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Creating a Digital Strategy for Nonprofit Organizations

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Part 1: Building Blocks of your Digital Strategy

Introduction

“When we change the way we communicate, we change society.”  ― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Background

This book is the culmination of years of working with nonprofits, government agencies and for-profit companies on website projects, marketing and advertising campaigns, social media marketing and email initiatives that were critical to the growth and success of those organizations. Even more importantly, it is the culmination of getting to know all of those organizations and striving to create cohesive strategic plans that tie high-level organizational objectives to tactics.

 In late 2003, it was quite possible a traditional advertising agency would have taken a slightly different approach to such challenges as growing donations, membership, issue advocates and the like. Carousel30, however, was born in the age of social media startups like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. That has helped inform our approach to a holistic marketing strategy that balances an organization’s business goals with measurable audience goals. This can be applied to all of your digital properties and tactics, while maintaining a close relationship to your offline marketing tactics.

 From our experiences, I developed a process to create a digital strategy for any nonprofit organization in a straightforward, simple process that is easy to follow and adjust over time. This is not to say that every organization is the same, but when you understand the fundamentals, you can easily modify the process to suit your organization’s needs.

The Purpose of this White Paper

There are several good white papers, books, articles and blog posts about digital strategy out there. What I want to do is fill what I consider to be a void: give people who work at nonprofits a very practical, step-by-step guide to creating a digital strategy from scratch and putting a program in place to make it a living document that can be continually revisited and refined.

 I have used this process many times to get great results for clients both small and large, with locally focused needs or national campaigns. The best part is that it is easy to follow, and the elements you need to get started are things you most likely already thought through. This approach is simply a way to organize all of your goals, audiences and measurable objectives into a clear and strategic plan.

This white paper is the first of two parts, and it will lay the foundation for you to complete your digital strategy by giving you the building blocks necessary to evaluate, audit and organize all your digital marketing properties and tactics into a clear plan that helps to grow your organization.

Who is It for?

For this guide, I have put a specific focus on the needs of nonprofit organizations, and it is my hope that many marketing professionals in those organizations will get the chance to read and utilize these methods to improve their digital marketing endeavors. Overall, the same general principles apply to both nonprofit and for-profit businesses, but some specific goals like supporting social causes and tactics such as collecting donations (as opposed to selling goods or services) make some strategies different.

Also, this white paper is geared towards people in a marketing function within an organization. While we briefly discuss technology infrastructure in Section 5 of this white paper, the primary goal here is to give marketers the building blocks they need to do their jobs and to create an initial digital strategy or review the current one.

That being said, I think there is plenty here for anyone who is tasked with creating or defining their organization’s digital strategy. By the end of the process, you will have all of the information you need to:

  • Make important decisions about how time and budget are spent.
  • Have clear metrics to determine the effectiveness of your digital properties and tactics with your primary and secondary audiences.
  • And finally, you will have a rationale to justify new tactics or make tough choices about programs to cut or avoid.

What is Digital Strategy?

“Discipline is remembering what you want.”

— David Campbell, Founder of Saks Fifth Avenue

A Guide to Help Achieve Your Goals, and Measurements to Show You How Well They are Achieved

Digital strategy is the process of translating an organization's goals into a plan that will create effective digital marketing initiatives. It is the first step in determining the tactics that will be used to achieve success for your organization.

A digital strategy addresses several aspects of an organization’s needs. It translates organizational goals and objectives into a strategy that optimizes the effects that digital marketing initiatives have on the organization. This is done through the following:

  1. Analyzing and prioritizing customer needs and goals that the organization can adequately address and improve.
  2. Identifying opportunities and challenges to the organization as a whole and, more specifically, where digital assets and tactics can help.
  3. Creating a strategic framework for how digital assets will fulfill business opportunities and customer needs, along with a plan to measure its effectiveness.
  4. Determining and prioritizing the digital assets and tactics that can deliver on this framework and implementing the appropriate measurement plan.

This translates into tactics such as the creation of marketing and advertising plans, technical infrastructure recommendations, reporting and analytics frameworks and plans, and digital brand guidelines and a plan to manage the brand across platforms and mediums.

If you are not taking a step towards your goals with the time, energy and dollars you are spending to market your organization, you might as well be taking a step away from them. 

A digital strategy provides your campaigns and projects with guidance and insight to ensure that all of your work is aligned with the overall goals of the organization. You benefit from focused campaigns and tactics that achieve measurable results. Those results are directly tied to the metrics by which your organization bases success.

The danger of not creating a comprehensive digital strategy is that you will instead end up focusing simply on a myriad of tactics that are not directly aligned with organizational goals.

It All Starts with Organizational Goals

In Jim Sterne’s book, “Social Media Metrics,” he outlines the three fundamental goals of a business:

1)    Increase revenue

2)    Decrease costs

3)    Increase customer satisfaction

While #1 might take on a slightly different meaning for a nonprofit organization —substitute “Revenue” with “Contributions” for instance — the idea remains the same.  For #3, you could easily substitute “Increase Customer Satisfaction” with “Retain Supporters/Donors/Volunteers.”

