Measuring the Performance of Your Communications

If you want to optimize your nonprofit's online presence and make your digital communications a true lever for recognition and development, this article is for you. It explores the importance of integrating continuous performance measurement into your communications. This often-overlooked aspect provides valuable insights that can guide and maximize the impact of your communication efforts

Why Measure Your Performance?

In today’s digital world, everything is measurable. Click-through rates, email open rates, social media engagement rates, conversions, and much more. When analyzed correctly, this data offers a wealth of valuable information about the performance of your communication actions. It helps you understand what works or doesn’t with your target audience, allowing you to adjust your strategy accordingly.

Directing Your Human and Financial Investments

One of the main benefits of performance measurement is its ability to inform your decisions and investments. By identifying the most effective channels, you can allocate more resources to what works and reduce, or even eliminate, spending on less effective areas. This is particularly relevant in the context of paid advertising, where every dollar should be spent to maximize return on investment (ROI).

Because Not Everything That Glitters Is Gold…

In our work, we often find that a lack of performance analysis leads to suboptimal use of resources. Generally, the absence of measurement is almost always symptomatic of unclear objectives.

For instance, we frequently see substantial investments in social media communication that do not significantly contribute to the visibility and funding of nonprofits. Having a highly active Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook account is not necessarily a guarantee of success. In fact, strategic communication often means communicating less but communicating better.

Making a Link Between Your Actions and Efforts across Various Channels

Your website, newsletters, and social media are your three traditional pillars of nonprofit digital communication, each playing a unique role in attracting and engaging your community. Measuring and analyzing performance allows you to gain a clear picture of how these channels interact, reinforce each other, and contribute to achieving your communication goals.

At the Core: your Website
Your website is often the central point of your digital strategy. It should be the ultimate landing place for each of your communication actions. It is where members of your community engage with your nonprofit to discover your added value or consume your products or services.

Understanding visitor behaviors, their sources, consumed content, and the conversions generated by your communication efforts is crucial. This essential visibility will help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your strategy and continually guide your optimization efforts to achieve your goals.

Your newsletters
Newsletters offer a direct and low-cost way to communicate with your community. This channel is often a powerful driver of conversions, as subscribers are already interested in what your nonprofit has to offer. Open rates, click-through rates, and subscriber growth provide valuable insights into the interest generated by your content and how to adjust it to increase engagement. These metrics should be closely monitored.

Social Media
Social platforms allow direct interaction with the public. Measuring engagement, shares, and likes helps understand what type of content resonates most with your community, allowing you to refine your organic social content strategy.

However, it is important to recognize that without a paid advertising approach, the impact of your actions on these channels may be very limited, and the time spent on their maintenance may represent a low return on investment.

Although having a presence on these networks is essential for your nonprofit, it should be adjusted based on several factors that dictate the time and energy you need to invest.

Continuous Optimization
The key to success in your digital communication strategy is continuous optimization. Performance measurement is not a one-time exercise but an ongoing process. By regularly analyzing your data, you can quickly identify emerging trends, adjust your strategy in real-time, and experiment with new approaches to continually improve your results.

How to Measure your Initiatives ?

Your first step is to set up a Looker Studio dashboard. Once configured, this customizable dashboard will display data from various sources, such as your website, newsletters, and social media platforms, giving you a comprehensive view and allowing you to compare performance across different channels. This real-time data analysis is valuable as it provides precise and actionable indicators.

By integrating a dashboard into your performance measurement strategy, you will gain a clear and interactive overview of all your key metrics, consolidated in one place. This dashboard will be useful during strategic meetings to review past initiatives and plan future communication actions.

Surround Yourself with Expertise
Deploying a data-driven communication strategy requires time, practice, and certain knowledge. Don’t hesitate to surround yourself with experts in the field. This will enable accelerated management and faster achievement of the results you aim for.

Conclusion

Basing your communication actions on performance measurement is now essential for any nonprofit wishing to maximize its online impact. With the right set of tools, skill development, and a data-focused approach, nonprofits can not only understand where to concentrate their efforts but also how to create more engaging and meaningful experiences for their community members.