Tag: Owning Your Content

How much traffic should I expect for my nonprofit’s website?

The short answer is the classic consultant’s cop-out: it depends.

To state the obvious, every organization is different, and so the “reasonable” amount of traffic for your website is unique. I once built a website for the United Way chapter of a very small town in Iowa and I would never expect them to receive the same amount of traffic as United Way of King County in Seattle, much less the national United Way website! So in some ways, this may be a research question for you: What are other similar organizations seeing in terms of traffic and traffic trends.

Website “traffic” in its purest form is what you might call a “vanity metric”. It only has meaning when it’s given context and viewed over time. To turn a vanity metric like “traffic” into something useful, set a goal for why you want to see more traffic on your website. What’s your theory of change for why more traffic will help you achieve your mission? Will more traffic result in more volunteers? Does more traffic indicate a greater interest that leads to more individual donors? Stats are most useful when you can ask questions of them.

Website traffic vs. social media vs. email

There’s also a second question you may wonder about. What is the value of posting to your website vs. on social media vs. in an email newsletter. And for that, I have a much stronger answer!

Social media networks will come and go but you have the power to keep your website alive and in one place indefinitely. In the WordPress and open source world that I work in, we call this “owning your content”.

My primary recommendation is to use your website as the central “hub” of all your information (both brochure-type information as well as news and events) and then use social networks and newsletters as distribution channels. It’s much easier to change where you share links to your website than it is to change where you post your new information (much less to archive or migrate the history of your posting on another company’s website).

Here are two articles I’ve written with more details about that idea:

Write Blog Post, Share Link, Engage Followers
The Best Practice Blog-Driven Newsletter Formula

If you can increase the amount of content you post to your website, you’ll tend to see the positive effects for site traffic accumulate over time. By driving more traffic to your site, you’re exposing more people to your donate button, volunteer page, events calendar, etc.

There are so many benefits to this strategy. Posting engaging, bite-size news and announcements makes it easier for other people to share those links with others via email and social on their own.

Building up a larger history of consistent information about your work and the people it impacts will also help your search traffic increase as search engines see your site as a better and better result for people interested in the type of work you do.

It’s always about the people

Websites are just a tool to help your organization achieve it’s mission. So what matters is how it increases the impact of your nonprofit.

Remember, that 10% engagement for 100 people is the just as useful as 1% engagement of 1000 people. So before you get too worried about how many people are coming to your site, make sure you know exactly what you want them to do and make your site as compelling as possible. Trust the process and normally good things will eventually happen.

Write Blog Post, Share Link, Engage Followers

Ever wondered why you should blog? Are you stuck and lacking motivation to write? This post will get you inspired and excited about the possibilities of blogging to support your organization.

One of the newer pages on Nonprofit WP is “Blogging Best Practices.” There is a ton of great info on that page, including tips for blogging frequently, ideas for blog posts, and best practices for crafting the perfect post. But the crown jewel of the page is this diagram showing how you can use your blog to turn passive followers into engaged supporters.

Blog + Social Media = Engagement

Take a look, and then we’ll break it down…

Blog posts give you content to generate social media traffic back to your website. Your website houses the important calls to action like sign up, donate, and contact.

 

It’s a tricky little diagram but here’s what’s going on. Start in the middle column:

  1. First, publish interesting content about your nonprofit to your website’s blog.
  2. Next, share links to your blog posts on social media.
    Make sure those posts have good “Meta Descriptions” and “Featured Images” so they generate nice looking link previews!
  3. Instead of reading what’s on your Facebook page or in a Tweet, users visit your site to read your blog post. Make sure it’s worth their time.
  4. Once on your website, users can reach important calls to action like the donate page or a volunteer signup form.

See what you did there? Instead of a user passively reading your email newsletter or watching something on Facebook, they can act on their interest in your cause and become an even bigger supporter of your organization!

So here’s that successful recipe for engagement through blogging one more time:

  1. Post to your blog.
  2. Share your posts on social media.
  3. Drive traffic back to your website.
  4. Use calls to action to generate deeper engagement.

For even more in-depth information about sharing to social media and other ways to promote your blog posts, check out this guide on “How to Promote Blog Posts for Nonprofits” from Wired Impact.

The Right Calls to Action

The best calls to action in a blog post are timely, relevant, and not too pushy.

If you ask for donations in every post, the request loses impact. Urging people to contact their senator at the end of a new staff member profile probably doesn’t make much sense either. Provide a single clear call to action at the end of your blog posts and make sure it relates closely to the content above it. Committed visitors who have actually read (or browsed) the blog post will be much more likely to click the link and support your nonprofit!

Educate Your Visitors (and Google)

Similar to call to action links, make sure you’re cross-linking from your posts to relevant web pages. Mention a program with it’s own page? Link to it! Discussing an important policy proposal? Link to your position paper. Mentioning a staff person? Link to their bio.

While these links may not drive engagement in the moment, they allow users to learn more about your organization and follow their interests through your site. A website visitor may need repeated exposures before taking a big step up in activity with you, so be patient and keep them interested.

As a bonus, linking from blog posts to other relevant information on your site helps search engines better understand who you are and what you do. In the future, this means people interested in your cause are more likely to find your nonprofit in search results!

Owning Your Content

WordPress lets you “own your content”, because it lives in a database on a hosting plan you have access to. It’s also easy—relatively speaking—to export that data into a new system should the need arise.

Tons of nonprofits post to Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram that only lives on those sites. By posting first to your blog, you know that if a social media site loses active users or reduces access to your followers—cough-FACE-hack-BOOK-wheeze-#%$@!—you still have the information safely stored on your website.

Blogs are powerful communication tools for reporting on your work and sharing your impact with your most committed followers. When fully optimized, a blog can become an engagement tool itself, bringing your social users closer to your organization where they can help you make the world a better place!