Ultimately, the work that you do as a result of your digital strategy must address at least one (or more) of these goals to be truly successful. Simply increasing the number of Twitter followers or posts on your Facebook Wall is not enough, unless those items are tied to these goals, but we’ll walk through how to go about doing this as we go through the process in a later chapter.

Similar to those three overall business objectives, a digital strategy has some things it must support as well. In Accenture’s podcast, “Leveraging Opportunities in the Digital Age for Banking,” John Keast outlines three things your digital strategy should support:

1)    Generating leads

2)    The ability to direct leads to the right channel

3)    Increasing conversation rate and enhancing the customer experience

In the case of a nonprofit organization, a lead would be a potential donor, volunteer or other type of supporter, but the overall idea is the same. We want to create strategic goals that align with these three things, and then tie them to the overall business objectives we defined earlier. The process we will go through will help you to do this and go well beyond that to identify your primary audiences, their needs and goals, and ultimately create a plan that is both measurable and ties in full-circle with your organizational objectives.

The Process

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.”

— W. Edwards Deming

The process consists of five steps of goal-setting and identification, and a sixth step that outlines a plan to analyze and adjust over time.

In each of the steps, we will focus on tying your goals (organizational or audience-driven), content and metrics back to results that are easy to define as successful or not and are directly tied to the success of your organization.

  • Step 1: Organizational Goals
    • This is where the process starts and what helps define overall success. We take your core goals as an organization and better define them as executable objectives, as well as highlight any dependencies and limitations, to set the foundation for your digital strategy.
    • Step 2: Audiences & Personas
      • Clearly defining your audiences and what their needs and wants are will help us define what success looks like from your constituents’ perspective.
      • Step 3: Digital Landscape
        • This stage outlines the playing field including the properties you will utilize and the tactics you will execute to reach your audiences and create conversions.
        • Step 4: Technology Infrastructure
          • In order to have a successful digital marketing plan and support for your digital landscape, it is going to require the right technology infrastructure.
          • Step 5: Content StrategyNow that we know who the players are (the audience) and where we are reaching them (the digital landscape), we will define the types of content and messaging that will be used to reach them.
          • Step 6: Defining Success
            • At this point, we have the data necessary to define what a successful conversion looks like on all of our digital properties and with all of our various digital marketing tactics. We will then create a measurement plan that incorporates all of the goals per audience and property and tie them back to the original organizational goals.
            • Step 7: Plan, Analyze & Adjust
              • The final step is an ongoing process of planning, analysis and adjustment based on the success of your efforts. We will cover the first part of this, planning, in the next white paper. The planning stage is where you actually create your digital strategy and subsequent tactics based on the work you have done up until this point. This is also the part that will be regularly reviewed and adjusted as necessary as your organizational and/or audience goals shift. A solid digital strategy should support small shifts and adjustments, so that you don’t have to constantly redo Steps 1-6.

At the end of this process, you will have all the information, from goals to a full view of your digital landscape, and an exhaustive list of your conversion metrics that will be used to create your digital strategy.

Step 1: Goal-Setting

"There are those who travel and those who are going somewhere. They are different and yet they are the same. The success has this over his rivals: He knows where he is going."

— Mark Caine

The first step in the process is to make sure you understand both your organizational goals and your audience goals. Everything else you do will be dependent on this step.

Organizational Background

While there is doubtless a lot of information already in existence about your organization, it’s important to define your organization and its place within your industry as you begin to build your digital strategy. This goes well beyond your place in the online world and includes the change in the world that your organization hopes to achieve. It will undoubtedly include your place in the online world, but depending on your business model, properties like your website might simply be a tactic to achieve a greater goal. On the other hand, if your company’s central presence is online instead of brick and mortar, your Web presence might play a greater role here. Think big: what is your organization’s mission and vision for the future of your industry or the cause(s) you support?

For the purpose of putting your digital strategy together, write one to two paragraphs that frame your organization’s mission and purpose. This will make it easy to apply audience goals down the road. Speak to the different types of work you do, products you offer, and so on. You have now set the context for everything that follows.

Organizational Goals

Your organizational goals are used to form your digital strategy, but they are not necessarily solely dependent on digital tactics. The purpose of outlining these organizational goals is to reinforce that each of the goals and tactics used in your digital strategy should align with at least one of your organizational goals.

As stated in the previous section, your high-level organizational goals are going to be centered around three things:

1)    Increasing revenue

2)    Decreasing costs

3)    Retaining supporters/donors/volunteers

Dependencies

It’s important to define the constraints and dependencies that help define both the limitations of scope, as well as the approval process, technical infrastructure and other organizational initiatives that either provide additional insights or barriers to the completion and execution of a digital strategy.

