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Please vote for these NTEN conference panels by Thursday Sep. 30th!

2010-09-28T10:15:58-07:00

The NTEN conference is the premier non-profit technology conference. Like many conferences now, they include public participation in the decision-making process for programming the conference.

Shayna Englin and I have submitted a panel idea for this year's conference, and we could really use your help in voting for it. You don't even have to register to vote, but please, only vote once.

(look for this image above and then give stars to help rate my panel)

The Potentials and Pitfalls Of Using Web Analytics (by Shabbir and Shayna)

Session Takeaways

What the key roadblocks are to an analytics deployment.
What skills you need to implement an analytics program, and what backing they need.
How to effectively prepare your organization to act on analytics insights.

We're going to bring a number of different non-profit executives and ask them to talk about the challenges of implementing analytics within an organization.

Also I would ask you to give some love to two of Beth Kanter's panels as well.

You Can't Recycle Wasted Time on Social Networks (by Beth Kanter)

Session Takeaways

To discover the best practices and secret tips used by nonprofit social media pratitioners that help save time
To discover ways to maximize results using social media
To be exposed to a wide variety of useful tools that help you implement social media efficiently

I Found My Free Agent, Now What? (by Beth Kanter)

Session Takeaways

What are the techniques and strategies that nonprofits use to find free agents?
What are the lessons learned from Free Agents about working with nonprofits?
What are the change issues for traditional nonprofits that want to become "networked nonprofits?

Slides for two upcoming talks

2010-06-23T15:10:07-07:00

I've got slides for two upcoming talks online:

Stanford 7th Annual E-Commerce Best Practices (Stanford Law School, CA): On Friday June 25th I'm on a panel talking about online crisis communications best practices. With my new focus on analytics I'm not going to be writing about this as much, but most of the research I've done is still relevant, and the conference is in my backyard. Slides are up on slideshare. I jokingly think of this as the "How Your Lawyers Cause Crises" talk.
American Library Association Annual Meeting (Washington, DC): I then take a redeye to DC to make good on a previous commitment to a good friend and participate in a panel about communicating externally, specifically to elected officials on Sunday June 27th. Slides are online here.

Summer happenings

2010-06-22T09:48:06-07:00

I've got a pretty busy summer. I'm speaking 3 or 4 times, working on some cool client projects, planning my next "ebook", and putting together a new project that's not ready to launch yet.

A few weeks ago I was in NYC for Personal Democracy Forum 2010 where Shayna Englin (Englin Consulting), myself, Alisa Aydin (US Fund for UNICEF), and Ken Deutsch (Morningside Analytics) gave a panel talk covering a lot of different material in the field of analytics, including:

deploying analytics (what it is, what it isn't),
measuring Facebook,
measuring advocacy, and
measuring the global conversation.

Alisa's and my slides are here. Shayna's are here, and Ken's are coming.

Also if you didn't catch one of the chapters of my "Six Projects To Do Before You Redesign", go check on it now. I've finished all six chapters.

Six projects to do before you do a website redesign: Learn what the user craves to hear

2010-05-26T15:28:20-07:00

[This is the last part of a six part series on projects you should do before you commit to a redesign. To learn why redesigns are expensive and often serve the agency much better than the client, read my introduction.]

The currency of modern online marketing and outreach is content. There are a lot of other words for it: conversation, social, engagement, storytelling, but it all comes down to one key thing:

You need to tell a compelling story about the work you do that communicates your excitement and passion. And you need to be able to do it on a regular basis.

To this end every nonprofit (and every brand of any kind) is currently struggling with how to tell their story. They've been doing broadcast boilerplate so long, they've had to relearn what it means to talk about themselves passionately.

Figuring out your voice, and what your users crave to hear, is a key part of your strategy that you need to figure out before you do a redesign. Why? Because if you do a redesign and then discover that your users want different content than what you thought, your new site navigation, layout, and your entire information architecture will need to be redone. After you've spent a bunch of money to do it once, do you really want to do it all over again?

Here's a simple process for experimenting with new content that you can do in order to prepare for a redesign.

Start by applying analytics to your email list

If you've been running an email list for a year, you've probably got a large set of archived emails and their data around. Pull that list and go through the process of categorizing the content in each email.

