Transcript for 451_tony_martignetti_nonprofit_radio_20190802.mp3 Processed on: 2019-08-03T15:14:35.193Z S3 bucket containing transcription results: transcript.results Link to bucket: s3.console.aws.amazon.com/s3/buckets/transcript.results Path to JSON: 2019…08…451_tony_martignetti_nonprofit_radio_20190802.mp3.941763266.json Path to text: transcripts/2019/08/451_tony_martignetti_nonprofit_radio_20190802.txt Hello and welcome to Tony martignetti non-profit Radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, what an incredible 450th show last week. I hope you were with us. I’ll say more in Tony’s Take Two, and I’m glad you’re with me today. I’d be thrown into up pal Mona Riotous if I saw that you missed today’s show. Inconceivable that metric does not mean what you think it means. Take a fresh look at fund-raising Metrics with Kirk Smith and West Moon. Kirk is with stars, and West is from wisely that’s recorded at 19 and T C. And Google Analytics and Google optimize learned terminology and best practices for these applications. Should you trust your data? Which reports do you need? What about testing and optimizing? We cover it all with another 19 ntcdinosaur Colleen Campbell from Firefly Partners and Jeannie McCabe at the Center for Reproductive Rights. Attorney Steak, too. 450th recap were sponsored by Wagner, C. P A’s guiding you beyond the numbers. Wepner cps dot com by Cougar Mountain Software Finale Fund Is there complete accounting solution made for non-profits tony dot m, a slash Cougar Mountain for a free 60 day trial and by turned to communications, PR and content for non-profits, your story is their mission. Turn hyphen to DOT CEO. Here are Kirk Schmidt and West Moon Inconceivable Welcome to Tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of 1990 si. You know what that is? That’s a 2019 non-profit technology conference where at the convention center in Portland, Oregon, and this is ntcdinosaur Bridge is non-profit radio coverage and all of our 19 ntcdinosaur views are brought to you by our partners at ActBlue Free fund-raising Tools help non-profits Macon Impact. My guests now are Kirk Schmidt, director of Foundation Analytics Systems and operations at Stars. And he’s seated next to me and West Moon co founder and C e o c 00 of wisely welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Kurt West. Welcome years. Some session topic is inconceivable. That metric does not mean what you think it means. Of course, with the first thing we need to find out is who is the Princess Bride Fan? Who is that? Both of us. Both of you. All right. Top five movie for both of us. Top five. Okay. Okay. Um Of course, inconceivable is Now. What? What’s the name of the Wallace Shawn character? Who says Inconceivable all the time? What? Zini, Vizzini, Vizzini. He’s the bad guy. And Mandy Patinkin is Inigo Montoya. And he says, I don’t I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Is that Do I have that right? Is it? Yes. Okay. In concert. I mean, I know that’s where it’s from. Did I say the line correctly? Yes, but the But the line he’s most most famous for is my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. That’s right. He’s looking for the man with six fingers on his right hand. Who’s, you know, Christopher Guest? What’s that character’s name? What’s that? Was Christopher Guest character’s name? Yeah, the six fingered swordsman. Yeah. No name in my mind here. God. Five. You can’t remember. I can name all the top I can have. The six fingered man. Yeah. No, he’s got a name. I think it does. Because the prince the prince calls and doesn’t call him six fingered man. Prince called him. All right. Could be I am Devi that Thank you. Wait. Okay. We can have that by the end. All right. Inconceivable that metric doesn’t mean when you think it means. Um, Wes, I like to start furthest away. Why do we need this topic? Why do we need this session? Um, metrics which drive a lot of decision making in charities across the country are used improperly. Metrics are used improperly. OK, Quite often. So you have. You have a metric, uh, that tells you something. And if you don’t understand how that’s being used, it is going to be used incorrectly. Context matters. Okay, West. Anything? I’m sorry you want I’m sorry, Kirk. Anything you want to add to that? No, I think really, The what we’re trying to do is advance the sector past metrics that have been used for decades. Two things that are more robust and Maur accurately reflect what we’re trying to do with it, which is decision making to better fundrasing. Okay, so tradition is often a mistake made more than once. Right? Okay. What is your shorts? A T shirt related to this topic. My shirts wearing a T shirt for those who don’t have the benefit of the video wearing a T shirt. What’s the context of the shirt. So So it’s Ah, it’s a little data joke. And it says there’s two types of people in this world. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data. OK, that’s clever. All right, way have an answer to the president. Because the characters Ruben Ruben Wright Ruegen. Okay, I’m top five for both of you. Neither one knew. Count. I don’t think I knew that wasn’t an all right. All right, All right. Um okay, so we need to take a fresh look at fund-raising metrics. There’s a lot of mistakes being made. We need to correct things. Can we go into detail about what some of these mistakes are? I’m sure we can. Sure. So So when we get started, when we did this talk, I mean, I mean, part of it was really to find out what individuals in the audience tend to measure and really talk about those measurements and whether the worthwhile. But of course, we had our own examples. Top one being average gift. Average gift is one of those metrics that is used everywhere. And it is quite often an incorrect measure For most of the things that we try to use it for okay. Is that deeper than because averages skewed by out liars that I mean, that’s the main reason, right? So So because of the out liars, we’re using that. But But then you know where you would go to medium gift? That’s right, Median. Or you know that we talked about other ones, like trimming the average or using a winterized average way. Got jog in jail in radio for sure. You got to find this so so winterized average effectively. What you’re doing is you’re taking an outlier value. Um, and you’re you’re winterizing it. Basically, what you’re doing is you’re saying so. So take $500 for example, anything over $500 you now count as $500. So you’re taking the average and you’re basically acknowledging that, Yes, there are major gifts, but I don’t know what those major gifts they’re gonna be year to year. So you’re including them because they’re important account. But you’re not including the size of that. Yeah, the magnet, right. Counting them as a data point. Correct. And how do you Is it too technical to explain how you decide at what point you cut off and start wins arising. There are a lot of different ways, some, some arm or robust statistical means. Some could be just intuition going. You know, we’re just get cut this off in 1000. But either way, you feel that’s more accurate