Stakeholder and Departmental Goals

There are many stakeholders in an organization’s digital strategy. Some of these might only be tangentially related, but the success of the plan depends in some part on the success of the stakeholders and their individual or collective objectives. Make sure to define any stakeholder goals that are not duplicative of the overall organizational goals.

Offline Tactics/Campaigns

A digital strategy is always part of a larger communications and marketing plan. Integrating your digital and traditional efforts requires careful coordination and you will find the most success when the two are aligned. Make sure to note your offline campaign dependencies. This might be the timing of a direct mail campaign or telephone fundraising drive, or it might be an annual gala or event.

Budgetary

In a perfect world, money would be no object, but your nonprofit organization’s digital plans are constrained by a budget. This is not simply a dollar amount; it is also dependent on your fiscal year, monthly cash flow, and even the amount of staff or volunteer time available. Make sure to provide a well-rounded summary of the budgetary constraints that will affect the scope of your digital strategy.

Technical Infrastructure

Technical infrastructure can be a large investment for an organization and any dependencies here might include server software requirements, legacy CMS or CRM systems, or skill preferences of existing staff. This helps set the stage for budgetary needs as well as the scope of specific tactics like a website redesign. Make sure to differentiate between items that are required to be used (e.g. your organization signed a 5-year contract with a CRM vendor) and that are simply a preference (e.g. your IT team prefers open source technology).

Challenges

In addition to dependencies, outline some challenges that pertain to achieving your goals. These could be based on previous marketing efforts or other external factors. Try not to be too audience-specific and focus more on organizational challenges – we will get to audience-specific challenges in the next step.

What to do in Step 1:

In the Appendix of this document, there is a worksheet in Step 1 that helps you identify these elements

Recap and Next Steps

At this point in the process, we can already see at a high level what we would like to accomplish and how we can start making a plan to achieve it, simply based on overall goals, dependencies and challenges. We don’t need to get very specific in our recommendations at this point, but we should have a good sense of our overall expectations and limitations. In the next step, you will think more about your primary and secondary audiences and your goals for each.

Step 2: Audiences & Personas

“To create a product that must satisfy a diverse audience of users, logic might tell you to make it as broad in its functionality as possible to accommodate the most people. This logic, however, is flawed. The best way to successfully accommodate a variety of users is to design for specific types of individuals with specific needs.

— Cooper, Reiman, Cronin, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

In this step, we will be defining primary and secondary audiences and what their purpose of interacting with your organization is, as well as what your definition of a conversion or goal for that audience is from your organization’s perspective.

For instance, for a primarily fundraising-based organization, you could have two primary audiences: 1) high-value donors, and 2) grassroots (low dollar, high volume) donors. Each audience obviously has very unique needs and might be motivated by different calls to action. For instance, a conversion for the high-value donors might end with a phone call to your development department rather than a credit card donation. As you define your audiences, be sure to keep in mind how you will begin to track them and measure your success.

Personas are a very useful part of a website redesign process as well and have been a staple of user experience (UX) professionals for years. In this step, we are going to create a hybrid of the type of audience profile that you might use to develop a marketing plan and a persona that you would use to create use cases for a website.

As a rule of thumb, try to create three primary personas (designated as “A” audiences) and two to three secondary personas (“B” audiences). You might have more audiences, which is fine, but keep in mind that the more audiences you have, the more planning and resources you will need to market, track and convert.

What to do in Step 2:

In the worksheet for audiences in the Appendix, we list the following categories that should be filled out for this step:

  • Primary Audiences
    • Name
    • Description
    • Needs
    • Wants
    • Secondary Audiences
      • Name
      • Description
      • Needs
      • Wants

Then we tie each audience to their specific goals and your organizational goals, along with the metric you can use to measure them. It is also important to define any challenges that you may have in measuring this. For instance, if one department keeps high-value donation amounts tracked in a separate CRM or database from lower-value website donations, you might have to work to correlate the two, or you might need access to both in order to track both audiences.Recap and Next Steps

While you already knew your audiences for your digital marketing efforts, this step should have clarified what they want, how to reach them and how you can track the effectiveness of your efforts.

In the next step, we are going to take a look at the entirety of your digital landscape, so you can begin to tie the various communication outlets to your primary and secondary audiences, all while adhering to your overall organizational goals.

Step 3: Digital Landscape

“We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.”

—Lawrence Durrell

Your digital landscape is your organization’s comprehensive presence on the Web, from websites, microsites and mobile apps to social media presences and beyond. At this point, it is important that we get the lay of the land so you can begin to better understand how your organizational and audience goals can be achieved by strategic use of all your properties. I recommend creating a diagram similar to the one below that shows where your brand exists online. Be exhaustive in your listing and determine the flow of traffic and content to and from each touch point.

We are going to make the distinction here between properties and tactics. Essentially, your properties are virtual presences that you own or manage and that can be linked to for an extended period of time. Tactics refer to timely things, such as email campaigns or events, which may only exist for a short period of time and generally send Web traffic to other destinations or properties.

