Creating a Digital Strategy for Nonprofits

Transcription

1 A CAROUSEL30 EBOOK WHITE PAPER Creating a Digital Strategy for Nonprofits BY GREG KIHLSTRÖM

2 Acknowledgements Just as importantly, the many organizations we have had the honor and privilege to work with over the years have helped to shape this work. These have ranged from large international organizations with sophisticated marketing and development teams to small, one-to-two-person nonprofits that were just getting off the ground. While each of these companies challenges shared similarities, the solutions they required were unique. Without them, much of the data and knowledge gained would have been secondhand research instead of on-the-ground experience. It is an honor to have worked with some truly brilliant people both in their fields of expertise and in the realms of digital marketing. This is the second part of the Carousel30 white paper series on how to build a digital strategy for nonprofits. We have decided to call this one a book, based on its length and format. It incorporates the content from the first part, with some slight updates, into the chapter entitled Building Blocks of Your Digital Strategy. There are many people without whom this book would not be possible. First, the team at Carousel30, the digital agency which was founded nearly nine years ago,has been instrumental for doing much of the work that led to the knowledge and insights forming the core of this book. Their tireless work over close to a decade has transformed organizations and led to innovations in the digital marketing space, and we cannot thank them enough for their help. We'd also like to thank Janelle Kihlström, Breeanna Beckham, Whitley Gaffney, Anna Steely and Kaitlin Carpenter. These individuals not only hid any awkward sentences from view, but helped edit this book into its current form. i

3 Introduction social media startups like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. This 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, we developed a process to create a digital strategy for any nonprofit organization. This straightforward, simple process 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 Book There are several good white papers, books, articles and blog posts about digital strategy out there. This book s purpose is to fill what we consider to be a void and give people who work at nonprofit organizations 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. 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, initiatives, membership recruiting and retention, and other activities 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 highlevel organizational objectives to tactics. In late 2003, it was quite possible that 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 Carousel30 has used this process many times and seen great results for clients both small and large, with both locally focused and national campaigns. The best part is that this process 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 book also combines the previously published Part 1 with many additional components in order to give a complete view and lifecycle of the digital strategy process. Who Is It for? For this guide, we have put a specific focus on the needs of nonprofit organizations, and it is our 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 forprofit businesses, but some specific goals like supporting social causes and tactics ii

4 such as collecting donations (as opposed to selling goods or services) make some strategies different. Also, this book is geared towards people in a marketing function within an organization. While we briefly discuss technology infrastructure in this book, 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. While Carousel30 has much expertise in technology strategy, infrastructure and development of technology solutions, this book is focused on providing digital marketers with the information they need to create a digital marketing strategy. That being said, we 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. Dive In and Get Started The best way to begin a transformation of your organization s digital marketing, communication and infrastructure is to dive into the process outlined here. It is a cyclical process that allows you to revisit your initial assumptions and to adjust your strategies and tactics based on real, measurable outcomes. Best of all, it s not something you have to do alone. Throughout each of the four major steps in the process we ve outlined the team that is recommended to help with each step. A larger organization might have many or all of these resources inhouse. A smaller organization might need help from consultants or contractors to fill some roles, or might decide to combine a few roles based on individual experience and expertise. A third option is to bring in an agency that specializes in this sort of thing to be a third-party, objective advisor. Any of these options have worked well for many organizations before you. Good luck! 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 Does This Book Not Do? Arguably as important as what it is supposed to do is what this book is not intended for. The purpose of this book is not to give tips on social media marketing or other specific tactics such as marketing best practices, or membership management, volunteer recruiting or advocacy best practices. There are plenty of other books that go into much detail about those things. While it is very important that you have a well-rounded understanding of how to use different tools and tactics effectively in order to build your digital landscape, we are not going into much (if any) detail on the subtleties of communicating with your constituents on Facebook vs. Twitter vs. Pinterest. The focus here is really on the fundamentals of relating goals to strategies to tactics and then measuring those results to define and refine your strategies. iii

5 CHAPTER 1 What is Digital Strategy? Discipline is remembering what you want. David Campbell, Founder of Saks Fifth Avenue

6 A Guide to Help Achieve Your Goals and Measurements to Show 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: Identifying organizational goals with the understanding that digital assets and tactics will be used to help solve 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: Analyzing and prioritizing constituent needs and goals that the organization can adequately address and improve through digital tactics. Creating a strategic plan for how the organization s digital properties will accomplish organizational objectives and customer goals, as well as a plan to measure its effectiveness in each. Determining the digital properties and tactics that can best support this strategy and then implementing a measurement plan that will illustrate its effectiveness. 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. Implementing a plan of review and evaluation in order to continually improve the digital strategy and the results it offers. While there are a wide variety of nonprofit organizations, a common list of needs/ challenges/goals might include several of the following: This translates into tactics such as the creation of marketing and advertising plans, technical infrastructure recommendations, reporting and analytics frameworks and plans, 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. 1) Increase Donations and the Cost Per Acquisition of Each Donor 2) Increase Membership and Member Retention 3) Increase Awareness and Positive Sentiment of an Issue 4) Increase Volunteers and Corporate and Individual Partners/Sponsors 5