Use your email analytics product to pull reports of people who have clicked something in the last 30 days, in the 30-60 day range, and in the 90+ days category. These will be your test subjects.

Now pull the content analytics from your website

Another great source of information about what content of yours is most popular is your inbound links, something we've discussed in great detail in previous articles. Go into Google Webmaster and download the list of your pages fed by external links. Or Google Analytics and look at your landing pages that are fed by "Referral Traffic" that aren't search engines.

Pull them into Excel and categorize them in classic card sort technique by their topic. Most of what you write probably falls into just a few buckets. Is there something that you no longer produce that has a sizable number of inbound links or traffic? A-ha!

Conduct a simple, telephone interview

Now reach out to the users in each email history category through something simple and cheap, like a personal email, and ask them to talk to you about what they like in your email newsletter. If you have their phone numbers, you can call them. Ask them what they remember clicking on. Does it match what they actually clicked on? Ask them if they read an email newsletter from a similar organization and learn what they like about the others. You won't copy it, but combined with your domain expertise it should give you ideas.

I've actually been doing this with the latest ebook about measuring Facebook that Shayna and I wrote. Just randomly, I've been calling people that downloaded it, apologizing for the intrusion and asking for a few minutes for feedback. Most of them are stunned by this personal touch and complete lack of sales pressure. When they realize I really just wanted to know what they thought of it, they're more than happy to help me.

Half of them haven't read it yet, but the other half gave me particularly good feedback that Shayna and I are using for our next ebook. In fact, I have learned that about a third of the material in the ebook was not really well-targeted to the audience. Surprising? Useful? Valuable and inexpensive Research? Yes Yes and Yes.

Start brainstorming new content and testing it in email and Facebook

At this point its time to come back to your domain expertise. Learn what it is people might like, and start drafting some examples. Use them in an email and check the clickthru rate, or post them on your Facebook page and watch the Facebook.com-sourced traffic click through to it. Over time you'll find some new ideas for your content.

Conclusion

This process is a good one to try on a regular basis, perhaps once or twice a year, in order to avoid getting stuck in a rut doing the same thing without external input. It requires listening though, which isn't a natural skill for everyone. Making sure you've done it before a redesign is crucial, though.

Six projects to do before you do a webside redesign: Learn what the Internet sees

2010-05-12T13:09:39-07:00

[This is the fifth part of a six part series on projects you should do before you commit to a redesign. To learn why redesigns are expensive and often serve the agency much better than the client, read my introduction.]

Your website today, no matter how crappy you think it is, has a steady stream of people that come to it, and in some percentage, do what you ask. They are some of your best traffic. They came for one of two reasons:

Because they searched on a topic in a search engine that didn't include your name, found what you had to say compelling, and then gave you their email address or money; or
Because someone on the net linked to one of your pages, which they came to and found what you had to say compelling, and then gave you their email address or money.

Think about the last redesign you did, or one of your colleagues did. Did anyone spend anytime talking about preserving the incoming link structure? Did anyone prioritize that list by the largest numbers of backlinks, making placeholder pages or 302 directives to redirect people to the new website?

Did anyone say, "Hey, we're ranked in the top 10 for these topics, we better do our homework to preserve our Google rank when we put up the new design" ? Probably not. Many agencies that do redesigns (and the clients that hire them) are concerned with mockups, designs, content management systems, and content migration.

And you paid an agency your hard earned money for this treatment?

How to find and preserve your inbound links through a redesign

During the redesign process, and preferably at the beginning, you should analyze your site's existing inbound link structure using a tool such as Google Webmaster. Once you get your website setup in Google Webmaster (GW), you will have access to Google's spider data about your website. In short, it will be like Google crawled the entire Internet for you and found everyone that linked to you.

Once you do this, you can download a spreadsheet of all those incoming links From GW. Go to the section "Your Site On The Web" and click "Links To Your Site".

Up will come a spreadsheet showing how many inbound links there are to your website and to what pages. You can also download the list of all links at the bottom.

When you click on the number on the right, it will bring up the detail of where those links are coming from. Once again, you can download that table of links at the bottom.