than average. Absolutely gift. Absolutely. Okay. It’s certainly more predictive on when you think about average gift. Uh, one of the reasons why we really care about it is, let’s say you, as a fundraiser, are being asked to raise average, get by 10%. There’s a couple ways you can go. You get one astronomically large gift and be done so that way. And we like, we like to call it the Brute Force method, which is under the Giant with a a big rock. He’s gonna he’s gonna course one person to make one large gift. Okay, Another way to do it would be to get your entire cohort to increase the size of their gift by just 10% and we call it the masterful way on, and we’re you know, that’s that sword play. The last way isn’t good for a charity. And if you took all your small donors and just eliminated them from your program. You’re giving up a lot of money. Your average would rise substantially. Hit those low wallet that low wallet. Quadrant him out. Eliminate the Miss donorsearch way. Call that the inconceivable method Inconceivable met the inconceivable method. But you know where we see this and fund-raising is stuff. Did you raise the average gift? Yes, I also saved money and direct mail. That’s right, well, and we see it quite often with retention rate, right, like there will be organizations that try to raise retention rate. And the inconceivable method of doing that is to cut off acquisition. It’s time for a break. Wagner C. P A’s. They’ve got another free webinar. On August 6th. It’s developing high impact grants. Improved your grants, we search and writing. You’ll find it at Wagner cps dot com. Click Resource Is and upcoming events. Now that’s only a couple of days away. I know that you’ll probably miss it live, so watch the archive. Wagner cps dot com Quick resource is and recorded events Now back to inconceivable. That metric does not mean what you think it means. Okay, I’m sorry. I’m hearing this for the first time. Say that again. I know it’s simple, but you got to say it again. So if you want to raise your retention rate, we know the first time ever. Really low retention. So cut off the equity. We know it’s only 25%. Yeah. Stop inquiry. Right? And so is that the right thing to be measuring fundraisers on? Okay. And fundraisers are literally measured on that. Yeah. Yeah, attention. Okay, what’s better than what we identified? What is better than retention rate? It’s not necessarily what’s better, but it’s It’s more about segmentation or or developing cohorts. Right? So we do want to measure first year donors separately from the rest of your database, and you might even want to separate further in terms of multi use your donors, those who are lapsed so on so forth. Okay, okay. This is fun. This is fun. Let’s identify some or another one that’s miserable. Been around too long. Well, not not valuable. Well, part of the problem, too, with some of these is Sometimes they were put in in other formulas for other metrics. So we talked about lifetime valuers estimated lifetime value S o f p fund-raising effective in this project defines estimated lifetime value a very particular way, and it uses average gift in the numerator. And it uses the attrition rate, which is based on your attention rate in the denominator. So and so So, basically, you’re finishing This one is bad. So So you’re overestimating your average gift, right? Because because of what we talked about before and you’re underestimating your attrition because you’re not counting your first your donors and so your lifetime value looks really big. And the problem is, when you’re using that to decide whether you want to acquire Donor comparing it to the donor acquisition cost, you’re going to believe you’re going to make more money than you will. In fact, you could believe that you’re making money and you are, in fact, losing money. Yeah, Yeah, it’s inconceivable, right? Exactly. All right. All right. This is very good. Um, let’s not. Yeah, um, we got others. Another exam is just what the session was. Examples between you brought some and the audience contributed. Was that the whole session? Effectively? I mean, we started talking about metrics in general, on dhe some good, some Something’s no like the importance of knowing the difference between the leading metric and a lagging metric. All right, we have to go there yet. Can we Can we do another dinosaur Metric? One more dinosaur matter and we do one more before we go to leading versus lagging. Mmm. When maybe you got one from the audience that you remember. I didn’t think. Now there weren’t a lot of dinosaur metrics on there. I think when we went through them, it was Maur is more talking about. What are they used for? And are they the right metric for what you want? Okay, way covered that. I think we way hit the main ones, like overall retention rate, lifetime value, an average gift, all of which are used to make business decisions. Uh, there are other metrics, I think, as you start to dig deeper, that may or may not have good effect on decision making, but they’re not used ubiquitously. All right, All right. So we hit the big three, we hit the big three. Okay, let’s go to leading versus lagging. So, what’s what’s the, uh we need to understand what the difference is. So go ahead. Explain it, Kirk. Sure. So so a lagging metric is effectively something that you learn at the end of a period of time. Where is the leading metric? It’s something that is changeable over time, and you can use it to you when you look at what it is. You can then make adjustments to it to get to, ah, better value, and then they will help inform that legging metric. So a really good example would be the number of donors you have at the end of the year. That is a lagging metric, right. Uh, so how do you find out how many donors you’re gonna have at the end of the year? Well, if you know your acquisition rate, you know how many people you’re you’re tryingto you attempt to acquire. And if you know what your retention rate is, knowing how many donors you had at the end of last year, then you can predict what the number of donors are going to get than the end of this year. So then you can adjust things. Do you do make changes to your acquisition rate or how many people you’re acquiring? Do you? Do you embark on stewardship ventures, money retention to retain donors so you could actually make adjustments that way. Okay. Okay. Um, why do we need to know? How does this fit into the bigger picture in any different way? Or this is just leading versus lagging this. How does this help us? Overall? West? Yeah. You always want to be able to walk back your goal. So let’s say, are the fictitious charity that we’re using today. It was a fire. The fire swamp trust. Okay. And the fire swamp trust is saving. Rodents of unusual size is also far a argast want from also from Princess Bride. Okay, so they needed to raise $100,000. So to get to $100,000 on they wanted to do this using mid level giving. So gifts of 1000 to maybe $10,000 in order to secure those we know. We know some things. We know that you have to talk to donors and you have to move, take them through moves, management or a pipeline. So what’s a good