Presented at Grizzard's annual Missions Getaway conference.

1. Digital Essentials
Tools, tips, awesomeness
March 7, 2012
This presentation mostly
discusses tools that build
on what I discussed in my
Digital Fundraising
Everyone Can Understand
presentation.

2. I talked about
making Facebook
more valuable for
your likers.

3. How to actually
use Google
Analytics for your
reporting and ROI
measurements.

4. Email best
practices.

5. And, scheduling
within social
media.

6. Ultimately, your
emphasis area
though will defer
from the person
next to you.

8. When it comes to
making any social
media presence
valuable, it all starts
with strong planning.

9. At the same time though, being able to
move quickly is necessary.
Durham Rescue Mission uploaded this
image within one hour of getting access to
Facebook’s Timeline for pages. In the
future, they’ll be uploading constituent and
sponsor photos embedded into the right
side of this Timeline photo in order to
highlight valuable supporters.

10. One of the beautiful things
about Facebook is that you
can get pretty much all of
the data you want directly in
the Insights section.

11. You can even export it
to Excel if you want to
manipulate it

12. You might want to
look at where your
likers come from.

13. If you don’t have a lot of
time, consider using a
paid tool like Edgerank
Checker.

14. 17
While I recommend using
the paid version, even
the free version gives you
a lot of valuable
information.

15. 17

16. In case you’re
interested in how
much it costs.

20. Within Google
Analytics, one of
the first things you
should do is set up
Custom Segments.

21. My preference is to
set up segments for
Social Media,
Branded Search, and
Unbranded Search.

22. Within these segments,
look at your Visitor Flow
to see where people
come from and how they
move through your site.

23. Next, look at your
referrers to see who is
sending you traffic and
find out why. Can you
build a stronger
relationship with any of
these people?

24. Next, look at your search
terms.
I recommend however
that you look mostly at
your Unbranded Search
segment.

25. This will give you a lot more
valuable information so that
you can determine if you
need to create any new pages
around these specific terms
or modifying existing pages to
align with them.

26. Next, look at your top
pages, landing pages,
and exit pages.

27. Split this up by
segment.

28. Viewing by segment will
help you understand
what content is driving
traffic for each segment.

29. Set up Goals and Ecommerce tracking.
I cannot stress this enough. Set them
up so that you know how many
donations and how much revenue
you’re brining in by source.

32. This is MECLabs’ Email
Messaging Heuristic.

33. The process of getting
someone to donate via
email is like a series of
steps.

34. To the recipient though,
it should feel like a nice
smooth path.

35. If it feels instead like
this, your donor will turn
around and go home.
This doesn’t feel natural.
A nice, flat path does.

36. The first step is getting
the recipient to open
your email. At this stage,
it’s all about a good
subject line.

37. Once the email has been
opened, the recipient
needs to see a strong,
relevant, and enticing
headline. A good headline
is what motivates them to
begin reading the email.

38. If the person opens, reads the
headline, and then decides to read
the email, the first 2” is what will
determine for the reader whether or
not they continue through the rest
of the email. By this point, you need
to have had a strong subject line,
headline, and then first 2” of copy to
even get the person to continue on
in the email.

39. The final 2” of the email is what
determines if the person will click
through to a landing page to learn
more. You need a strong CTA and
value proposition in order to
motivate the reader to change
channels from email to website. It
must feel natural and not like a
series of steps.

40. As much as you might want to
ask for the donation in your
email, don’t do it. The
purpose of the email is to get
the person to click through to
an environment where you
can have more media, control
the design more, and
generally present a more
integrated argument. The
landing page is a better place
to ask for the donations.

41. Asking the the donation too early can sometimes
be like the salesman going for the sale too early.
Imagine a door-to-door salesman comes to your
door, talks to you about a product, and then asks
you to buy. What do you want? You want them to
go away and let you call them or come to the
store when you’re ready.
This is the same as your email. Let the person
click through to the sales pitch when they’re
ready. Don’t hit them too early.

42. We often think of the donation funnel
with the donors going down the middle
and only a few of them making it to each
successive stage.
I prefer to think of it like the donor
hanging off the outside at each stage and
trying to work their way to the bottom.
Imagine a series of monkey bars working
their way all of the way down.
If you make this process too difficult for
the donor, it’s easier for them to just
drop straight off than it is for them to go
hand over hand to the bottom.

46. Timely is, by far, my favorite social
media scheduling tool. It looks at
when you get the most replies, link
clicks, comments, likes, etc and then
schedules your tweets or status
updates when you are likely to get
the most response.

47. Let’s say you find a
web page you want to
tweet or post to
Facebook.

48. Click your Timely
bookmarklet.

49. It will pull the page title as your
tweet and then auto-shorten the
URL using your bitly account.
You can modify the tweet as you
like. I often put in questions,
statements, or whatever else
feels appropriate.

50. Select which
accounts you want
to post this too.

51. And then, decide if you
want it scheduled
automatically for later
or if you’d rather post it
now.

52. Within Timely, you can
see what’s queued and
when.

53. You can edit or
move the posts
to the top.

54. But, you can’t
pick the specific
time things are
posted.

55. You can view
how much is
queued by
channel.

56. And then also
see what is
performing
best.

57. I recommend doing theme testing
like I described in my Digital
Fundraising Everyone Can
Understand presentation.

58. This will help you
determine if you should
be posting on the
weekends.

59. And, how much you
should be posting
each day.

60. If you’re in an organization
where multiple people could
contribute, add them to the
accounts. This will make
content sourcing and
scheduling much easier.

61. Also, make sure you input
your bitly account
information so that your link
clicks get tracked.

64. As much as digital channels might
confuse you, bad digital marketing and
fundraising will just confuse your
constituents even more. The thing is
that they won’t continue along the path
until they come to an eventual end.
They’ll just turn around and go back or
step off the path altogether. At that
point, you’ve lost them, so make sure
you’ve done your planning and that
proper tracking is in place. Once you
have that, you can figure out how to
effectively move donors along that path
to donation, email sign up, or any other
desired outcome.

65. Eric.Pratum@Grizzard.com
404.935.7130 – office
360.306.0889 – mobile
@ericpratum
65
Please give me a call if you
have any questions, but if
you get my voice mail,
PLEASE email me. I’m still
not very good about
checking my voice mail.