Wow, that's a lot of links to keep updated! How do I do that?

The easiest thing to do is to have your technical staff maintain the exact page address of anything with an incoming link through the redesign. If this isn't possible, have them replace the page that was at that address with a server side 301 redirect. Despite that sounding complicated and technical, it's actually not that hard for someone who configures webservers for a living.

If all of that doesn't work, then you're stuck using one of the less satisfying alternate methods. There's a discussion of these in the Google Webmaster forums. What you should not do is create duplicate content, though.

A great deal of your traffic comes in from your existing backlink network, and its worth it to preserve as much of it as possible.

How do I find my well-ranked search engine pages before a redesign?

These are also important. These are your organic search engine results, and you need to do your best to preserve their rank. There are three steps:

Identify them;
Preserve their web address for inbound links; and
Preserve their Search Engine Optimization-friendly (SEO-friendly) qualities.

Identifying them can be done through any tool, including your analytics product. Just produce a report of your top landing pages generated from organic search results. Preserving their page address is the same process as I describe above for any page with inbound links.

The harder process I can't explain is the preservation of the SEO-friendly qualities of the page. Keyword density, use of keywords, page crafting and other subtleties are part of the ever-changing SEO landscape. Any list I would provide would be incomplete. My advice is to retain a professional for this task if you have well-ranked pages, because if you do, you want to keep them.

You won't get lucky in your redesign if you don't prepare

It may be tempting to press on through your redesign and hope for the best. Don't. Google rank and link networks don't maintain themselves without effort, and when you're examining your traffic and wonder why there are less visits, donations, and email signups than before the redesign, this will be one of the culprits.

Six projects to do before you do a webside redesign: Learn what the user can and can't see

2010-05-05T05:54:37-07:00

[This is the fourth part of a six part series on projects you should do before you commit to a redesign. To learn why redesigns are expensive and often serve the agency much better than the client, read my introduction.]

I have an assertion for all of you considering a redesign of your website:

Some significant portion of your web visitors can't see, or don't see portions of your website. If you redesign the website without knowing what they aren't seeing, you may put crucial information in their blind spot in your redesign.

There are three reasons for users not to see the information you put on a page:

They physically can't see it.
They don't see it because it's not prominent.
They don't look at it because they've been trained not to.

You need to understand the blind spots in your website before you build another one, or you may put information in a blind spot even with the help of a usability expert. You also need to understand how people read on the web. Here are the reasons a visitor may not be seeing your content.

Can't see it: Blind visitors

If you're blind, you can't see the images. If you don't tag your pages carefully to facilitate screenreaders for the blind, these your visitors will miss out. It's not enough to just add alt tags to all your images, you need to attempt some level of 508 compliance. The US Government has some great tools for you at section508.gov.

Can't see it: Too small text

If you're text is too small, your visitors may not see what you've written. You can facilitate this with font sizing functions on your site that let the user make the font bigger. The major browsers also build this into their functions, but many visitors won't know they've missed it.

Can't see it: Color blind

This affects more people than you think. There are several different types of color blindness, and you only need to render something difficult to see (as opposed to invisible) in order to get tripped up by this and affect the effectiveness of your site. Use a tool that shows you the filtered version of your website to spot color blindness problems.

Can't see it: Screen size too small

Do you have a solid understanding of the screen sizes of your visitors? While you may not want to design your website to satisfy the 5% users that only have 600 pixels of width to view, you need to know enough not to put the most crucial information on the far right.

You can get screen size information from your analytics product. You can also see an immediate overlay of the site with Google Browser Overlay. If you run this on truthypr.com, you'll see why I moved my call-to-action column to the left.

Don't see it: not prominent

You can also bury important information in your website by cluttering it with too much material. I suggest running an eyetracking study on some of your competitors before doing a new design. People typically advise running a study on a design before you implement it, but a design that only exists on paper (or hasn't been worked into a CMS) is still very theoretical.

If you run a study of a competitor website, you'll learn the secrets that are specific to your issues, as well as learn a little about what your competitors don't know about their own audience. Of course, if you have the money, run it on your new design as well. Just don't be surprised when the design changes six months after implementation and another eyetracking study reveals a problem.

