Measuring the effectiveness of your nonprofit’s content strategy

Content marketing is about creating a conversation and a connection with donors and the community. Sending the right message on the right channels is essential for creating those connections in this digital age.

You know your nonprofit needs a content strategy to step out ahead of the competition. You know what you need to do to put together that content strategy. But creating it and implementing it are only the first steps. Measuring the effectiveness of your nonprofit’s content strategy is an important step of the process. You need to know what’s working and what isn’t and use that information to revise your strategy and make it work even better.

At Allee Creative, we work with a lot of nonprofits, and we know that budgets are tight and getting good results for your investment is important. Measuring the success or failure or a content strategy is a service we offer. Here’s how we do it.

Key Performance Indicators

When you create your content strategy, make sure you identify key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are specific measurable goals that you will track to gauge success.

Example: “We want to increase organization awareness” is not a KPI. It’s a goal, but it’s not measurable. The KPIs will be specific indicators that will let you know if your organizational awareness has increased and might include measurable goals like:

• Increase number of information request forms filled out online by 10%
• Increase Facebook audience to 1,000 likes
• Increase Twitter engagement by 25%
• Increase visits to website by 35%
• Make Facebook a top 5 referral source for website traffic
• Increase online donations by 50%

Tracking goals

To track your KPIs, keep an easy-to-read spreadsheet that allows you to see progress over time. You don’t need a fancy report, Excel works just fine. Check in once per month to see how well your content is helping you reach your goals. If you don’t like the results you’re getting, the data you’re collecting will allow you to clearly see how and where you need to revise your strategy.

Collecting data

Using social media platforms like SproutSocial or HootSuite can help you compile social media data into reports that give you a snapshot of how channels are performing. Of course, some of the metrics you may be tracking will be available through the channels insights; Facebook provides a lot of excellent metrics for business pages, for example.

Google analytics

If you don’t have Google analytics tracking your website, make it a goal to implement that as soon as possible. Google analytics will give you the information you need about what’s driving traffic to your website, where visitors are going and how long they’re staying. Adding Google Analytics to your website  is easy and free. It’s a great tool that offers a lot of information that can help you track your nonprofit’s KPIs.

Content calendar

Using a content calendar for your nonprofit’s blog and social media will help you keep your content on track. A content calendar keeps everything in one place so you can look back and improve in the future. Content calendar provides a record of what you have done, so when you need to make changes, you know where to start.

The world moves quickly and things are always changing. Your audiences needs may be changing, your nonprofit may be changing, your content and how it’s distributed may also need to change. The only way to know is to evaluate your content strategy, know what’s working. Adjusting your strategy based on the metrics that matter will keep your content effective and give you a competitive edge.