As we enter the fall season, many nonprofits are starting their annual planning processes. With that comes the need to set communications goals for the coming year. And with that comes the need to work with the programmatic teams in your organization and how you will collaborate. (Note that the annual goals we are discussing here are actually what we would call objectives in a larger communications strategy.)

Use the Three Stages of Engagement to Set Communications Goals

One helpful approach to discussing and setting communications goals with others is to structure the conversation using our definition of engagement.

Engagement has three stages: Awareness, Interaction, and Participation.

Think of participation as completing the call to action. So, what do your program folks need people to do? Do they need people to RSVP, sign up, volunteer, donate, attend or what?

But before they participate, people have to be aware and then they typically need some kind of interaction to warm up or prepare. 

Let’s look at awareness goals first. Are you growing your email list or getting more followers on social media? Is getting more traffic to your website through organic search or paid advertising important? These are all ways to build awareness that require investing time and money.

Next is interaction. Are people opening emails and clicking on the links? Are they liking or commenting on specific social media posts? Are people returning to your website or spending a reasonable amount of time on certain pages? These are all forms of interaction that have a higher level of engagement than just awareness.

At the interaction stage, you also present your calls to action for consideration and make the case for them.

Hopefully, those who have been made aware and are interacting with your content will follow through and become participants. 

As you create your plans for the coming year and try to set communications goals, consider using this framework in discussions with other teams. It should help them understand how your communications and marketing work can get them closer to their programmatic goals.

What are the best nonprofit email metrics now, especially since open rates aren’t as useful as they once were?

You’ll find plenty of explanations of what all the nonprofit email measurement numbers technically mean, but what should you really pay attention to? What actually matters?

We suggest three different approaches to tracking your nonprofit’s email metrics, based on what you think is most important now. They build on each other. So work your way down the list as you have capacity.

1. Easy and Basic Nonprofit Email Metrics That Are Still Meaningful

At the most basic level, we encourage you to focus on your click-to-open rate and work to increase that over time. While email opens are still in this equation, the emphasis is on shifting your focus to clicks.

To calculate your click-to-open rate, divide unique clicks by unique opens then multiply by 100.

Now, look for trends or differences between the different kinds of emails you send. For example, what’s the difference between newsletter and fundraising emails or event invitations? Or the topics or style of the subject line?

Once you have your baseline, start to experiment.

As you optimize your emails for clicks, you’ll need to look at the text content and the design. For example, you might try using more teaser content or adding more buttons or white space around text links.

2. Email Metrics that Demonstrate Community Building and Engagement

Click-to-open rates are based on the individual emails you send. But your list health is a huge part of your nonprofit email marketing success or failure.

Nearly all email service providers help you calculate the level of email list engagement. This metric usually looks at the number of people on your mailing list who have clicked a link in the last six months. But those criteria are not uniform across all platforms. So you need to understand how your email service provider defines an “engaged” user.  For example, here is how MailChimp calculates engagement. 

Next, see if they offer any tools for you to use to adjust those criteria. Those tools are often called lead tracking. 

With this basic understanding of how engagement is calculated, you can now set your own benchmarks. What percentage of your list is engaged? Unengaged? 

How can you better manage the unengaged, for example, through re-engagement campaigns or archiving unengaged names after a certain period?  Cleaning up your email list before year-end is a fabulous idea!

What benchmarks can you set to try to reach over time (e.g., percentage of the list or total number of records at each engagement level when there are several levels)? 

3. Nonprofit Email Metrics that Demonstrate the Value of Email Marketing with Your Communications Strategy

So you are optimizing your emails for clicks and watching your nonprofit’s email list engagement. What’s next?

It’s time to think about how well your email strategy contributes to your big marketing goals at your nonprofit like community engagement.

One excellent approach is implementing UTM links, which allow you to track where your website traffic is coming from, including your own emails. Here’s our basic explanation of how they work.

UTM links allow you to look outside your email service provider and get email performance data through your website metrics (like Google Analytics).

The trick to making UTMs work is deciding which parameters to use (start with Source, Medium, and Campaign) and then creating a naming convention — or a consistent menu of options for each parameter.  You want to use the same term every time so that Google Analytics properly collates the data.  

For example, you don’t want to call your email newsletter “news” one day and then use “newsletter” the next because Google will think those are two different things. Same with campaign names: “year-end” and “Yearend” won’t be combined.  Don’t use spaces and stick with lowercase to keep things clean.

This doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Implement UTMs on one set of emails (like a series of emails in a campaign or welcome series) to see how it goes and expand from there.

What Other Email Metrics Should We Track?

Are there more things to track? Always.

Tracking overall list growth and the number and frequency of your email sends are also important to your long-term email strategy.

But you can add those things when you have time. Pick where you are above now and see what you can learn.

What About Nonprofit Email Benchmarks?