Properties

Your digital properties include websites and other destinations like a social media presence. Most likely these are places on the Web that your organization has control over from a content and branding perspective, though sometimes (e.g. partner websites) you may have limited control. In order to distinguish between those that you have full control versus partial control, make a list and differentiate between the two using a term such as internal and external, or something similar.

Tactics

Tactics are similar to your digital properties except that they do not have a static destination where they exist. Examples would be an email campaign, digital display ads, public relations efforts, etc.

While your tactics might behave differently than your digital properties in a number of ways, they can be simplified down to having similar characteristics such as:

  • Target Audiences
  • Goals
    • Audience-Specific
    • Organizational

Enumerating your tactics the same way you list your Web properties will help with the next step, which will be your content strategy. It also forms a comprehensive view of the touch points you have with your audiences.

Conversion Metrics

The next step is to define what successful use of each of these properties or tactics will result in. We call this a conversion. Some common conversion metrics might be:

  • Successful completion of a donation
  • Signing up for an email list
  • Sharing content on Facebook
  • Signing a petition
  • Registering for an event
  • Clicking on an advertisement, going to a campaign landing page, then clicking a learn more button

We want to define each of these conversion events so that we can set the measurements in place in order to determine the effectiveness of our efforts. For instance, a conversion pathway might be something like the workflow to the right:

Thus, we want to make sure that we add “successful donation” to our list of conversion metrics for both advertising and the website. We will then tie these both to our audience and organizational goals from earlier, and we will go on in the next steps to tie these to a measurement plan to report on the effectiveness of our donation pathway.

We will also return to this idea of a multi-step process, or funnel, later in this document. Note how, while there is only one measure of success (a completed donation), there are several steps in this donation process as described above. We will want to define such pathways in Step 5, where we talk about measuring our success.

What to do in Step 3:

In the Appendix, there is a table that addresses your digital landscape that looks like the table below. You can see that we are now making sure that we add the properties/tactics into our process and tie them back to both organizational and audience-specific goals. At each step in the process, it’s important to do this, as it clearly defines the relationship between everything you do and the way that it can be measured, as well as the way that it contributes to the goals of your organization.

Recap and Next Steps

Now that we have outlined all of the properties and tactics you are using in your digital marketing, as well as the conversion methods they employ, we can trace backwards through our process to see the audiences that they reach and the audience and organizational goals they support. We are halfway finished with the work of enumerating the breadth and depth of your digital strategy.

In the next section, we’re going to talk about content. Content can be text, but it can also be images, video, as well as social media comments and other user-contributed items. Just like we defined all of our Web properties and tactics, we’ll do the same with the content that we produce.

Step 4: Technology Infrastructure

“Hardware:  where the people in your company's software section will tell you the problem is.  Software:  where the people in your company's hardware section will tell you the problem is.” 

—Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top

Overview

Your technology infrastructure supports both external and internal communications, including your digital marketing properties and tactics, as well as internal functions such as email, document storage and more.

Because this white paper is primarily targeted to marketing professionals, not technology professionals, the content will only touch on the basics of the requirements for a proper technology infrastructure.

Your Current Technology Infrastructure

A proper technology infrastructure can be divided into several components:

  • External
    • Website
      • Content Management System
      • Hosting
      • CRM
        • Membership
        • Fundraising
        • Communication (Email)
        • Marketing & Advertising
          • Email Marketing
          • Search Engine Marketing
  • Internal
    • Email
    • Document Storage & Sharing
    • Software

Recap and Next Steps

Now that we have outlined all of the components of your technology infrastructure, you can begin to assess the effectiveness of each, how it supports your digital marketing efforts and make decisions that can decrease cost and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your organization’s efforts.

In the next section, we’ll cover content. Content can be text, images, video, as well as social media posts and other user-contributed items. Just like we defined all of our Web properties and tactics, we’ll do the same with the content we produce.

Step 5: Content Strategy

“Without a content strategist, who will objectively assess the efficacy of current content against brand strategy and communication goals? Who will audit existing content for quality, currency, and relevance? Who will create key messages and develop content to support user decisions along the way? We haven’t even gotten to writing yet!”

— Margot Bloomstein, The Case for Content Strategy Motown Style

Content is a large component of any digital strategy because while your digital landscape is where you are reaching your audience(s), your content is how your organization is communicating. Even if you are not an organization whose primary offering is content (such as a magazine or blog site), content still plays a huge role in your communications.

The idea behind your content strategy is to communicate:

  • Effectively: Produce the right content for the right audience.
  • Efficiently: Organize and produce content in a way that reduces redundancy and allows all of the departments and channels of your organization to easily create communications.
  • Appropriately: Use the right tools to communicate with the right people.

MessageMission/Vision

The mission/vision should align with your organization’s branding guidelines and overall goals.

Tone

Tone refers to the personality and way you write to your audiences. Generally, you want to have consistency across your brand so that all audiences share a common experience, but there are times when a different approach or voice resonates more with one audience than another.