leading indicator and figuring out are we going to be able to reach $100,000? Well, we know that we need to have people to actually talk to donors, and we need donors to talk to, Uh and we have a lot of metrics in our history that say getting someone to qualify if they’re in my portfolio is about 25%. So we have some conversion rates between our stages on. We know that it takes about five actions or five interactions with that donor to move people through each of the different stages. So a leading indicator in getting to that $100,000 would be having 20 donors to talk to and taking 100 attempts to talk to those donors will produce one gift. So that means that if if you walk that back, this is where we we like thio abuse. Leading indicators. If you walk that back, you know that if the gift team isn’t taking enough action, that that needs to be adjusted because you will not hit your target. And that’s how we like to look at leading and lagging Lagging would be how much money came through the door today. In this particular case, context is really important. Could do it like week by week, and absolutely you should in fact you have to, because that’s how you’re gonna know whether how you doing time versus goal? Sure. And whether you need to, in fact, walk back and change one of those variables that once you have control over. Exactly. Okay, Okay. Leading versus lagging. What else we got? Well, I mean, we did talk a little bit about the future, right? And in terms of, you know, we’re at this point where we can do a lot of this manual work in terms of figuring out what are lagging. Indicators are figuring out what our leading indicators are. But what what’s coming in terms of technology in terms of how processes air computed and and what will that look like? And kind of How do we get there? All right, we’ll talk about it. Well, um, I’m in the business of machine learning for charities. Um, we’re doing a lot of leading indicator work on making using those leading indicators to predict what a donor will do next. That is one good example of what the future may look like around a prediction. So when you think of what are the variables that you’re measuring thio, maybe it’s proprietary. A couple happy to share. We have about 75 variables way we don’t have time. Didn’t they fit into three transactions? Eso previous donation is obviously one of the biggest predictors of what will happen on, and that’s not new. That’s that’s old news. I would say your best customers. Your most recent customer. I learned that in the eighties you have information about a donor, which would be, you know, Tony D’oh! Do you care about this organization to attend events? These types of things where you live economic status on then the last piece would be Theo interactions between you and the church. So those three pieces together allow us to be pretty predictive on what’s the value of your next gift? What your likelihood to make that gift on. That’s one example of what the future may look like of in the charitable sector. There’s some very interesting things happening around. Kids help phone in Canada. They are doing sentiment analysis the organization kids help phone. Okay, great organization. They help at you at youth risk krauz at risk Youth. Thank you. In crisis I am listening. You’re testing me? Yes, I waas you passed So the sentiment analysis that will predict if a call needs to be escalated. For instance, is this a very serious call? And they can do that in real time because computers can absorb more variables. Any human on bacon do that at scale. It sort of automate sort of that intuition around using metrics. So we use metrics to inform our decision in inform for good decision making an intuition. Computers could do that at scale now. Okay. Okay. Um, you had something in your description that said, uh, recognizing data. That may be problematic for some metrics. Did we talk about that data? Well, Rita points that might be that comes around, saythe out liars with average. All right, so that’s gonna throw it off. Okay, way learned that yet? All right. The lights have gone off in, uh, in the exhibit hall. Uh, and he’s 19 ntcdinosaur non-profit Radio perseveres never actually have our own lights. You shall survive long. They don’t turn the power off. We could still record, and we could still see each other, So non-profit radio perseveres. I’m not sacrificing a 30 minute segment in 18 minutes because the ambient light out okay. Um okay. Integrating better analytics into your organization’s reporting. Better analytics for your accusations, reporting move. Kind of that subsumed it, Really? And everything we’ve said, Absolutely. That’s pretty general one. But you’re holding out on us because we got more time together and you do the 75. We’ve only done, like, 17 minutes and you get 75 minutes with the view up for the for the NTC audience. So what do you not giving up? Well, I’ve got a German name, so I’m efficient. I’m going cheating, cheating of radio listeners. I’m not gonna have it. So what else did you talk about? Or maybe talk about in more detail that you haven’t yet revealed here? So what we did is we, uh the audience gave us a number of metrics very early on that they used to measure. And the nice thing is, we got metrics from all sorts of all sorts of business units that aren’t necessarily fund-raising. So, you know, we talked a little bit about, you know, impressions and click through rates and things like that. From a marketing standpoint, there were a few few that were very much program delivery, So people were talking about you know, the number of unique clients that they served or things like that. So what we did is we We spent some time going through some of those metrics and really talking about, you know, what is this measuring? Is it a leading indicator? Is it a lagging indicator? Is it both on dhe then? Going through that? Okay. So unless your host comes up with a 20 minute well, 10 minutes worth of variables that metrics that I’m that I’m preserving and committed to and then you analyze them rattle look well, well, we I mean, we we were, Unless that happens, if we one good example. Actually, I was I knew something. Would you dug enough? You’re holding out. But I’m not giving up. There’s nothing more to talk about. It talk about. Go ahead. There is S O. The audience is a little more varied than we expected. We thought it would be Omar fun fundez rating focused audience. But there’s a lot of operational folks in there. Uh, and that was intriguing to me. And we heard a number of cases where they were tracking like, number of days we have of operational funds in the bank was a metric that they looked okay. So let me give me, give the uninitiated a shot at that number of days. Number of days, days of money we have in the bank. Never heard that metric before. That sounds pretty granular like hopefully, it’s hundreds. No hope, the numbers hundreds of days. I was getting the impression it was not 100 today. Oh, maybe this is an important one. I mean, it’s like six. Well, first of all, that person needs to be networking for a job. A tte, the career center. Aaron NTC. If it’s six or below