It’s May and we’re quickly approaching the mid-year mark. This is a good time to take stock and do some forward planning to carry you through the rest of the year. In my recent 20 best practices for your charity website article, I talked about the importance of measuring and setting goals (tip #13). If you haven’t made time to do this yet, I’d like to walk you through it in more detail to help get you started.

Without tracking and measuring your goals, you will have a hard time maximizing your revenue (tip #19). Experts are paid large sums of money to help large e-commerce companies with their conversion rate optimization (CRO). These e-commerce firms clearly understand that a small increase in a conversion rate can lead to huge gains.

If you aren’t tracking goals yet, don’t worry—you are not alone. A recent joint survey (results coming in June, 2014) with Good Works of over 500 charities produced some surprising results (of the not-so-good kind).

How to start tracking goals

First of all, don’t panic: your goals don’t have to be complicated, but they do need to be useful. The first thing I recommend is to decide on three to five things you want to measure. Then, for each item ask yourself, “will this measurement help me take actions to improve my site?”

Let’s use an example. Imagine you decided that the number of visitors accessing the website was your measurement. If your visitors rose by 10 per cent or dropped by 5 per cent, could you (using that measurement alone), make any decisions on what to change on your site? Probably not. In my opinion, this is too vague to be a useful goal.

Examples of useful goals

Google Analytics classifies goals into four main types: revenue, acquisition, inquiry and engagement.

Here are some examples of types of goals we’ve set up for some of our charity clients:

• Form completion goal - This counts submissions for each of the forms on your site, and will give you a conversion rate for any form (submissions/site visits x 100). We could make changes to the form pages and then see if the completion percentage goes up. This can be used on volunteer forms, email sign-up forms, donation forms or event registration forms.
• Downloads goal - Say you wrote a series of downloadable PDF documents and want as many people to download them as possible. Having a count of the number of downloads will tell you how many people are actually following through. If there are fewer than you’d like, you could make changes to the landing page to encourage people to access the downloads. As you make changes, the goal will tell you if it’s working or not.
  
  
• Content goal - Many of our clients use stories on their website. Measuring the number of stories read would be a useful metric for some organizations. Headlines of articles could be tested or imagery could be adjusted to see if your engagement increases.
  
  
• Social sharing goal - This allows you to track how your site content is being shared across different social media channels. As you learn more about what content is the most sharable in the eyes of your users, making adjustments will encourage users to spread the word for you.
  
  
• Media goal - You can tell your story in many ways, but video or audio stories are some of the most powerful. Like any other content goal, measuring the number of times a video has been played can provide details on the kinds of videos to produce and what resonates most with your audience.

As you can see, there are all kinds of goals and it’s not all about donation forms.

The most important step: regular review

To be effective, goals need to be acted upon. The best way to make sure this happens is to make them a part of your culture. In her book Measuring the Networked NonProfit, nonprofit expert Beth Kanter talks about a weekly ‘Metric Monday’ ritual in which the team enjoys muffins and talks metrics and next steps. Sounds like a great idea to me!

A tireless explorer of new developments on the web, Todd Jamieson has been keeping pace with its constant changes since 1996. Through EnvisionUP.com, Todd and his firm have worked with over 100 non-profits and charities. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and two young boys. Follow him via twitter.