A Website Analysis Can Help Your Nonprofit Raise More Money

A typical nonprofit wants to raise donations, get new members and volunteers, gain support, educate the public, get people on their email list, and more (depending on the type of organization). 

If you’re running a campaign that relies on SEO in some capacity, a robust analysis of your website will give you the knowledge needed to achieve your goals. That’s because once you locate your website’s weak points you can take steps to fix them.

For instance, you can see where visitors to your site came from—be it via a Google search, an email, a Facebook page, an ad or another website. You can use that information to match their activity with donation patterns.

For example, you might find that certain emails generated higher levels of donations than others. You can then tailor your email campaigns to better engage your recipients. Or, you might discover that one version of an ad worked better than another, and adjust accordingly.

By examining bounce rates—the percentage of visitors who navigate away from your site after viewing a certain page—you can find out if information on one of your website’s pages is, well, lame. If it is—or if there is a glitch on the page—you can take appropriate actions to fix the problem.

Using a website analysis will help you:

• Find out how many people complete transactions so that you can optimize your check out process.
• Use a website-path analysis to see where people are getting lost while navigating your website.
• Find out the search terms people used to locate your website. (This can help you come up with new and better search terms).
• Discover if a certain social media post drives visitors to your website. (That way you’ll learn the best types of posts to attract more people to your website.)
• Optimize your inbound sales funnel by analyzing the path people take through your website toward becoming members, or making donations, or performing some other action. (By analyzing this path, you can identify weaknesses and fix them so that your visitors can easily navigate to the area of your website where they’ll make your desired conversion.

You might find that certain emails generated higher levels of donations than others. You can then tailor your email campaigns to better engage your recipients. Or, you might discover that one version of an ad worked better than another, and adjust accordingly.

A daunting task

There are many other ways you can use data to achieve your nonprofit’s goals. However, mining and interpreting that data requires somebody who is adept at using Google Analytics (or a different analytics system). Only about 52.9% of all websites on the Internet use Google Analytics, and the number may be lower for nonprofits, which are often understaffed.

Tags: fundraising, nonprofits, web