number of days, I don’t know, something just sounds weird about it. But But if you’re a tiny organization, maybe maybe this is keeping the lights on. It’s hard. I mean, from a business standpoint, it’s really about your cash flow, right? Like if we were in the for-profit business world, what we would be talking about is, is what is our cash flow? And and can we maintain it right, So so absolutely. It’s a really interesting stat from from a a charity Stemple, and she’s got such a scarcity mind to it. But if you’re in that. But if that’s you, yeah, all right, I can’t really get into controller. That’s looking. Oh, OK, yeah, yeah. As opposed to the fundraiser, right? Yeah, that’s the person who should be getting it right. Looking for a new job. If it’s the fund raiser knows that it’s 6 30 you get you’re in deep trouble. If anything, it’s a good good thing for somebody to be looking at. It’s just a matter of who. Hopefully that same organizations looking at receivables. Sure, we got We got this number of gifts in the pipeline, and typically these. This number will come through from our prospect list. So as far as you, as as we dug in a little bit on this indicator, which the number of days left is, in my opinion, still a lagging indicator, it is not a leading indicator. It is just a yard marker to say. How much time have we got left to make that a leading indicator? We then need to know how is that changing over time, for instance, so week over week, month over month, year over year, how how’s your cash flow or your days left in the bank changing over time. So if every day you look at the stat and it is still six days, then you can expect that this is actually reasonable case and that you have regular money coming in and you need to then keep walking back to get to the point where if you miss a day of doing something important that you know about it because six days from now you don’t wanna have to turn out the lights, right? So that is the exercise that that we preach about getting to those leading indicators that are your business drivers. I think one of the other important things I mean, I mean days left to somebody to some degrees is a bit of a leading because because you kind of have some some semblance of you know is the time to panic. Yes, it is. Um, and we talked about how context really matters in terms of leading indicators and lagging indicators, right? So for a stewardship person whose job it is to retain donors, retention rate might be a lagging indicator, right? They’re going to do a number of stewardship measures like, how long does it take to receipt and thank a donor on there. They’re going to try to adjust those as they go through to try to reach a good retention rate. Whereas a development officer might use retention rate to determine how many donors that there will be at the end of the year s O. So, depending on the context, depending on your job, what might be a leading indicator for one person? Maybe a lagging indicator for the other. Okay, I got your Yeah. I can’t really, uh, do a follow up question. But I understand that context matters absolutely the exact same number. Yeah. The last the last topic that we covered off was around cohort. And we haven’t talked about cooperating with you yet. Okay, s So I think I think it’s a good topic. Okay, courting is that we just have, like, two minutes left. Oh, no. Oppcoll super important cohort, please. The most important thing. All right, go ahead. Uh, you need to group people together. You know, birds of a feather segmenting segment here, Eddie would ntcdinosaur birds of a feather, right? Whether it’s knitting or stamp collecting and and that that becomes the basis of all your metrics and you only want a cohort to the point where, uh, you can still use it. So you can You can create too many segments on and have an unusable amount of data s o. You can’t consume it. You can’t produce on it like specific marketing appeals. Andi, we talked about using gift type. How someone was acquired. Eso a monthly donor has very should not be in the same cohort as a one time gift donor and a lot of these very basic things. Uh, but setting up your cohorts the right way so that their operational and usable and predictive eyes key. And that’s what I’d summarize in one minute. Okay, Okay. That was an excellent summary. I was thinking of, You know what would be a worthless cohort since we’re talking about bad, bad, like dinosaur data? Bad data. Um, age. Uh, I had some valid thoughts, as you were as you were talking. Explaining it, um, age could be, Could be a valuable cohort, or it might not. Right. It might not mean anything to average gift, but it might mean a lot to, um, potential donors to the plan giving program. Well, it might not mean something in particular cases as well. Like you might have a case where let’s say you’re an international charity and you find that certain American donors react a certain way to two things that you do. And donors in a different country who seem to have the exact same profile work completely different, Right? So So sometimes you’ll find that cohorts work in some places and don’t in others. So really, it’s about repeated testing and really, really looking to see what works in what cases? Okay, okay, West. I’m gonna give you the wrap up to this. Inconceivable the metric that does not mean that metric does not mean what you think it means. What do you want to leave people with, Oh, care about your metrics and always walk them back to their source. How, like, why’s that metric important? Take every step, break every step down and go right to the source for that leading indicator looks with leaving. Look for that leading into court indicator. Okay, that was West Moon, co founder and CEO of Wisely and sitting next to him is Cook Schmidt, director of Foundation Analytics Systems and operations at stores. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure and thank you for being with Tony martignetti non-profit Radio coverage of 19 NTC As the lights are dim, the hall is quiet, but non-profit radio perseveres. All of our ntcdinosaur 19 ntcdinosaur views are brought to you by our partners at act Blue Free fund-raising tools to help non-profits make an impact, we need to take a break koegler mountains software maintaining separate accounts for each fund-raising daily expenses and reporting to the board are all a challenge. That’s why Cougar Mountain created Denali Fund. It’s your complete accounting solution specifically designed for non-profits. They have a free 60 day trial. You can get that at the listener landing page. Tony dot m a slash Cougar Mountain. Now time for Tony’s take to the 450th show last week. It was amazing. And when I say it was, what I mean is, I feel it will have been amazing. Awesome. I’m looking 10 days ahead and I’m telling you what happened a week ago, which is not hard for me to say, you see, because I know who will be on the show, and I know how good they’ve each been in the past, individually and collectively. Of course, no point critiquing them as individuals when they will have been and in fact were part of our whole troupe, but not quite, in fact, actually