Don't see it: it looks like an ad

This is something I see commonly on nonprofit websites. Someone wants to promote something and so they build out a graphical promotion, maybe even an animated gif, to look like an ad, and drop it into every page on the site.

The problem with this is that web visitors have been training themselves to ignore ads for years. They gloss right over them, which is why the Internet Advertising Bureau has standardized larger and larger ad sizes to be embedded into pages.

Understanding how your existing website, no matter how awful, really works is a key step to creating a better one. These suggestions won't break the bank, but will help you understand what you need to do.

Six projects to do before you do a webside redesign: Learn what the user can't do

2010-04-28T10:39:58-07:00

[This is the third part of a six part series on projects you should do before you commit to a redesign. To learn why redesigns are expensive and often serve the agency much better than the client, read my introduction.]

I have an assertion for all of you considering a redesign of your website:

Your website is probably failing you in some way, and you don't know what it is. If you redesign your website without knowing why it's not fulfilling its goal, you're going to waste a lot of money. You're redesign is unlikely to randomly fix the problem.

Let me be clear about what I mean by fail: websites that don't have clear goals defined are failing their owners. And websites that have clear goals but can't get sizable quantities of visitors to complete their goal process are failing their owners.

If you either don't have a goal established, or you aren't measuring that goal, the redesign will be a waste of money and you're website will still be a failure. So let's assume you have goal already and a notable number of visitors aren't completing it: how can you learn what your users can't do? Let's start with the simple ones:

Check your site feedback email

I can pretty much guarantee that if you have a problem completing goals on your website, people have complained about it. Find the person who suffers through the site feedback email and ask them to show you what there is from the last three months. I remember I once started a relationship with a new nonprofit and asked about their high abandonment rate on the default multipage donate form. I asked "Do people ever complain about how many steps it takes to give you money?" The response I got "Oh yeah, all the time, people hate that."

Well, I said, let's change it to a shorter form. We did.

And the completion rate tripled.

Check your "user voice" tools

I won't repeat the instructions here, but if you installed a tool like 4Q to survey your users, you're set. A user survey tool will tell you what they came to your site to do and if they could complete it (or why not).

Study Your Goal Funnels

All analytics tools allow you to see what happened to users on their way to your goal, but failing to get there. Look at this goal funnel below for my first fundraising ebook. On the left are listed pages that drove people to the download and registration page. On the right are listed the places people went when they didn't finish and download.
Here's what those links on the right tell you:

Some just quit (exit), thwarted by the requirement to register.
Some went to my other ebook about measuring facebook.
Some went to the about page to see who the heck I am.
Some went back to the homepage.
Some went to an article I wrote about measuring social media.

Though you'll never have a 100% conversion rate for a page like this, you can always study the reasons people don't finish by looking where they went and attempt to raise that completion rate by addressing those concerns.

And the project to solve that problem is a lot cheaper than a website redesign.

Praise and publicity for our Facebook ebook

2010-04-22T08:44:37-07:00

We've been getting a lot of good publicity for our Facebook ebook. Here's a little roundup:

One of Shabbir's analytics heroes, KD Paine, tweeted a nice compliment.
Beth Kanter, ubiquitous expert on nonprofits and social media, really absorbed the ebook and blogged how it could be used as a framework for measuring all social media.
Convio's Connection Cafe ran a guest blog post from us, as did Web Of Change.
Frogloop, one of my favorite must-read nonprofit blogs ran a guest post by us.
NTEN wrote a complimentary blog post.
Katya Andresen, COO of Network4Good, blogged it.
TechPresident published a review "How Many Clicks Does It Take: A UNICEF Case Study".
Also tweets from: Meta Brown, analytics enthusiast and SPSS staffer, tweeted it, as well as Veronica Sopher, Brenna Holmes, and Adam Faitek.
Andrew Tyla blogged the study, as did Kirsten Bullock.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy did a one word link buried in their "Give and Take" column. (Hey, we'll take it!)

I'll update this as more come in. There's a lot of good work still in the pipeline.

Six projects to do before you do a webside redesign: Learn what the user does

2010-04-21T11:04:07-07:00

[This is the second part of a six part series on projects you should do before you commit to a redesign. To learn why redesigns are expensive and often serve the agency much better than the client, read my introduction.]

