Tag Archives: dashboard

What’s New in ePhilanthropy

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If you missed this week’s Social Media for Nonprofits NYC event, you can get a great summary from Big Duck’s Farra Trompeter, who presented a great step by step tutorial on implementing Multi-Channel Campaigns.  (More session slides from this and past events are available here.)  See also Kivi Leroux Miller’s post highlighting Convio’s recently released Multi-Channel Marketing Report.

Coming up with strong content is the key behind any online strategy.  As I and many of my nonprofit colleagues around the country do, I try to find the most worthwhile posts to share with my followers.  Beth Kanter explains that Content Creation is Listening and Engaging, then followed up with this look at Scoop.It as a way to organize your content.

How can you make your website more ‘social’?  Debra Askanase explains how and gives several examples of nonprofits that are doing this well, and will follow up with a Nten webinar next month.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen says you must focus on essential content when writing for mobile platforms.  If you’re new to email marketing, learn about Email Marketing 2.0, then learn how segmentation can help you to get better results.

Finally, if you’re trying to find a format to send to your management to summarize social media and results of other online activity, Beth offers this guest post highlighting the Smithsonian Institution’s in-house dashboard, then suggests using a small pilot project to demonstrate the effectiveness of social media.

 

Using Dashboards to Measure Results

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At the Nonprofit Excellence Awards I attended earlier this year, Witness was recognized for excellence in communications, including a ‘performance dashboard’ which “uses metrics to measure the organization’s results.”  Recently, I read another article on this topic, Warning Lights by Maguire Associates which discussed this topic from the viewpoint of educational institutions.

At my current organization, I generate a monthly report which summarizes key statistics for online fundraising: pledge and non-pledge based events, online donations, memberships, honor/memorial donations and ecommerce.  The greatest challenge is providing the information in a compact enough format that executives will read, but which include sall important data.

A good analogy is WebTrends & Google Analytics, which we use to monitor our web site traffic. WebTrends clearly provides more data but requires some ‘digging’ to analyze results.  Google Analytics, which redesigned its interface earlier this year, shows graphical reports which are easy to present to executives.  (For now, we are using both tools.)

At most nonprofits I’ve worked for, it’s rare that all staff members and the public knows how the organization is doing at times other than when the annual report is issued (which is usually many months after the fiscal year ends).  Using regularly updated dashboards is a powerful tool to keep employees and stakeholders fully informed.

Attention vendors: can your product integrate in a way so that statistics can be easily utilized by a dashboard type application? The tool used is not critical (I use Excel);  what’s important is that the organization provides consistent data to all.