infection, which is close to fact in the existential sense. They’re the same. So when I say they were, I mean that they will have been. And in 10 days they were in fact have been. You can watch the recap video of Our Foreign, your 50th show at tony martignetti dot com, which will have been done after the 450th show. And that is Tony’s Take two. Now it’s time for Google analytics and Google Optimize. Welcome to Tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of 19 and T. C. We’re kicking off our day three coverage is the final day of the convention, the conference and we’re coming to you from the conference from or Portland, Oregon at the convention center. So it’s a conference in the convention center. Make that three beginning of the beginning of the ending day. All of our 1990 CIA interviews are brought to you by our partners at Act Blue Free fund-raising tools to help Ma non-profits make an impact. My guests are Colleen Campbell and Jimmy McCabe. Colleen is seated. Closest to me. She’s a senior digital strategist at Firefly Partners. Jimmy McCabe is senior digital producer at the Center for Reproductive Rights. Colleen, Jeannie. Welcome. Thanks for taking time on Day three unconference. How’s your conference going Going? Well, uh, Day three is always a little hard ones. A little tired, but hanging in a little bit. Have you done your session, then? Oh, yeah, it was yesterday. Thank goodness. Okay, that’s why we picked today to talk to you. Okay. I think that’s why um so your your topic is let your day to do the driving Google analytics and optimize for non-profits. Um, Jeannie. What? What was the reason? Why do we need this session? What are non-profits need to know? Big picture. We got playing time to go into the details. Well, how many do you want to answer the big picture? Because you’re the architect of our presentation. But I will. I will tell you what the center uses, um, data to how we use data to make decisions. Um, I can’t speak for other non-profits. That’s what that’s all. Okay, you are overviewing the headline. Yeah. So you know, our session was really focused on as the title says, Let your data do the driving. So we told a story about you know, first, how do you get good reliable data in Because, you know, that’s really the fundamental steps Way walked folks through some of the things about how to set up your Google analytics to get really actionable data and get to a point where you can trust your date up. Then we focus our middle section of our presentation talking about how do you interpret and understand what are some of the right reports toe look at, you know, not just sort of looking at numbers and pages, but really understanding what’s going on in your digital ecosystem. And what can that what story can that data tell you? And then ultimately, what do you do with it? So not just getting the data and looking at it, but then devising a plan for testing and optimizing. Okay, um and these are this is using Google analytics and Google optimize. Yeah, it was really fascinating that I would everybody in the room at our session yesterday. Use Google Analytics. All the hands went up and maybe a handful raging for 45 folks we’re using optimized, Which is that the final piece of that puzzle of getting the data, understanding it and then using it? Okay, so we’ll spend a decent amount of time on optimized since that sounds like that’s what people are at least familiar with. Are you Are you familiar with Google optimizer? Should we should be back up and explain it a little bit? I am not. You want to do an overview of optimized? We’re gonna let Let’s not go into detail. Now we’ll get to it, but tell us what it does. But what optimizes the tool that Google rolled out not that long ago that allows you to use a visual editor to basically run a be creative tests on your front end. So in other words, if I have, if I want to know if this picture that picture performs better, I pull that page into Google optimize. I send 50% of my traffic to the page with this image and 50% to the page with the other image and Google optimized reports back on your conversion Thio, you know, let you know which one is performing better. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah, and it’s a new tool. Or roll that out. I can’t remember. It’s recently free. Used to actually be a painful. And Google within about the last year have really open it up as part of a free sweet. So, um, you know, especially for non-profits Google Analytics 100% free. Yeah, you know, optimize that natively integrates with 100% free. And then even when you roll in, you know the Google ad grant in that part of that ecosystem. It’s a really powerful sweet of free tools. So the son of reproductive rights uses all of those Google tools. We have analytics, and we run AdWords advertising or they call it Google Ads. Now, I think with our Google Google grant, and then we recently started using optimized to try to up optimize literally, are our donation pages. Specifically, we’re not seeing the conversion we want, all right, and we’ve had a couple of panels on Google ad grants or Google ads. I thought it was called that grand, so I’m not sure, anyway. Michelle Hurtado, the head of whatever it’s called. Google was here. But I just learned through the content of the conference, I learned that they had changed the name from AdWords to Google ads, which so, Iet’s Google ads with grants. So if you’re a non-profit, you can have a grant. Right? So that’s $10,000. Okay, We didn’t do a session on that. Okay, we’re done with that now. We have yet, And like I said, we have the head of Google and grantspace Google ads. Way still don’t know the head of a co-branding problem is that they do. Yeah, well, I introduced her as something, and she didn’t object. So whatever the hell it was, it was right at the time. If it’s changed since then, 24 hours. All right, let’s get focused on what works. Great. Okay, you have some Now. I was just drawing from your session description. You have some best practices for for analytics and optimize Okay on. Do you have some Google Analytics terminology? Sure, if needed. Okay. You know, But then Colleen, you kicked us off with trust your data. What reports to look at and then testing and optimizing. So we got plenty to talk about in the next 20 minutes, right? Okay, Okay. Not a problem. So let’s start with some of the best practices for for analytics at Lena’s. We’ll weave them together since they they natively integrated analytics and optimized. Jeannie, why did you have a good idea for a best practice for either analytic list? Like a list of about 10 way? Don’t have our notes in front of you, but I can remember most of the top to the top three or four. What do you like? Well, I feel like it’s a little hard to explain without looking at it, but, um uh, you want one best practice we talked about. It’s setting up multiple views in Google Analytics. So, um, you have the ability to set up basically a test view, um, and then a mass review for your data. So it’s kind of like having a staging site on productions. I, um and we use views at the centre Thio create separate analytic views for our