Types of Output

This refers to the different types of content being written. This doesn’t refer to something as general as text on the website, but more specifically to things like organization description, case studies, blog posts, press releases, team bios, status posts and other pieces of content that are unique in their subject and purpose.

Audiences

Your audiences were defined in Step 2. The important thing here is to ensure that you tie each type of content to one of your primary or secondary audiences.

Delivery

Properties and tactics were defined in Step 3. The purpose of including them in your content strategy is to make the connection between where your content resides, what audiences it is connected to, and what goals it addresses.

Timing/Editorial Calendar

Your organization’s editorial calendar is the schedule by which content and information is released. This should include both a time and topic-based breakdown. Simply saying that blogs will be written twice a week doesn’t adequately convey the direction of the content that is being produced by your organization. Most likely, if you have a digital editorial calendar, it will be based somewhat on a broader organizational one, which is a good thing. Just as your digital tactics relate to your traditional tactics, the content you prepare for your digital properties must support and augment content produced for your other efforts.

Media Relations

Your content strategy needs to incorporate ties to your organization’s media relations efforts. This could be making sure that blog content pertaining to recent press releases is readily available, status posts on social media announce releases, or even simply that press releases are available on your website.

Content Review

How often does the content need to be reviewed for accuracy, timeliness and alignment with what is currently happening at the organization? For a website, descriptions of key focus areas or case studies might need to be either reviewed or rewritten every six months or so. For social media content, this is not necessarily about single posts but more about the focus of the content.

What to do in Step 5:

In the Appendix, there is a table to fill out for the Content Strategy section.

Recap and Next Steps

Your organization’s content strategy is critical to understand because it can be used to effectively support all of your marketing efforts and augment the work you are doing across your digital landscape. By defining the content that you are creating and managing and the audiences and goals it supports, you now have an important trifecta of your digital strategy covered:

  • Audiences and their goals
  • Digital properties and tactics
  • Content strategy

Next, we’re going to go through all of the previous steps to create a measurable plan that will show the effectiveness of your website and digital marketing tactics for each of your primary and secondary audiences. This will be the last piece in the preparation of your digital strategy before the rest of your work begins.

Step 6: Defining Success

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." — Albert Einstein

 Overview

There are many components to success for your digital strategy. The purpose of Step 5 is to enumerate the properties and tactics, audiences, audience goals and organizational goals and align them with conversion metrics and a plan/tools for measurement.

You’ll be taking the goals and measurements you created in Step 3: Digital Landscape, and augmenting it with a plan to measure each item. This completes the process we began in Step 1. We have aligned organizational goals with audiences and audience-specific goals. We have then deconstructed our entire digital landscape by Web property or marketing tactic. We have created a plan to populate all of these properties with content targeted at specific audiences to achieve specific goals. And finally, below, we outline our plan to measure the effectiveness of our work.

Unfortunately, as the quote above from Mr. Einstein suggests, there are some things that we wish we could measure that are more difficult than others, and sometimes things that are easy to measure are less meaningful to us in the long run. In Neil Mason’s article, “5 Quotes for Analytics Success,” he elaborates on this by saying that there is a real challenge in creating key performance indicators (KPI), or our measurable metrics, because though there are a lot of points we can measure, it is important that we stay focused on the measurements that help us most in achieving our goals. We need to remember that in most cases, even though something can be measured, there is a cost associated with it of time, money or both. Thus, we must carefully select our conversion metrics.

Finally, while it’s important to measure as much as you can, it is more important to measure the things that are the most meaningful in relation to getting your audience(s) to complete the transactions that are critical to your organization. This could be registering for a membership, making a donation, volunteering or attending an event. We will want to take a look at how individual goals relate to steps in a process (or a funnel), and then how these individual funnels relate to a customer or constituent lifecycle.

Measurement/What Should You Measure?

In his blog post, “100 Ways to Measure Social Media,” David Berkowitz outlines 100 different metrics you can use to measure social media alone. Fortunately, he also reminds us that, while these are important things to measure, you need to first start with a plan of why you are measuring them and what you hope to achieve with the measurement.

Now, imagine what this list would look like if we also added all of the metrics related to your website, your digital advertising and your search engine optimization. Not to mention your offline tactics.

Conversion Metrics

Be careful when determining what your conversions are and what it means to your organization. For instance, conversions could be things such as:

  • Donations
  • Volunteer applications
  • Email list signup

More likely than not, there is a series of steps that a user goes through to complete one of these conversions. A donation, for instance, might require:

  • A user lands on a page to decide what type of donation they want to give.
  • A user fills out payment information.
  • The user is taken to a success page.

This process is something that can be tracked using goal tracking in software such as Google Analytics. By tracking and enumerating the steps in the process, you can determine where users are arriving at your page from, what steps in the process are effective, and how many users make it all the way through the process. The goal of tracking conversions is to optimize the pathway for each audience in order to maximize your results, in this case donations received.

