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Establishing Success Metrics for Fundraising-ROI in Your Online Social Networking Community
Posted by:
Walter Roark on
May 26, 2009 at
7:22PM AFT
You Need Qualitative Goals before Leaping to Quantitative Metrics
In establishing a socially-enabled community, it’s important to
keep the big picture in focus. Your objectives should be all about your
organization’s constituents. Certainly, fundraising campaigns and
dollars raised are the bottom line, but the members of your  online community have agendas that go far beyond monetary matters.
Albert Einstein (a rather smart fundraiser himself) voiced a
memorable quote that applies very well to the social aspects of
metrics: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything
that counts can be counted.”
Measuring Qualitative Community Success by the Relationships You Have with Your Members
If your community succeeds in strengthening the ties between you
and your advocates, as well as reinforcing the bonds between members,
you will set the stage for healthy fundraising in the long-term.
Examples of qualitative success in a branded, social networking community:
-You are able to learn something new about your members that redefines your relationship
-You are able to effectively deliver a message to the community and
your members are sharing the message with each other and with the
outside world
-Your blog posts are building momentum in the number of quality comments
-Members are actively sharing knowledge with each other and
meaningfully supporting fellow constituents’ concerns, passions and
goals
-Your administrative experiments within the community are  teaching you how you need to adapt your practices for future objectives
-You are learning significant insights from the two-way communication in the community
-You are able to communicate a fundraising success narrative to
your advocates by linking online donations to the compelling, real-life
stories of your members
-A modest but encouraging number of connections with members are
powerful and instructive—they are providing you with valuable feedback
about the community and your organization’s overall objectives
Selecting High-Quality Metrics to Track Quantitative Trends in Your Social Networking Community
First, plug in standard web analytics, including...Search Terms,
Referring URLs, Content Popularity, Home Page Visitors, Site Overlay
Clicks, and Bounce Rate.
Stage one, establish these essential social networking metrics:
What should you look for to reinforce basic analytics within your community?
-Membership growth (number of new members by week + month + quarter + annual change)
-Number of page views in comparison time periods
-Average duration of web site visit
-Number of blog posts/comments to number of members by time period
-Conversion rate of member to member-donor
-Average donation in comparison time periods
-Number of days from community registration to first donation
-Loyalty quotient—number of multiple donors
 Stage two, concentrate on these additional fundraising-specific social networking metrics and marketing strategies:
How often are community visitors finding your fundraising pages?
-Number of hits and unique visitors to your designated fundraising pages
-Determine which causes are most followed by your members. Use
these data to create causes that resonate best in the future. This
action can also help determine if your marketing is working
Which pages produce the most donations?
-Once people visit certain pages, which pages produce the most
transactions and biggest total dollars? This is your conversion rate.
-Accordingly, test different pages, layouts and causes to determine the best setup for your causes
What types of causes trigger the biggest monetary result? When you call
for a routine donation size, which one evokes the greater response?
-Which causes produce the most robust response? Are the high-return causes linked to a larger campaign?
-Do larger donation requests produce a smaller percentage return?
-If your request for $20 produces 60% fewer transactions than a call for $10, consider lowering your average request
Which member profile has the strongest history of donating?
-What is the trend among your more generous donators? More or less frequency?
-What are their profile characteristics? Age? Location? Background?
 Are you mining your member information with a flexible donor management system from our dedicated partners?
-Which individual types are more likely to donate?
-Can you deliver content to them and create causes that are tailored to their interests?
-Are your active members also the most generous? Are they more likely to create content or simply view it?
-Do your frequent donors tend to participate in chapters or
pledges? Do they organize online events? Are they active on Twitter?
-Are you integrating your email marketing?
Obviously, establishing fundraising metrics for nonprofits and
associations in a newly deployed community is an evolutionary topic.
Please feel free to comment about social networking and ROI-fundraising
measurements in today’s competitive online environment.
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