Tips for Creating a Donor-Centric Web Site

By Abny Santicola

Set and track key performance indicators
Measuring Web metrics is valuable to determine your site's performance over time. Most Web hosting companies offer basic metrics or Google Analytics. Determine your key performance indicators, i.e., measures that yield information on the performance of your organization online. This will enable you to take action based on those indicators.

To determine your KPIs, consider:

Your primary objective. Is it to increase donations, improve donor engagement, provide information?
Your call to action. Is it to donate, register, subscribe, download?
The value to the visitor/donor for each action.
The metrics to which your organization is held accountable.

Gonzalez said all marketing/optimization activity should affect your top-level KPIs; otherwise you might be wasting time and money. KPIs should remain consistent and be measured over time. He stressed organizations not mistake traffic (e.g., impressions, visits, hits, etc.) for measures of site success.

Examples of donor-centric KPIs include average visits per visitor and total visits/total unique visitors; average visit duration; abandonment rate; average size of gift; and recurrence of gift.

In terms of hits, visits, visitors and unique visitors, you want to know how many people came to your Web site, what pages they viewed while there and whether it was the same person over and over again or unique visitors. In terms of page views, page view duration, bounce rate, visibility time, session duration, depth and frequency, you're looking at the frequency and amount of time visitors spend on your site and how many pages they view before leaving. These loyalty metrics, Gonzalez said, help determine your site's "stickiness."

Clicks, impressions and clickthrough rate measure how often a visitor selects or clicks on a link, how many times a page loads on a user's screen and the number of clicks divided by impressions for each link, respectively. A high ratio between these three equals high visitor engagement — which is the goal of every nonprofit Web site.