different language sites. So we have, um of you. We have our main website is reflective right side and Google Analytics. We set up a view for our Spanish pages are Spanish site, which is the same you are all about to Spanish language. Um, and then our English pages that we have a master view, which which combines all of them. What is Analects do for you on those two different pages? Well, with a view you’re able to then see, you don’t just isolate the audience for those pages and see where they’re coming from and what they’re doing, as opposed to, you know, having them all mixed up right away. The numbers being aggregated specific slice. Yeah. Okay, Colleen, a practice past may be the one optimized aural analytics. Yeah, as you mentioned, you know, I kind of went through our top 10 checklist, but I think the most important fundamental piece is having your goals and your conversion tracking set up. You’re not really going to be able to get valuable data and look at those reports and understand your r a y or, you know, run meaningful experiments without having that measurement in place. So, you know, our advice to folks was Look at what are the most important calls to action on your site and make sure that you’ve got goals that are actually configured in your analytics to track line to those those calls. Action s O for the center for Reproductive Rights. For example. You guys, um, you know, focus on email acquisition, tracking your donations within your analytics and getting that actual transaction data. Um, I think those are pretty common to toe lots of folks and lots of non-profits. Also the action alerts on your site, you know, Did someone actually complete that action? Right. Right. And then, Jeannie, I know one that’s a little bit more unique to you is actually tracking pdf downloads as well. Yeah, we have a narc way. Have extensive archive of publications, but also case documents and, uh, legal cases. Yes. So this interview, we’ve really introduce our Yeah. Since then, everybody writes, we we do a lot of litigation in the states, and we have for 25 years. So, um, we have ah long history of case documents that you can access through our website, and we don’t really know who’s engaging with them without setting pdf way. We set a goal and Google Analytics for pdf downloads, which is applied to those dahna. Pdf documents are for all of our casework. It’s hard to explain, but it was understandable. I think there’s there’s lots of you know, of those conversion goals that are common to any organization. I think the other you know, Big One from that Top 10 checklist is making sure that cross domain tracking configured in your Google analytics, which is a little bit of, ah, you know, obscure concept. But basically most sites you’ve got your primary domain, you know, reproductive rights dot or GE. But your online forms, like your donation form of your action alert, probably live in a different domain that’s hosted by your tool provider. So when someone comes to your website, you know that’s registered as a page, you and your Google analytics. But then that user clicks that donate button. They’re going to that domain where that form is hosted. And if you don’t set up that cross domain tracking analytics is gonna count, that is two different sessions. Oh, okay, so it’s a big thing. We’re, you know, Yeah, getting that fundamental data, make sure it’s right and make sure you can trust it. That’s really, you know, get your goals in place, make sure that you’re tracking configuration is tracking her whole ecosystem. Okay, I got one practice, but wait, I would like to do one for optimized. Got anything for Google? Optimize. I mean, that’s what I was gonna mention. I pee filtering, though, for Google analytics for us. Just one more quick note. You can, um can filter out from your mess review and Google Analytics filter out traffic that’s coming from specific. I p s like, like your own office. Perhaps eso are all of our legal assistance use our website extensively to do legal research on our cases. And so all of that traffic would be, you know, would show up on Google analytics if we didn’t filter out our own I p address. So that’s an important one. Google optimized. No, that’s it is there Are there really best practices? I’m just getting used to using it. And it’s really actually quite simple. Like the Google Analytics is super complicated compared to duvette optimize Google optimizes like a tool like I don’t know, it just feels really easy. And I almost feel like how are the best practice? Well, how would you answer that? That’s encouragement to use it. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have a best practice way could move on. We’re not gonna believe this thing. Yeah, I just think. I mean, I think it’s interesting because they do work as a suite of tools. So once you’ve got those fundamentalism place for optimized army for analytics, you can really layer on top, starting to use optimizing really smart ways. Okay, so, optimizers much simpler, right? I think aside from the use of it, the one thing that you know before you before you make an experiment and optimize the one best practice would be like, have a thesis have a plan. Um, you identify an issue that you wanna fix or you know, you want to improve conversion on your one time donorsearch. What do you think? You have to, you know, kind of have a thesis of like, Well, what do you think the issue is that it’s causing conversion to be low on what might make it better and make a hypothesis. And then, um, you know, do your A B tests and see how it goes. But I have a plan to just kind of willy nilly test this or that. You know, have a strategy. Good advice Okay, time for our last break turned to communications, PR and content for your non-profit. They help you tell your compelling stories and get media attention on those stories to help you build support. They do media relations, content marketing, communications and marketing strategy and branding strategy. You’ll find them at turn hyphen to DOT CEO, and we’ve got butt loads. More time for Google Analytics and Google Optimize. Let’s let’s go to reports. You mentioned that Colleen is one of the one of the triumvirate of your urine. 