On Wednesday, October 2nd, 2014 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern (10:00 a.m. Pacific), I’m teaching a brand-new webinar called How to Measure Your Nonprofit’s Marketing Success. I’ve had requests for this topic for a couple of years, and finally got around to producing the webinar, so I hope you’ll join me!
We will talk about what numbers to pay attention to related to your website, email, social media, direct mail, etc.
But I’ll start the webinar by talking about the three elements that your organization really should have in place BEFORE you can do anything serious with marketing measurement: Strategy, Leadership, and Learning.
Let’s look at how each connects to measuring success.
Strategy is about limiting the number of goals, making hard choices about how you achieve those goals, and then committing the resources to the work. Without at least some level of strategy, there is no real point in measuring. You are just bean counting.
Leadership, in this context, is about choosing and deciding quickly, constantly reprioritizing rather than just piling on new to-dos, and empowering staff to get the work done. Again, without leadership to react to what you see in all that you are measuring, and to make adjustments, what’s the point? Measuring is just an academic exercise without leadership.
Learning is also about what you do with the insights you gain from your measuring. Do you understand the best practices that are often your baseline tactics? Are you watching others and learning from them in our rapidly evolving field? Are your staff free to experiment and see what works? Without learning and experimenting, you can’t expect those numbers you are measuring to change much.
But let’s be realistic. Many nonprofits don’t really have these elements in place. Does that mean they shouldn’t try to measure their marketing? Of course not. I’m just saying that it’s hard to go beyond the numbers themselves, to find meaning, and to make smart changes to how you approach your marketing without these elements in place.
Regardless of where you are, I hope you’ll join us for this interesting conversation!
Details and Registration: How to Measure Your Nonprofit’s Marketing Success.