Measurement Plan/Tools

Outline your plan to measure the conversion metrics, as well as the tools you will use to track results. This goes back to your digital landscape exercise where each audience had its own measurable goals and a conversion metric assigned to it. Many times, your measurement plan will be something simple; since it is something your Web analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) platform measures out of the box. Other times it might be more difficult to measure and will involve cooperation from different departments. For instance, to track event attendance and cross-reference that with Web advertising reach, you might have to coordinate with several different teams and work across data sets. Or, if your CRM tracks donation data or email signups in a separate database than your website visitors are measured, you might have to use an analysis tool to analyze the results of a fundraising drive.

What is Your Funnel?

Anyone familiar with Google Analytics’ Goal Tracking will at least understand the basics of a funnel. The idea is that a multi-step process, such as purchasing a product on an e-commerce site, might have several steps and all must occur in a specific order for a goal to be met. An example of a funnel is:

  1. Identify the product you want
  2. Add the product to your shopping cart
  3. Click the checkout button
  4. Create an account
  5. Add billing information
  6. Confirm your order
  7. Complete the transaction

That’s a lot of steps, and a lot of opportunities for a user to drop out of the funnel. One important thing to track is where your users drop off in the funnel, and to make positive changes (try A/B testing to test the effectiveness of changes you make) in order to decrease the drop off from one step to the next.

An example of a funnel for a fundraising-based nonprofit might be:

  1. User lands on a donation page
  2. User chooses the type of donation they want to make (e.g. one-time donation)
  3. User fills out contact and billing information
  4. User hits a submit button

That’s a simple example. But the important thing for your digital strategy is to make this single example of a funnel into a larger constituent lifecycle.

Customer Lifecycle

Think of a customer lifecycle as several funnels combined back-to-back or in some recurring frequency. It could be something like this:

  1. A user becomes a follower on social media and learns about your cause.
  2. A user donates (this encapsulates the entire funnel for the donation example above).
  3. A user is added to the email supporter list.
  4. A user might donate again, or volunteer to help the organization.

Recap and Next Steps

This step was the last part of the setup work required to create your digital strategy. Now, the real work begins. You need to take all that you have learned from Steps 1-6 and create a plan, which starts at the top with Organizational Goals, goes to Audience Goals, Digital Landscape, Content Strategy and finally your Measurement Plan.

To make this even more beneficial, you should incorporate your goal funnels and, if possible, a constituent lifecycle.

In the next step, you will be compiling this knowledge and creating an action plan that will then follow a cyclical analysis, adjustment and review process from this point onward.

Step 7: Analyze & Adjust

“Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice: It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

— William Jennings Bryan

Summary

At this point in the process, we have gone through a complete analysis of the inputs and outputs of your digital strategy. This is where your digital strategy grows from a plan to its realization. You will also have all the tools in place to measure its effectiveness and make adjustments as needed when you are done.

You might think that having gone through the previous six steps your digital strategy is already built, but unfortunately, the true analytical work begins now.  What we’ve done here is a thorough audit of how things currently are in your organization, and how they relate to your organizational goals. During this process, you might have found several holes in your current plans and infrastructure. In the next white paper, we will review the output of previous six steps and determine what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to change.

Process Moving Forward

Your digital strategy is a living process. Setting the correct foundation is imperative, but it is just as important to have a process that incorporates evaluation in order to fine-tune what you have and modify it to add or remove components that need adjustment.

1: Identification & Goal Setting

The good news: this step has been accomplished (the first time) simply by going through this document! By identifying and defining what success looks like (and where it will be accomplished), you have taken one major step towards a successful digital strategy.

2: Planning & Creation

With Step 1 out of the way, you will now have the requirements for your digital strategy. Now is the time to plan the tactics and begin the process of creating those properties or tactics that don’t exist or redesigning those that already do, so that they are in-line with your strategy.

Begin by writing a document that encapsulates everything you have defined: from goals, to properties & tactics, to a content plan, and to how you will measure success.

This will take a little time, but you’ve already done the hard part by creating the rules by which all of these items will be defined and ultimately measured. The goal of this document should be thoroughness, but not necessarily length. We went through a very thorough process of outlining goals, properties and metrics in Steps 1-6 in order to give you a full understanding of the relationship that all of your efforts have both to one another as well as to the growth of your organization and the fulfillment of its mission.

During the previous Steps 1-6, you might have come to the realization that some of the Web properties, tactics or content that you are producing are not closely aligned with audience or organizational goals. Now is the time to do something about this. It might be that they either do not fit in your plan as they currently are and require adjustment or realignment with goals, or they might need to be cut out altogether in order to better focus your efforts. It is up to you to make sure that your organization’s resources (both time and money) are used most efficiently. Thus, your digital strategy should include only the elements that can provide the maximum bang for your buck.

This digital strategy plan you will create has the benefit of providing the justification for all of the properties and tactics that you do choose to maintain and will be able to tie them all back to audience and, ultimately, organizational goals.