7 5) Increase Legislative Activity Around an Issue Ultimately, the work that you do as a result of your digital strategy must address at least one (or more) of these goals to truly be 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. Furthermore, you must be able to clearly show the relationship between your digital marketing activities and the change in effectiveness of these goals. One thing you might notice is that a lot of the terms, methods and tactics used in creating your digital strategy are fundamentally similar to those used in a classic marketing plan and strategy. There are not a lot of differences to the underlying approach. The differences come in how the goals and strategies are applied more than anything. As preparation, you might want to dust off those old marketing textbooks from college if you still have them. 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 Conversion 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 fullcircle with your organizational objectives. In the past, the creation of a digital strategy took on a much more linear form. Much work would be put into the initial crafting of the strategy, and then it would be executed at a later point in time. More recently, with the advent of better and more accurate means of capturing and reporting on analytics, this linear process has turned into the cyclical one as pictured in the circle diagram in the introduction (and throughout this book). We will still spend the time necessary to do research and craft an intelligent, measurable plan, but we will do all of this knowing that a key part of the process is measurement, analysis and adjustment over time. 6

8 CHAPTER 2 Identification & Goal- Setting "People with goals succeed because they know where they're going." Earl Nightingale 3

9 Overview This first step of the process sets the foundation for all work to come. Without clear goals and a clear idea of where you are going, there is no way to truly guide your efforts towards the most efficient and rewarding end goals. Components of Identification & Goal-Setting This stage takes on a few steps and will uncover much of the data and research that will go into your strategic plans moving forward. We ve split this into four parts and will go into further detail on the following pages: As stated before in the introduction, your goals here are going to be directly related to your organizational goals, which will consist of fundraising, membership, awareness and possibly some others. Without knowing where you are headed, there s little chance you can set the strategies, tools, and tactics in place to get there. Team The team needed for this portion of the process will include everyone from brand and marketing strategists to researchers and stakeholders. You will need to involve not only the technical experts on branding and marketing, but also the subject matter experts who can help guide your research and findings. Here is a partial list of the people who you will want to consider involving: Digital Strategist Brand Expert or Brand Manager Marketing Expert Research / Focus Group Expert Research Assistants Stakeholders Subject Matter Experts Initial Research Building Blocks Additional Research Research Summary A recommendation is to find a good way to store all of the information you gather in this stage and keep it somewhere that is easy to reference, and easy for others within your organization to access. Creating a special directory on a shared network drive, or even a folder in a filing cabinet, can make it easy for others in the future. While this research is being done specifically for your digital strategy at the moment, it could serve countless purposes in the future. The other recommendation is to see what research has already been done by your organization, which could save you hours of time trying to find answers from scratch. If you are new to your organization, you might want to ask a few veterans to see who was in charge of the last set of branding, audience and marketing research so you can assess where things stand before you begin. Initial Research The best way to get started, even for the seasoned veteran to your cause or group, is to do some research. We tend to take for granted that we re on the ground and have firsthand knowledge. There is a wealth of information out there (or even untapped knowledge within your organization) that can have a dramatic positive impact on your information-gathering process. 8

10 This research can also be helpful to new employees, new consultants or agencies you begin relationships with, and it can help different departments with your organization better understand your audiences. First and foremost, it will help guide the strategies you put into place, and later it will help guide the tactics you choose to deliver on those strategies. Your research can be divided into several important components, including: Organizational Strategy and Other Documents You will revisit the content of these items a little bit later in the Building Blocks portion of this step, but it is important here, too. Stakeholder Interviews Take the time to talk to both internal (staff and board members) and external (partners and supporters) stakeholders to determine how the messages and mediums you are currently using to communicate and market your mission are resonating and helping these people do their jobs. Having one-onone conversations with these people will invariably lead to some great anecdotal insights that might not be uncovered otherwise. Current Marketing Efforts Audit We will dive deeper into this in the Building Blocks portion of this step, but it will help your efforts to do an audit of what current marketing efforts are being undertaken. We are not yet determining the value of each property and tactic; we are simply making an audit of what is currently being done and what has already been invested in. Constituent Interviews & Research This might take the form of in-person interviews, focus groups, online polls or other such methods. Your goal here is to interview customers of the organization to get a sense of how their needs and expectations are being met by messaging, marketing and other work the organization is doing. Primary KPIs Anyone in the business of measurement will tell you that while there are still many challenges that present themselves daily, retrieving data has become considerably easier over time due to products like Google Analytics and the reporting features available through platforms like Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. That being said, your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are not necessarily something that Google Analytics or your Facebook fan page can easily report on and correlate. KPIs can be defined as measurements of a marketing program s health or success, so they are much more high-level than something as granular as the bounce rate on your website or number of Facebook likes. They are also better rounded and demonstrate the true effectiveness of your marketing and communications efforts. Libby Bierman of Sageworks ( ors-principles-of-selection-for-nonprofits.aspx) gives some advice on some principles to remember when selecting KPIs: 1. Create a measurement for your KPIs and don t change it over time. It is very important that your measurements remain consistent over time in order to track true progress according to your goals. This also makes it all the more important to make sure you choose the right metrics and calculations from the start. 2. Set annual targets. Work backwards from a year and determine, if you have an annual goal of x, what that translates into from a monthly perspective 3. Use industry benchmarks to help you. While it is great to continue to beat your own measurements, it is also important to gain the perspective of how well you are performing alongside other nonprofit organizations. Try to find like organizations, but don t be afraid to use NGO-wide industry averages if you have to. Dennis R. Mortensen, a Web Analytics Instructor at University of British Columbia, gives seven characteristics of a KPI in his blog post at: 9