I have an assertion for all of you considering a redesign of your website:

Your website already works well in some area and you just have no idea what that is. And when you redesign your website without researching first, I guarantee you're going to destroy something you will want.

This doesn't mean that you might discover what's working on your website and then subsequently discard it after doing a cost/benefit analysis, but when you just charge into a redesign, you're not making an informed decision.

Things You're Likely To Break In Your Current Website When You Redesign

Here are some examples of ways in which a website works that you:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): You might have incredibly good ranking on a number of search terms that put you #1 in Google and bring you extremely well-performing traffic.
Heavily linked content (related to SEO): You may have an online presence so old that enormous numbers of people have working, healthy links to your content.
High prospect rate: Your website may have a design that refers people effectively to the donate page (or your main ask page, whatever it is). When you redesign, that rate may drop and so will your donations.
Low abandonment rate: Your donate page may have extremely low abandonment rate, such that most of the people that get there also complete your ask.
Domain authority (related to SEO) : You may have a very old domain with a high Domain Authority. Without knowing it, this could be contributing to high Google rankings.
Existing pro-bono campaigns: You may have existing campaigns, perhaps through the AdCouncil or others, that are sending traffic to specific pages on your site. If you change your content or domain, you may cause those campaigns to cease functioning.
Ease of use (usability): Your user base may find it easy to find things, and your navigation may be natural. But if you re-organize without proper research, you could make it hard for your current audience to find the same things, or even make it worse.

If you redesign your website without checking any of these first, you are almost guaranteed to destroy something of value. It's critical to actually understand what part of a website is working before you undertake a redesign. The above six items can be checked with the help of a research expert well-versed in the area of web analytics and search engine optimization through a combination of Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and various SEO tools.

Learn What The Users Are Doing And Avoid Breaking What Works On Your Website In A Redesign

In preparation for a redesign, you should research the following things:

Your Google juice: What links do you have into you from elsewhere? What content you've forgotten about that people like? What terms are you ranking on? How authoritative is your domain name?
Your conversion performance: How often do people start to donate? How often do they finish? You need to know this, because if your redesign makes your performance worse, you need to revert to early ones or incorporate previous insights.

For your Google rank, you're going to either take a crash course in Search Engine Optimization or hire a guru that can help you assess your current performance.

To measure your donation prospecting and donation completion performance, you can probably do this yourself with a copy of my ebook "3 Fundraising Metrics For Your Nonprofit Website". I've attached the form below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebeam/ / CC BY 2.0

Free ebook for measuring your nonprofit Facebook page: "Is your nonprofit facebook page worth it? Measurements and analytics"

2010-04-19T12:58:56-07:00

Measure Your Nonprofit Facebook Page

Every online marketer I know is struggling with how to measure social media. Particularly hard is how to measure the value of their Facebook page, and the work around it. They're asking themselves the following questions:

How effective is the work I do on Facebook in producing bottom line results for the organization?
What should I be doing differently on Facebook to improve my results?
Should I take resources away from Facebook and devote them to something else?

Shayna Englin (Englin Consulting) and I have studied data from the last year of the US Fund for UNICEF's Facebook page and Google Analytics data for their website. We've found ways to clearly measure the benefit that their Facebook page provides, as well as clear guidelines for how they should optimize their work on Facebook to get better results.

While these results are probably somewhat specific to US Fund for UNICEF and the relief sector, the methodology is universal. If you have a Facebook fan page and a website with Google Analytics installed, you can immediately begin to measure Facebook's contribution to your overall goals.

What's more, if you have access to a data nerd like myself or Shayna, you can take the historical data you already have an learn what's been working on Facebook to garner donations, drive traffic to your website, and recruit fans.

The e-book is free! Just sign up for my e-mail list. (The ebook will be emailed to you, so don't give me a fake e-mail address!)

First name	Last name

Organization	Your e-mail

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Free Ebook: Is Your Nonprofit Facebook Page Worth It? Measurements and Analytics The e-book is free! (The ebook will be emailed to you, so don't give me a fake e-mail address!)

First name	Last name

Organization	Your e-mail

Your telephone