3: Implementation & Execution

This step will be the practical implementation of your strategy and plan. With Steps 1-6 completed, you can then begin implementing the tactics defined in your plan and building (or re-building) the properties and assets that are crucial elements of those tactics.

Chances are that some of the work you did to define measurable goals resulted in some additional reporting and measuring that will be required. You might have also uncovered several other items that need to be added or removed from your digital landscape, and all of these things take time to implement. You will need to create a project plan that details how (and when) these changes will be made in order to make your plan a reality.

4: Measurement & Analysis

As good as your plan is, the proof is in the pudding. Thus, you will need to execute your digital strategy in order to see how the various pieces work according to your goals.

In Steps 1-6, we identified and established the important metrics that require measurement and tied them to both organizational and audience goals. We also identified how they would be measured and how often. Now, it’s time to do the work of measuring the goals and analyzing the success or failure of our digital strategy to achieve them. 

Your measurement plan, along with all of the conversion metrics, will be your guide during this part.

5: Repeat

Just as important as going through the process once is making sure that you revisit your digital strategy when the process is complete. It’s not likely that the second time through will require as large of a time investment as the first time, but as organizational goals and dependencies shift, so do other focal points of your efforts. Try to establish a regular cycle for review that is both manageable from a time and resources perspective and still keeps your efforts targeted and current.

Moving Forward

From here on out, you will be working with a plan that you can track and measure. Things might change in your organization, new audiences might become more of a focus for you, but the basis for your digital strategy will be sound, and modifications will be much easier to incorporate than redoing it from scratch.

Make sure that you follow the “Repeat” step above. It will help your digital strategy to become a living document that grows with your organization and digital marketing.

Conclusion

By now you have had an in-depth introduction to the process of creating a digital strategy for your organization. I hope you will use the Appendix to go through the process and begin aligning your digital marketing goals with your organizational and audience needs.

Remembering What You Want: Sticking to Your Digital Strategy

If you are not taking a step towards your goals with the time, energy and dollars you are spending to market your organization, you might as well be taking a step away from them. 

David Campbell, founder of Saks Fifth Avenue said, “Discipline is remembering what you want.” It’s so easy to take advantage of an opportunity that pops up out of nowhere, but it might not be aligned with your goals. 

In this case “discipline” is adhering to your digital strategy. There are opportunities that are once-in-a-lifetime and there are opportunities that just seem to make sense in the moment.  Make sure that the choices you make augment and support your goals and strategy instead of taking advantage of a one-off chance to do something that is a tangent for you and your organization.

Beware of the should statements. Back in the 1990s it went something like this: “Our company should really have a website.” A little bit later it was: “We should really start blogging.” More recently it was: “We should really be on social media. All of our competitors use it.” Not to mention the “should” when it comes to having a mobile app. There will surely be something new that comes out tomorrow that is the new must have. It can be a full-time job keeping up with the constant barrage of new social media sites, communications tools, advertising products and devices.

Without a clear strategy and a clear set of goals tied to that strategy, it is easy to create a series of tactics that serve no true purpose other than to keep up appearances with your constituents and competitors. Your digital strategy is the long-term plan that incorporates short-term tactics and allows each to work together in harmony, instead of having each working hard in a silo.

For what it’s worth, there’s a very good chance your company should have a website, a social media presence, and a mobile marketing plan. But before you get lost in the tactics of digital marketing, let’s look at some ways to stay on track by remembering what you really want your digital strategy to accomplish.

Start from the Top

If it has been a while since you last evaluated your digital strategy, or if it is not formally documented, it’s time to start from the top. Your digital marketing plan is informed by your organization’s business objectives and marketing goals. Take the time to create a strategy with clear, measurable goals that are in line with your larger organizational goals. Remember not to let tactics get in the way at this point. How the goals are achieved will be determined soon enough, but starting from the top gives you the opportunity to determine the goals you want to achieve without the burden of figuring out how they will get done.

To be even clearer, make sure you tie your goals to one of the three key business objectives that can apply to any organization, anywhere: raising revenue, lowering costs and improving customer satisfaction. If you can do that, you’re definitely on the right track.

You’d be surprised at some of the organizations that have not gone through this process as deeply as they should, but it’s never too late to start. To do a quick analysis, start by taking your organizational goals and dependencies and clearly defining them along with the metrics of success. Then create specific goals for your marketing and digital marketing with your key audiences and their wants and needs. Analyze your digital landscape and tie each of your audience and organizational goals to each property and tactic that your brand touches.

Once you have performed this exercise, you will probably notice a few things. First, a lot of what you are currently doing may already be a good fit as tactics to achieve your goals, but their purpose should become clearer. Second, you will probably see that some of the activities you are currently performing simply don’t contribute in a meaningful way towards achieving your goals, either specific to your marketing efforts or to your broader organizational objectives. Finally, you will most likely uncover new uses for some existing tactics. For instance, your social media communications are assisting with your marketing messaging and PR outreach, but how can it help your constituent service needs?

