality of people who reach your page depending on the tactics that you take.

So I hope that you are able to sit down and take Bryan up on his action where you say, What are my goals? What are the goals for my team and my particular page? What are my goals for my overall organization and my whole website and say, what could my particular teams page or my particular team’s content or my whole organization’s website or content do to help me achieve those goals?

Before you try to figure out how to optimize or anything, get clear on those two things. And then the metrics you need to measure will become a lot more obvious when you’re clear about what actions you want to take. If you’re curious to learn more about things like search engine optimization, make sure to check back in next month.

In March, we will be talking to an expert about how you can use data to optimize your content with specific search terms. And you can also go back and check out episode 25 where we talk about YouTube metrics. And we discussed the same issue about the difference between vanity metrics and impact metrics. So be sure if you’re interested in exploring a little bit more about how tracking the right things can be helpful in really driving change for your nonprofit organization.

You can follow this up if you haven’t heard it with episode 25 with a tie. So thank you so much for joining me today. And as always, if there’s anything else I can do to help you, feel free to check me out on Merakinos.com or LinkedIn. Alexandra Mannerings. If you enjoyed the show, all I ask is that you either leave a rating or invite someone else to listen so that we can find more people who will find value out of what we talk about on this show.

Until next week, I wish you the best on the next step of your analytic journey!

Adam Kogeman

Adam Kogeman is co-founder and principal consultant at Good Bones Consulting, an organizational development consultancy which supports purpose-driven organizations to enhance operational systems, processes, and efficiency. Adam is an experienced social sector leader who has overseen programs and operations at prominent nonprofit and social enterprise organizations and has expertise in diverse issue areas including workforce development, homelessness and housing, and refugee resettlement. He is an engaged member of multiple nonprofit boards, including Good Business Colorado, a statewide advocacy group and network of values-driven small business owners.


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