11 A KPI: Website visitors 1. Echoes organizational goals. Top search keywords 2. Is decided (or agreed upon) by management. Twitter follows/unfollows 3. Provides context. YouTube video views 4. Creates meaning on all organizational levels. 5. Is based on legitimate data. 6. Is easy to understand. 7. Leads to action! Our suggestions would be to find between five and eight KPIs to focus on. These will be very important numbers that you and your leadership can all agree contribute to the overall success of your organization. They also might involve cooperation between multiple team members, departments or even divisions of your organization. For instance, finding the lifetime value of a member or supporter involves metrics from your digital marketing, fundraising, development, membership and direct mail teams. Getting all of this data correlated can be a challenge of its own. To help simplify, or possibly make it more confusing, a KPI is a metric, but a metric is not necessarily a KPI. Examples: KPIs Versus Metrics To further help, here are a few examples for you: Some examples of KPIs: Efficiency of your fundraising Value of a supporter (donor, volunteer, etc.) over time Effectiveness of social media in fundraising Building Blocks We will go into much more details on these in the next chapter, which was formerly a white paper of its own. When we talk about the Building Blocks, we mean all the elements that are taken into account as you re crafting your strategy, assigning tactics and determining success. This is a mix of goals, strategies and tactics, as you would imagine. Here is a brief explanation of each; we ll go into more detail in the next chapter: Organizational Goals These are the guiding goals and KPIs that everyone in your organization is working towards. They are not solely digital goals, but your digital efforts must correlate with them and support them. Conversion rate from advertising Value of a social media follower Some examples of metrics that are not KPIs: Audiences & Personas Who are you targeting and what do they value and want from your organization and the causes you support? Knowing this will help guide all your efforts and be key in determining what to do and not to do. 10

12 Digital Landscape This is a map of where you are in the digital world. It contains all the web properties and tactics you are involved in and ultimately maps back to audiences and organizational goals, along with the measurements that help you evaluate successes and failures. Technology Infrastructure This is the supporting technology for all your efforts. For instance, your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that helps you manage members or collect and send s, or the Content Management System (CMS) that powers your website. Content Strategy This is the strategy and plan to ensure that your organization s content needs are being handled efficiently, effectively and according to a schedule that supports both your marketing efforts and your audience s needs. Everything you do involves some form of content, and the goal here is to get the maximum benefits from every piece of content you produce. research on your key audiences online usage habits, their spending and donation habits, and the ways that they prefer to be contacted and interact with causes and organizations that support them. Constituent Interviews This might take the form of in-person interviews, focus groups, online surveys or other such methods. Your goal here is to interview customers of the organization to get a sense of how their needs and expectations are being met by messaging, marketing and other work the organization is doing. Competitive Research In the nonprofit world, we don t typically refer to other organizations as competitors, but it is a harsh reality that we are all competing for something, whether it s volunteer time, donation dollars, or even attention to a key issue. It is important to note what is working and what isn t amongst your peers. Even in the for-profit world, there are many examples that you can draw from of successful outreach and use of technology to solve a problem or communicate a need. Measurements of Success Critical to all of the above are the measurements that determine how effectively your digital strategy and its associated tactics are working. You will likely have two sets of measurements at this point: KPIs that are the primary measurements the organization uses and additional metrics that tell you how your individual tactics are performing. Additional Research There is some additional research that will be most helpful after you do the previous exercises of both the initial research and identifying the building blocks: Audience Research We wait to do this research until after we define our primary and secondary audiences because, given finite time and resources, we want to make sure that we are putting the most effort towards the audiences that will give us the highest returns. We also encourage doing interviews and/or surveys of audience members, but this research will consist of outside, independent General Trends While your audience is sure to be unique in some ways, it would be foolish to not take into account general usage trends and behaviors in the digital world and beyond. Even if your general constituency is behind the times it is still key to your organization s success to understand general digital trends. And if you do have a more tech-savvy audience, this is all the more important to keep up with. Research Summary The natural next step is to summarize your research in an easily digestible format that others within your organization, as well as consultants and agencies you might work with, can easily read and understand. This invaluable research will form the basis of the rest of your work, so make sure your summary is exhaustive yet easy enough to follow that it can be easily referenced and referred to on an ongoing basis. 11