We always recommend that you benchmark against yourself. Your particular list and email strategy, including sending frequency, segmentation, and content, are the biggest drivers of your email success. However, if you do want nonprofit benchmarks, you can start with Neon One’s data as well as the M+R benchmarks

If you are a communication pro working at a museum, a performing arts center, a discovery center, or any other facility that relies on ticket sales or folks coming through the door, you are probably wondering what your marketing goals should be.

Should they include attendance or ticket sales revenue? Yes, of course, because that will often be your call to action.

BUT.

And that’s meant to be a BIG BUT.

Yes, it’s your goal. But it must be a shared goal with programmatic staff.

That’s because the quality of the exhibit or performance has a major effect on your ability to market it. The choices that the programmatic staff or curators are making have a very direct effect on your ability to build awareness of the event and then to encourage ticket sales or attendance.

Some exhibits or events are much easier to market than others. Program staff and communications staff both need to listen to what folks want and to create programming that is easier to market.

That doesn’t mean everything should be popular, however! Nonprofits often exist to push boundaries, raise new or hidden voices, and start difficult conversations. It is absolutely appropriate for program staff or executives to deem something important to the mission, regardless of the general appeal.

And it’s still your job to market it. This is what we here at Nonprofit Marketing Guide call “putting cheese on the broccoli.” Broccoli is good for you, but not a lot of people love it. Potatoes and tomatoes are much more popular. But nonprofits have a lot of broccoli to get into the world. That means you need some serious time, talent, and budget going toward putting cheese on that broccoli.

In other words, everyone else in your organization must acknowledge that certain events or exhibitions will be more challenging for the marketing staff, take more time, and demand more creativity.

That means the goals will also be different. Communications, programmatic, and executive staff must set realistic expectations for organizational performance and then individually for each team member.

You may even want to develop a system where you rank the expected effort required to market the exhibit or event together. Then in your annual planning, you ensure the right mix that works for both the mission-oriented staff and the communications team.

If programmatic staff fail to work with you on setting goals, I recommend you make yours about community engagement more generally.

How should you decide which social media metrics your nonprofit should really pay attention to?

Sure, you could make a case for tracking every number that the social media companies give you. But let’s face it . . . that’s a ridiculous waste of your time.

So many social media metrics provided to nonprofits are there because it’s easy for the companies to give you those numbers, not because they are actually of any real value to you.

Here’s an abbreviated version of the process I recommended today to our All-Access Pass Holders during one of our special nonprofit marketing and communications workshops called Jump Starters. 

Step 1: What is the point of your social media work, really?

We have data from the 2023 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report about the social media objectives nonprofits are pursuing.

But really, it boils down to two related questions:

• At what level are you good with on-platform engagement alone? 
• At what level do you need follow-throughs on calls to action, such as clicks off social to your website where another action may occur? 

During the training, I asked participants to decide that ratio for themselves. For example, are they good with 80% on-platform engagement / 20% calls to action, or the reverse, or somewhere in the middle?

This is just another way to talk about your goals for social media. But it also has a big impact on which numbers you watch most closely.

Step 2: Start with what you actually have control over without spending

When we talk about social media metrics, we talk about Activity, Reach, Engagement, and Impact. 

You can buy Reach on social media with ad dollars.

But it makes no sense to spend your money without first analyzing your Activity. I recommend that you look at three characteristics of the content you are producing:

1. Frequency of posts — how often do you post on average per week or month?
2. Topics of posts — what are some easy ways to categorize what you talking about in your posts? Think about maybe 3-5 categories. For example, a farmers market might post about
   • Farmers and other people posts
   • What’s in season now; products farmers are bringing to market
   • Events at the farmers market
3. Formats of posts — Are you using images, videos, text only, or links? You can also get more specific (live video versus recorded, or graphics versus photos as your images)

Step 3: Look at the “Engagement” over “Reach”

Now you know what you are posting. With those categories in mind, now you can look at both the Reach and Engagement numbers. Reach is how many people saw it; Engagement is how many people did something with it (liked, commented, shared, clicked).  We used Meta metrics (Facebook and Instagram) to keep this simple, but the same concepts apply everywhere. The metrics will just be a little different.

You’ll look at Reach and Engagement from two perspectives.

The first is a bigger-picture number that’s more focused on the people. Let’s say over the last 28 days, Facebook says your “post reach” is 23,366 people.  That is the number of people who saw any of your posts at least once. And Facebook also says your “post engagement” was 2,869. That is the number of reactions, comments, shares, and clicks on your posts.

I recommend you divide Post Engagement by Post Reach. So in this case it’s 2869 divided by 23366, which is 0.12.  This is a decent metric for the overall performance of your content on Facebook. Based on the number of people seeing it, how much engagement are you getting in a given month? Now, you can use that as a benchmark and try to increase that over time.

You can also look at Post Engagement over Followers. But honestly, I really prefer the Engagement over Reach numbers because those are the actual people seeing the content, regardless of whether they follow you or not. We all know that not all of your followers see the content.