1/3 of the triumvirate of your your presentation. Which reports Do you like it? And another reports that you find in your clients paying attention to that aren’t really ones they ought to be looking at. Welcome to say, Don’t do this as well. So when it comes, understanding the reporting inside Google analytics to figure out what I should be testing, I always, you know, kind of tell the story about inlets. Could do a great job of telling you who’s my audience, right? There’s a whole slew of of reports in there that will give you a breakdown. A demographic information show you geographically where they’re coming from My other favorite report is really spending some time on your mobile report and understanding how much of your traffic is coming from desktop vs mobile devices and tablet things like that. So you know, there’s that whole suite of report that can tell you who is my audience, right? Jeannie? Were some things that you guys have learned. Maybe even from looking a little bit at those reports. First, we are looking at audience reports while I look at the audience reports and g et to see, um, what countries people are coming from, where a global organization And so um, we have We have regional offices through Latin America, India, Africa, Europe and I looked to see what countries in those regions are visiting our sight. See what’s interesting to them. Also, what languages people speak to visit our site. So that’s all an audience demographics. Okay, if you’re if you’re national or regional non-profit, can you get the same breakdown by state? Yeah, you can really drill down there. You can see a global map. You can see a country specific map. You could see a metro specific and even drill into like a zip code goes down does. It s so if you’re a local or regional and you want to understand what counties a lot of my traffic is coming from, you know, it’ll drill down to that. You This is a fundamental question. But do you You can figure that in Google analytics, or is that part of the authoritatively part of the reporting in analytics? So you configure your analytics, and then all of those reports are available to you, and they got some really great data visualizations and really easy to understand. Okay? And this specific report is called, What? These are all in the audience section, and that’s specifically the geographic report. Okay, another one. Really? Well, I was really the real time reporting. It’s fascinating to me. So Google who wanna would accept the option Thio you’ll see on the side real time reporting. And you can see you can actually see visually who is on your website at this moment and, like, drill down into, you know, New York state, like where you pull them up, get your email a little stock ary, I think. But I love it so you can see visually where you know visually, where where people are accessing your sight from right now. And then you can watch where they go on. You’re saying that’s called real time. Real time reporting? Yeah. What section is that? Real time. Let’s go. Okay. Yeah, I think the other the other part of you know what before. What do you do with that? What do you do with that? No, I don’t do anything. I didn’t like it. I don’t do a lot with it. You know, what we were talking about yesterday is real time reporting is actually a good way to test that. All of your pages Air firing the tracking tag. So, in other words, like you can use or you could do-it-yourself. Why? So you can hone in on your own person, right on real time reporting. And, you know, on this, you know, on this browser over here, you clicking around to different pages and then you can see that those pages air firing and smart I still get goose bumps when I see that the web just works that fast. E I still doing? I still do. When? What’s one? I like the check. Just Oh, I mean something so simple. But it just amazes me still, because I didn’t grow up with this. I mean, I know I know it exists, but it’s so basic. It’s embarrassing. But I’ll say it. I’ve embarrassed myself. Falik times on this show. Nobody listens to it anyway, so it doesn’t. Nobody listens to this show, so it’s just gonna be the two of you. Um, my dad, my dad even stoploss you make a calendar entry. I could do a count on my desktop on Did I go to my phone? And there it is. I mean, I think it’s amazing that the damn thing works that fast. I mean, I know it’s just incredible or you make a mistake in your credit card, and it’s like it’s instant. You’re trying to buy something instant invalid. Invalid credit card number. Check. Your expiration date is invalid. And how does it How does it cross check their facts like watching me real time and put the wrong digit, and it just gives me a chance to say it’s a hit. Enter and then it’s like it just knows instantly. Indication before, right? No. Okay, so say I still I still get amazed that planes flying. So that ability. That’s like suspension ideology. They don’t understand my things. I don’t understand. I don’t really know how the calendar entry goes from my laptop to my phone instantly. I know it. I can count on it. I don’t know how it works. The access database, don’t you? You ruin the charm of the web for me. You’re ruining it. You’re killing it. Don’t want to know about databases. Table more reports. One of the report’s due. Like Colleen, I interrupted you was interrupted for a worthless digression. Listeners are customs are our list. Well, if we had listeners, they’d be accustomed to my would be familiar with them right now what we’re gonna say, You know, you could spend all day kind of nerd and out or being big brother, figure your audiences starting a neighbor. Then there’s the whole section of reporting of understanding where they’re coming from, which kind of really gets into that our lives. That’s critical. That’s really where the referral sources Yeah, acquisition is the section and Google Analytics. You want to look a little acquisition, huh? Tells you what you are elves they’re coming from or it’ll give you a breakdown of like all the channels, so you can see right next to each other. Who’s coming from social media? Who’s coming from email? Who’s coming from organic search versus paid search. But you can drill in then and see what Web sites are coming from. You know, if they’re coming from a direct link, where did that directly come from? And then you use what’s called UT ut m familiar with the way eso we talked a lot about way we talked a lot about you. Tm codes in our presentations. People want access that information online. We have to play with the art I will trying to very succinctly. But, you know, I’m kind of I kind of ramble. So maybe you have a T l d armors. You know, when it comes to you, T m’s, I say, You know, uh, analytics is gonna give you that break down of channels, and it knows and does a good job of understanding that it’s coming from social or it’s coming from direct traffic. But Google doesn’t know on its own that it’s actually coming from email. So there’s a little bit of extra work you got to do if you want to track your email traffic effectively, and that’s those UT M codes that genies talking about, which are sametz tre parameters that you add on the end of your morals in your email that you send out What is your team stand for? Do we know? Is it from Universal tag Manager? But the codes And you know, actually, Google has it. This is this is in the system For years that I’ve been using you. Could you go search whatever you are, you are all generator you TMU Earl generator or something. Right now it’ll come right up and you can plug in like your campaign name, your source, your medium and the girl that you’re gonna be placing in your email or whatever and Google’s But all the upend, all of the parameters are variables to the ends that you can get your tracking you, Earl, you could drop in your email. It makes it really easy. Okay, so I think the other important thing about it, it’s really great to understand where your tactics coming from, but it becomes even more powerful when you combine that with those goals and conversions. We talked about because then you can