13 You will be revisiting this research often, and if your summary is well executed, your organization will be able to use it for many other purposes, including things like membership information and donation collateral. 12

14 CHAPTER 3 Building Blocks of Your Digital Strategy If you can t describe what you are doing as a process, you don t know what you are doing. W. Edwards Deming

15 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 audiencedriven), 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. Building Block 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 ties them back to the original organizational goals. Building Block 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. 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. Building Block 1: Goal-Setting Building Block 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. Building Block 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. "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. Building Block 4: Technology Infrastructure In order to have a successful digital marketing plan and support for your digital landscape, the right technology infrastructure is required. Building Block 5: Content Strategy Now 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. 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? 14

16 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. 1) Increasing revenue 2) Decreasing costs 3) Retaining supporters/donors/volunteers Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Business Goals We will be talking a lot more about KPIs throughout this book, but you can start at this point to determine what your organizational KPIs are. Our suggestion is that you also create a set of marketing KPIs that, while directly related to organizational objectives, are also at least close to the sole responsibility of your marketing efforts. Budgetary Constraints Advertising & Marketing Goals Technical Infrastructure This gives you the responsibility over them and also allows you to claim success when you are able to move the needle. By no means should you disregard the overall organizational KPIs, but in many larger organizations or even small to medium-sized ones it can be hard to tie all the numbers together in a way that helps you determine the effectiveness of your efforts. Digital Strategy Traditional Advertising/ Marketing 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 Website Social Media Search Engine Marketing Display Advertising Mobile /Direct Marketing Blogger Outreach other organizational initiatives that either provide additional insights or barriers to the completion and execution of a digital strategy. Stakeholder and Departmental Goals 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 on three things: 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 15

17 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. What to Do: In the Appendix of this document, there is a worksheet in Step 1 that helps you identify these elements. Goal Name Description Dependencies Challenges Primary G1: Secondary G2: G3: 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 required items (e.g. your organization signed a five-year contract with a CRM vendor) and those that are simply a preference (e.g. your IT team prefers open source technology). Recap and Next Steps At this point in the process, we can already see 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. 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. 16

18 Building Block 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 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 the worksheet for audiences in the Appendix, we list the following categories that should be filled out for this step: Primary Audiences o Name 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. o o Description Needs For instance, a primarily fundraising-based organization could have two primary audiences: 1) high-value donors, and 2) grassroots (lowdollar, 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 include o Wants Secondary Audiences o Name o Description o Needs o 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. 17

19 Audience Name Your Goals Audience-Specific Organizational A1: A1G1: G1 MM1: A2: A2G1: G2 MM3: A3: A3G1: G3 MM4: Recap and Next Steps Measurement Metric Challenges Building Block 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 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. 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 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. Twitter Facebook Search Engine PPC Social Media PPC Google+ Social Media Digital Advertising Campaigns Digital Display Ads YouTube Drives Traffic Provides Content Drives Traffic Drives Traffic Organizational Website Provides Content /Direct Marketing Event Marketing Drives Traffic Traditional Marketing, Advertising, PR 18

20 to better understand how your organizational and audience goals can be achieved by strategic use of all your properties. We recommend creating a diagram similar to the one on the previous page 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. Target Audiences Goals o Audience-Specific 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 that don t necessarily have a permanent home on the Web, such as campaigns, advertisements, or events, which may only exist for a short period of time and generally send traffic to other destinations or properties. Properties o Organizational Enumerating your tactics the same way you list your Web properties will help with the next step, which will be your content strategy. This also forms a comprehensive view of the touch points you have with your audiences. Conversion Metrics 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 you may have limited control (e.g. partner websites). 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 like a website has a URL that is consistent over time. Examples would be an campaign, digital display ads or public relations efforts. These are very important to your marketing efforts, but tactics such as digital display ads might only run for a short period of time, across many different websites, and thus cannot be referenced by a single location. While your tactics might behave differently than your digital properties in a number of ways, they can be simplified down to having similar characteristics as your properties, such as: 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 list Sharing content on Facebook Signing a petition Registering for an event 19