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Is your social media marketing strategy getting your expected results? Is it reaching the goals of your nonprofit organization?
You can answer these questions by measuring the impact of your campaign.
How?
You have to determine the right metrics, study analytics and collect relevant data. You need to recognize and appreciate the abundance of marketing tools now than two decades ago.
Today’s digital landscape offers easier access to gather data than before. And the overabundance of data has become a problem, creating a new challenge for marketers of nonprofits to filter out junk from meaningful information.
Remember to collect and analyze data based in your real goals at the outset. These goals align with core values. These ones are manageable, meaningful and measurable, guiding you from start to finish.
Avoid the trivial and arbitrary. Your analytics root and stem from your original goals.
Each goal has a key performance indicator, or KPI, to measure how effective a company or organization is in achieving its main objectives.
KPIs for nonprofits may fall under different categories such as retention, fundraising, email or social media. But not all KPIs will apply for your organization. Focus on the ones that fit your goal.
Here we focus on three key social media metrics for nonprofits.
Social Media Metrics
Your focus: Engagement. While other social media campaign managers exaggerate impressions, focus on higher engagement.
Engage and drive followers to your official site, and not only to like your Facebook Page. Your site has relevant info that your social media pages may not have. And you have full control of your own website compared to restrictions imposed by Facebook.
Better yet, you can convert more prospects from social media to your site and gather valuable info from them. You can also encourage followers to share content from your site.
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate refers to how many times social media users interact with your posts. It includes close-ended passive engagements such as Facebook likes, hearts and emojis.
Active engagements include third-party sharing of social media posts. It includes shares, repins, retweets, reblogs or revines. The more shares, the wider the reach.
Taking active engagement higher are conversations, as your posts can spark a chain of interactions. These include message threads with different comments and replies. Supporters and followers share opinions and interests through these reactions.
Each social media platform has an analytics section to calculate insights. If not, third-party software such as Hootsuite and Sprout can do it for you.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate measures how many people switched from your social media page to your website or donation page.
Trackers like Google Analytics measure how many visitors reached your donation page, how they arrived and how many converted on that pace.
An easy way to calculate is to divide total donation page visitors by total donations made. Then multiply the result by 100.
Participation Rate
Participation Rate measures how many fundraisers secure donations for you and how they do it.
This key metric for peer-to-peer, or P2P, fundraising determines how much each fundraiser raised. It also notes how often and where they took steps to take part in your campaign.
To calculate, find a P2P software that automatically tracks and monitor fundraisers and their actions.
Takeaways for Nonprofits
Nonprofits can measure their success through engagement, conversion and participation rates. As a social media marketer, you need the right tools and software to do it.
What tools have you used to measure how effective your social media campaign is? Don’t forget to drop us a comment below.