see not only how much come traffic is coming from social media versus email, but how much of my raising from those channels how many people are actually taking action on my site? Maybe Social Media does a better job of getting people to take action alerts and respond online actions. But email does a better job actually getting people to donate. So having your conversion data next to that channel data is really sort of where the power is that I think the opportunity to find out what maybe not working or what’s unexpected. Where do I want to run? Some experiments and some Tyson optimized. So it’s about mining that data to really figure out what you want. A test. Okay, Okay. I used the report that I use the most. It’s just simply now we find out the one used the most Well, wait kind of working our way through the sidebar here. So we got audience acquisition. I was gonna start talking about content. Just another used most. Well, we’re going. We’re getting there we go. Which way, Jeannie? Now we know where they came from. Who they are now. We have to know what geological thought problem. Now we got to know what they’re doing on the site, right? Yeah, there’s these buckets. And as you can understand now, so they are You know, where they came from and what are they doing? That’s the site content. So I spend most of my time in St content reporting, which is seeing what landing pages people are coming in on. What’s the next page? They’re going to look at how much time they spend on certain pages. I look at, you know, it’s a page is getting a ton of use. Where did that traffic come from To get to that page? Um, so I know what the path Waas, um and I and I use it really Jin form or content strategy team. What content is of most interest? I look at fight search reports within there. I see what our top landing pages are every week. So we know if it’s something way, have some really specific, literally like a 12 year old, uh, reports, reports and documents that that get tons of traffic through Google search. And it’s interesting to see what people are interested in that we haven’t even we don’t even have updated content on the way. Can I talk to editorial team and say, Like, way need to revise that cerini to publish some new information on this subject. I’m gonna I’m gonna move us along testing, testing and optimizing because we just have three or four minutes left. So what’s, uh, what we need to know? Way just slide in our presentation that said, Optimize all the things right? No, but I think there’s there’s tons of opportunity out there, and hopefully you are mining that data to figure out what that is. But I’d say your donation form is prime real estate for testing, looking at and understanding what your top landing pages are on your site and what you can maybe test there to drive more action. What’s the right headline on that page? What’s the right imagery? What’s the right layout for that page? So, understanding from your analytics, what are those top landing pages and then identifying the elements on the page to actually run some 80 times, testing all different elements whether you have a photo or video with Dexter’s button color, all this? Yeah, everything. And then, in addition, to the elements on the page. Optimize allows you to do what’s called a redirect test. So if you have a CT A on a page, right, whatever, let’s call it a total. Okay, sorry about that. So you’re called action is donate right? But you wanna test, you know, one very different donate page from another day against another donate page. It’s not like a simple element changed. So you you can say through optimized like send 50% of the people who click on this button to this experience and sent 50% of this experience. And let’s see which experience performs better. So it’s a different type of test. It’s not just an element. It’s it’s literally using two different different experiences. Yeah, great example. Anyone who works in fund-raising has probably had the debate about what works better. Ah, form. That’s one step with all the fields on the page or a multi step donation form. And my answer is you gotta test it for your audience. There’s no there’s no one answer for everybody. Okay? Okay. Uh, was there another minute and 1/2 minute? Got about a minute left? What? Uh, you’re loving this No, it’s not among my worst injuries. Bottom third. You know, it’s valuable information. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. No. Good answer. Um, what, uh, what would you like to leave people with a guy like our son? And we got 32nd. Now that I just wondered. 30 seconds messing around. What? I’ll give it to you, Colleen, because you’re the You’re the consultant. Steven, you see the global picture of this? What would you like to leave our audience with? Yeah, I mean, I hope we did an all right job kind of painting the picture of how you get that data in how you understand it and then what to do with it. But I think when it comes to testing an optimization, you know people immediately everyone knows. And there’s doing that peace around a B testing in my email. And people understand the importance of testing their social media ads. But I think people all often overlook the importance of testing pages on your website. So I think, you know, with the suite of tools from Google that are all free again and really accessible and easy, you have, you know, the power inability to do. And even without help from consultants like, yes, we’ll be starting a Web site redesigned soon without your help, actually, and optimizing all the things you’re hearing the inside track on the client relations right? Brandraise shit right now. All right, So they are calling Campbell, senior digital strategist at Firefly Partners and J. McCabe, senior digital producer at the Center for Reproductive Rights. Thanks to each of you, thanks so much for having us. And thanks to you for being with Tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of 19 NTC. All of our 19 ntcdinosaur views are brought to you by our partners at Act Blue Free fund-raising Tools to help non-profits make an impact. Thanks for being with us next week. Getting buy-in and moving forward tech committees that work in two weeks. On August 16th I wanna let you know I’m firing a listener at the top of the show. If you missed any part of today’s show, I beseech you, find it on tony. Martignetti dot com were sponsored by Witness E. P. A. Is guiding you beyond the numbers. Regular cps dot com by koegler Math and Software Denali Fund. Is there complete accounting solution made Ford non-profits tony dot m a slash Cougar Mountain for a free 60 day trial and by turned to communications, PR and content for non-profits, Your story is their mission. Turn hyphen to DOT CEO. Our creative producer is Claire miree off. Sam Liebowitz is the line producer shows Social Media is by Susan Chavez Park. Silverman is our Web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein here with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit Ideas for the other 95% Go out and be great. You’re listening to the talking Alternate network. 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