If your digital strategy is up-to-date with your company’s overall objectives, I would recommend you review it often and keep those goals in mind when you are brainstorming new ideas or when new tactics are suggested. Review the strategy with your staff as well to make sure their activities are kept in line with the goals and strategy at all times.

Don’t Reverse-Engineer Your Strategy

Many of us are averse to change, and we also want to know that the hard work we do fulfills an important purpose for our organization. There might be some activities your organization performs that simply don’t fall in line with the goals outlined in your digital strategy. It can be very tempting to reverse-engineer your digital strategy to incorporate something you feel should be included. This means you create the justification for a tactic after the fact, instead of allowing the goals of your strategy to dictate which tactics should be used.

This is not an easy thing to do because in the absence of hard data to support what we’re doing, it’s easy to reverse-engineer. Like I said earlier, you probably do need to be addressing your audience on social media in some capacity. But before you set up 15 profiles on the most popular social networks, let your strategy determine where you communicate with your audiences, how you communicate with them, and the measurements you will be using to determine its effectiveness in achieving your core objectives. There are not enough hours in the day to justify putting resources towards something that is not pulling its weight.

Be Willing to Let Go

No one said that focusing would be easy. You and your team have developed a lot of great tactics over the years and have no doubt gained a lot of views, friends, engaged followers, comments and measurable data. But some of what you are doing is taking more time to manage than the value it is contributing to your marketing efforts. Your digital strategy is your guide to tell you what fits and what doesn’t, and it should be your guide for when and why to reassess what you are doing.

Let’s take the example of social media again. Your company had a pretty amazing MySpace profile in 2007. Both Tom and Tila Tequila were your friends and your list of friends was growing at a record pace. Why don’t you have a MySpace profile anymore? The wrong answer would be, “because it went out of style.” The right answer would be, “because MySpace’s audience base shifted to a segment no longer targeted by our digital strategy.” Even with 4 million friends, at some point it no longer made sense to spend the time and effort to communicate with an audience on that channel. You did the research and determined that there were other social networks that your demographic was using as a trusted platform to interact with brands. If it turned out that MySpace was continuing to send you an audience that converts higher than Facebook, no matter how passé it might seem, there’s a reason to be there in some capacity.

A great way to help evaluate these types of decisions is to set up a metric for measurement. If the tactic can be measured, and the measurement supports the goals you’ve set in place in your strategy, you should strongly consider keeping it. If you find yourself struggling to find a meaningful way to measure it and there’s nothing but a feeling it’s a good thing to do, you should reconsider keeping this tactic.

The Best Results Come from Focusing

Another upside to evaluating your tactics against your strategy is that you might uncover and eliminate inefficiencies that free time and resources for projects and actions that are more in line with your goals. 

For instance, I recently worked with a client that was spending an inordinate amount of staff time writing posts for the company blog. They were great posts, but when I analyzed the amount of traffic their company blog was receiving, as well as the efforts they were undertaking to drive traffic there, it was easy to see that the time spent was not worth it. If they were to keep blogging, one of two things needed to happen. Either their strategy needed to incorporate a goal of driving eyeballs to the company blog or they needed a plan of guest blogging on third-party sites with higher traffic volumes. After we started from scratch with their digital strategy, it turned out the latter was not only going to provide better results, but it was going to eliminate several hours a week of time spent writing, since our plan included fewer actual posts being written each month.

One of the great things about the digital marketing space is the constant innovation and exploration of new ways to engage, entertain and measure. It’s easy to get lost in the tactics, but by keeping your organization’s goals and your digital strategy front and center, it makes choosing what is truly important to both your organization and your audience a much simpler and more effective endeavor. Since things move at such a fast pace, make sure to revisit your strategy at regular intervals to ensure you are addressing all of your audiences’ needs.

Sources

Bailey, Chadwick Martin. Quirks: Creating Consumer-Brand Connections Via Social Media. Retrieved from http://blog.cmbinfo.com/in-the-news-content-/bid/47290/Quirks-Creating-Consumer-Brand-Connections-Via-Social-Media

Berkowitz, David. (17 November, 2009). 100 Ways to Measure Social Media. Marketer’s Studio Blog. Retrieved from http://www.marketersstudio.com/2009/11/100-ways-to-measure-social-media-.HTML

Bloomstein, Margot, The Case for Content Strategy. Motown Style. Retrieved from http://www.alistapart.com/articles/the-case-for-content-strategy-motown-style/

Cooper, A., Reimann, R., & Cronin, D. (2007). About Face 3: The Essentials of Interactive Design. Indianapolis, Indiana: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Keast, John. Leveraging Opportunities in the Digital Age for Banking. Podcast retrieved from http://www.accenture.com

Mason, Neil. 5 Quotes for Analytics Success. Retrieved from http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2074940/quotes-analytics-success

Sterne, Jim. (2010). Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Weber, Larry. (2011). Everywhere: Comprehensive Digital Business Strategy for the Social Media Era. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

For the appendix section and a full, PDF copy of the white paper, visit www.carousel30.com/ebook.

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