Free Measurement Tools:

1.  A/B testing

Anyone who’s been in the nonprofit sector knows that, in an ideal world, all results would be measured by randomized trials to show the statistically valid relative impact of specific programs. But that would also mean leaving some people to starve, suffer, or die just to ensure validity of the metrics.

In communications measurement we needn’t go nearly as far. But we can use the same principle: Test two different approaches—like one you’ve used before and a new one, or perhaps a cheaper one vs. a more expensive one—and see which one works better. The trick is to make sure that everyone agrees on the definition of “better.” See, for instance, this article on how to get consensus on definitions of success.

Fortunately with the speed and ease with which you can change things online, it is relatively simple to implement changes. For example, before you decide to do a major update of your website, gather key metrics from Google Analytics or whatever your analytics platform is. Don’t just look at where people clicked, look at where they dropped off and left the site. What is the average number of pages per visit? How long did they spent on the site? Did they complete any goals? These are key indicators of engagement on your site. Now, change one thing –the color, the image, the order of pages, and the size of the type… whatever you were thinking about changing. Then, wait a month and see if those key metrics changed.

2. Conversion

As with everything thing else in measurement, it all depends on the definitions of success. What conversions in Google Analytics do is to force organizations to agree on a concrete definition of success. For organizations that want more members or subscribers, you can count traffic to the subscriber page. For an organization that wants to bring in more donors, you can set up a conversion that tracks how many people saw your “Thank You” page (the page that donors get after they give money). For organizations that do outreach for advocacy, you might want to set up a Google goal that tracks when people sign a petition. If your objective is greater engagement, then the Google goal may be to have a user “spend more than 2 minutes per visit” or “visit 3 or more pages.”

All you have to do is to define the action and the URL where the action is taking place. (Watch this video to learn how to set up your own conversions).

3. Tagging

Tagging used to be done manually and required a web manager to implement. Today, with Google Tag Manager (GTM) it’s easy… just think of GTM as Google Analytics on steroids. It enables you to track different campaigns and efforts in far more detail than with Google Analytics alone. Tagging allows you to identify individual promotional campaigns or efforts and specifically keep track of the individual calls to action. It allows you to track views of a specific press release, a blog post, or any other individual piece of content.

4. Relationship surveys

Many organizations have as their goal “to improve awareness” or “to improve understanding of our mission.” The only way to measure those intangible thoughts and feelings is by asking your audience what they’re thinking or feeling. The easiest way to do that is to administer a survey to the target audience. If you want to measure relationships with your membership base, there’s even a free survey instrument in this research paper by Drs. Hon and Grunig that provides you with a set of proven questions that test the health of your relationships. Just plug them into an online survey tool like SurveyMonkey and you’re good to go.

5. Cost-effectiveness metrics

Sometimes the best metrics are a simple count of the number of new donors each month. Divide that number into the total amount (including salaries) that you spent trying to communicate with those donors. Compare the cost per donor acquired to last year or to a different tactic to determine which is most cost effective at generating new donors.

Do the same with volunteers. Track the number of new volunteers you’ve signed up each month. Divide that number into the total amount (including salaries) that you spent in recruitment efforts.

If your activity or event is designed to bring more people through the door, you need to be counting traffic on a daily or weekly basis. The key is to track that traffic against other marketing and communications activities. For instance, if you double the resources you devote to social media, does attendance go up proportionately? Even more revealing, if you cut back on social media efforts, does attendance decline? With sufficient amounts of data, you can calculate what it costs to get someone through your doors.

If you are taking donations from your website, calculate the amount of money coming divided by the cost of the site and you get a cost per donor value that can be compared to other donation sources.

6. Cost per message communicated

By analyzing the content of conversations around your brand you can evaluate whether your messages appeared (this is a good place to put interns or volunteers to work). Track the percentage of those conversations in which your messages appeared. Once you’ve tallied the opportunities to see your message, you can then calculate the cost of the campaign to disseminate those messages and compare it to other paid ways to get messages out. Now you have a cost-per-message-communicated calculation that will help you decide where and how you want to disseminate messages in the future.

Low-cost Measurement Tools:

7. CyberAlert

CyberAlert is one of the oldest and most comprehensive clipping companies around. They have a great program in which nonprofits can apply for an annual grant of one year’s worth of clipping for their brand. That gives you plenty of time to do a “proof of concept” to show management how useful it is to have a professional company tracking clips (as opposed to a human relying on Google News Alerts). When they’re convinced, you can let them know that CyberAlert’s pricing starts at just $300 a month.

8. Excel

Since most computers already have Microsoft Excel installed, I sometimes forget that it isn’t really free. But it is an essential tool. Excel enables you to run correlations, do t-tests, and otherwise check your data for accuracy, validity, and meaning.

It also has a cool feature called “conditional formatting” (watch this how-to video) that helps you analyze your data quickly so you can make better decisions.

9.  Survata

Survata makes simple surveys very doable. They charge a flat rate of $1 per respondent and, as long as you can keep your survey under 6 questions, you’re good to go. I’d suggest using Survata if your goal is awareness and you want to measure changes in awareness over time.

10. Salesforce and other open-sourced CRM platforms

Keeping track of your donors, members, and volunteers is critical to any non-profit and the best way to do that is using a customer relationship management system. Salesforce is the best-known and  provides deep discounts to not-for-profit organizations. If you have some IT talent around that can help you configure the system, there are a host of open-sourced CRM platforms available. ∞