Next, you’ll get into the post-level data, and this is where you need those post topics and formats from above. 

Meta tells you what your top posts are by Reach and by Engagement.

I recommend you keep track of the top 5 to 10 per month if you post several times a week.

• Top posts by Reach
• Top posts by Engagement
• Top posts by Engagement / Reach (yes, you have to do that math again)
• Changes in Reach or Engagement across your post topics and formats. Put them in order! Which topics got the best reach and engagement? Which formats?

This is what can help you make better decisions about your content strategy!

Step 4: Stop there with engagement or continue on to impact metrics

If you are mostly happy with on-platform engagement, you can stop here. Make your spreadsheet and start tracking. You’ll be off to a great start!

If you are more interested in calls to action, then you’ll need to get more specific about what that looks like. For most of you, it’s diving into that engagement number to separate out the Clicks specifically. You can then run the numbers above, but replace the full Engagement number with just the Clicks.

Can you do A LOT more than this? Of course. Do you need to? For most of you who are just trying to produce the most engaging content you can, this is plenty. 

We all know how much time nonprofit communicators spend on creating and posting social media content (Hint: A LOT). But what’s it all for?

I recommend that you connect your social media strategy back to specific nonprofit marketing goals and objectives.

Here are the 12 categories of nonprofit communications objectives that we suggest you start with for all of your work.

• Newly joining, subscribing, or following (e.g., increase newsletter subscriptions by 20% this year)
• Expressions of loyalty, including retention or renewal (e.g., maintain a 75% donor retention rate this year)
• Participation levels, such as registrations, donations and RSVPs (e.g., sell out 90% of the workshops this year)
• Financial gains or savings (e.g., increase the percentage of race revenue raised via peer-to-peer fundraising by 20%)
• Increased levels of influence or share of conversation (e.g., get invited to speak at 5 events this year)
• Increased demand or desire for something (e.g., increase appointment requests by 30% next quarter)
• Change in knowledge or understanding (e.g., 75% of beginners move to the intermediate level in 6 months)
• Change in tone, sentiment, attitude or preferences (e.g., the majority of social media comments on our profiles are positive or neutral this year)
• Increased preparedness or empowerment to act (e.g., 70% of petition signers continue to open educational emails six months later)
• Change in behavior (e.g., 50% fewer students use inappropriate language this semester)
• Increased satisfaction (e.g., raise the Net Promoter Score for the program to +60)
• Expressions of trust (e.g., three new organizations agree to partner with us on the new project)

Now, let’s look at some ways to get more specific about social media objectives.

Newly joining, subscribing or following is an obvious one as you build your list of followers. This is a good indicator for goals like raising awareness of issues, brand building and reputation management, and engaging our community to keep people inspired and active.

How about increased level of influence or share of conversation? When you look at conversations on the topics you care about, are your posts included?

Same with a change in tone, sentiment, attitude or preference.  When you look at the conversations you are in on social media, is the vibe of the conversation changing in meaningful ways?

Or consider change in knowledge or understanding. If you see a lot of engagement around posts on a particular topic, that can be an indicator of change in knowledge.

Working through how these and other objectives can apply to your social media work is a great way to be more strategic and to add real meaning to all that time spent.

It’s really hard to guess whether a change you want to make will actually get better results, especially when improving your email marketing. You just have to give it a try and see!

One way to do that is through A/B testing or split testing.  You pick one variable with two different options. You send Option 1 to half of your list and Option 2 to the other half, and see what works better. Or, you can send each option to a part of your list (say Option A to 20%, Option B to 20% and then you send the winner to the remaining 60%).

For example, MailChimp will let you test different subject lines, from names, content, and send time and will randomly split the list for you.  Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, Active Campaign, Hubspot, and Emma also offer some level of A/B testing. It’s a fairly standard feature these days, especially for paid plans, so check with whatever provider you use to send your emails.

Here are some tests you could run:

• Which day of the week is best? Some nonprofits get great results sending on weekends, for example.
• What time of day is best? Have you tried evenings, for example?
• Which words in your subject line seem to produce the best response?
• What about emojis in the subject line?
• Should the email come from your nonprofit, a staff person, or some combination of the two in the “from” field?
• Are people more likely to click on a button, linked text, or an image?
• Do images help or hurt clicks?
• What about GIFs in the content?
• Which wording for your calls to action perform best?
• Does a plain and simple email template (as if you typed it in Gmail or Outlook) work better than a designed template?
• Do images with people work better than other kinds of images you use?
• What seems to be the optimum number of stories or links?
• Does including stories, testimonials, or quotes help?
• Should you structure the mail as a letter with a signature and a PS?

Of course, you also have to define what “works best” means in each case. Are you measuring open rates, click-through rates, or something else? Typically, you’d look at opens for things like who the email is from and your subject line and use clicks for content. Sending time could be measured either way.

We’d love to hear the results of your split testing. Feel free to share in the comments.