Nonprofit Websites Must Be Measured, Optimized, and Refactored

A well-designed nonprofit website will get some attention, putting forth a strong brand image and prompting engagement from your audience. But the work doesn’t end with the initial launch of your site – if you want to increase donations and/or sign-ups over time, you need to measure, optimize, and refactor.

Here at BackOffice Thinking, we are big proponents of goal setting, measuring, and iterative refactoring as key elements of a website project. We have a specific approach baked into our process:

• Establish objectives and KPI’s
• Design & Build the Website
• Measure Traffic and Track KPI’s
• Test & Optimize
• Refactor Iteratively

When building a website, keeping measurable objectives top of mind informs features and placement of your Calls to Action (CTA). It also defines which tools you’ll want to use to measure those actions. We talk more about websites that inspire action here.

When we examine our most successful nonprofit client websites, this way of thinking is built into their projects and their overall organization culture.

Establish Objectives & Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Don’t skip this step. Determine your objectives before you start designing. Make sure each one is measurable and core to your existence as a nonprofit organization. The only way to know if you are actually meeting your goals is to measure.

While knowing how much traffic is coming to your website is something every nonprofit should know, it’s important to align this measurement with your overall organizational objectives. Let’s say you want to increase volunteers in your organization and your website is a key contribution to getting there. You’ll want to create aligned, measurable goals for your website, such as:

1. Increase visits from the home page to the volunteer page by 5% in the next 3 months.
2. Of those who visit the volunteer page, 20% fill in the volunteer application form (your CTA).

Now, go back to your organizational objectives and see what other goals you need to add.

Design and Build the Website

Once you have measurables, it’s crucial each of them be translated into CTAs which become “conversions” such as:

• Volunteers
• Donations
• Event registrations
• Social shares with network

From here, we design the website to make sure the visitor doesn’t miss the CTA. It needs to be strategically placed where it makes sense and creates engagement. This can be done without putting a big flashy button on the page. A good design will make sure this is handled properly, to be consistent with the organization’s style guide.

During this cycle of your website project you want to make sure the design is implemented in a way that is easy for staff to maintain and manage. Not only in the present, but in the future as well. It’s also important to put measuring and testing systems in place like Google Analytics, HotJar and Optimize (more information about these tools below).

Measure Traffic & Track KPI’s

Conversions

Before the launch of the new website design, you should set up conversion goals in Google Analytics (or events in Google Analytics 4). Each form you use (donation, registration, contact us, etc..) for your CTAs must have a thank you page the user is sent to when they submit the form. Landing on this page is proof of the ”conversion”. This page must not be accessible any other way, including through search, and each should have a unique URL address.

First set up your event in Google Analytics. There are many different types of events you can track. Here is a full list. Some of the most important ones are:

• Click
• File Download
• First Visit
• Page View

After you have your events, then you can use Google Tag Manager to set the page view tracking.

Other KPI’s you might want to track:

• Behavior Flow – Check to see if visitors are taking the journey you’d planned. Which pages do they see and go nowhere else?
• Visitors – Are you getting more visitors or less?
• Bounce Rate – The lower the better.
• Session Duration – Are people staying on your pages?
• Retention – If you have a membership hub for your website, you may want to see where the drop off is for return visits (1 week, 2 weeks, 10 weeks etc…). A Cohort Analysis (available in Google Analytics 4) will be helpful for measuring retention.

After the launch of the new website design make sure you schedule at least a monthly review of your website’s metrics using Google Analytics.

Test & Optimize

Ideally this is an ongoing effort. If you are actively measuring then you can think of your live website as an ongoing test platform. You have a continuous stream of data you can use to adjust your website and measure to understand the impact of the adjustments. It could be a simple quarterly plan like this:

• Analyze your last 3 months of traffic
• Document your findings (i.e. the metrics related to each of your goals)
• Adjust some element of your site that relates to your goal (e.g. a single strategic change to a headline or graphic around your CTA)
• Document that change, and wait 3 months
• Analyze the traffic again, looking at the same metrics and goals and comparing them to the previous report
• Determine the impact, make some decisions on how to further improve, and start the cycle again

A more advanced approach would be to utilize a 3rd party app like Google’s Optimize, which natively integrates with Google Analytics and makes it easy to perform A/B testing on your website.

This is how Google describes their app:

Optimize allows you to test variants of web pages and see how they perform against an objective that you specify. Optimize monitors the results of your experiment and tells you which variant is the leader.

Google Optimize

For example, you have a box, block, or component on your homepage that makes a pitch for your visitor to make a donation to your nonprofit. You want to find out what is the most powerful wording and accompanying picture to present in order for your visitors to make a donation. Simply design 2 versions of the page and then test using the A/B testing using a “Multivariate” test in Optimize. You can set the app so the one that performs the best after a certain time period is the one that is shown 100% of the time.

You can also see which box, block or component gets the most attention from visitors on your website using HotJar’s heat map. This will show you where people are clicking. You can even get recordings that show a visitors path on your website. Did they start to fill out the form and then abandon it? Did they quickly click away from the donation form and jump over to events? This is all valuable information for continually evaluating your website.

Refactor Iteratively

A good website project is never really “done” (sorry!) Iterative refactoring of your web presence is vital to staying relevant and engaged with your audience and constituents. This is best approached as an ongoing effort,informed by your testing and analytics. Think strategically: Based on what you’ve learned from your smaller tests, what larger changes or enhancements might improve your results? Or what new programs or initiatives is your organization embarking on that might necessitate an update to the KPIs you’re measuring? Each year, plan for these larger, very strategic and intentional projects – and always measure their impact!

Measuring and refactoring each year with the new data you gather will keep your website fresh, relevant, useful, and your most powerful fundraising tool for making a difference with your nonprofit organization.

We excel at matching the appropriate tools up with your goals. Send a support email to get help from our team or learn more about our website design services.