New Year’s Resolutions for charity digital peeps

It’s nearly the new year and here are a few things everyone should be looking at in my opinion. In no particular order:

Start using Trello — or another system that can give transparency to the workload of you and your team. Nothing enhances the trust between groups of people like being able to see what everyone’s working on. This is essential if your role is trying to work across organisational functions.

Fire up Google docs or Office 365 — Whichever tool you use, you can drive collaboration between different teams when everyone can see the changes being proposed or discussed. It will also help you keep track of changes if you’ve got a single doc rather than 20 versions being emailed around.

Speak to your users — Set up a process so that you can get regular feedback from the people who your organisation serves. Whether that’s a board you can easily email asking for feedback or a monthly meet up, the returns on investment will be massive. It’ll also allow you to settle all those circular arguments between teams efficiently and effectively by asking the only people who’s opinion truly matters.

Set up a non vanity metrics based dashboard for your website — Google Data Studio is a fantastic way to build easy to understand and distribute reports linked to your Google Analytics account. These reports are only as good as their design though so make sure you’re focussing on the metrics that matter. Hits to the website are only going to tell you so much, whereas illustrating what % of people viewing your information content are going on to donate is crucial business intelligence.

Test content in free channels for use in expensive ones — Facebook or email subject line testing is super cheap. What you learn there can be scaled up into channels which aren’t such as print, radio or TV…

Test new propositions in Facebook & PPC + MailChimp Landing pages before investing in them — If anyone has an idea, the first thing you say should be “great, let’s test it”. The quickest way i’ve found to do this for new propositions or products is to set up small campaigns in Facebook and Google, directing people to a landing page with an email sign up. Mailchimp have just released a new product doing just that. It’s all you need to get realistic costs per acquisition and build a business case based on data rather than assumptions.

User Test your website with your mum — If you find yourself tiring of Articulate or Trivial Pursuit over Christmas, fire up your tablet and get your family to look at your website. See what their immediate reactions are and what they’d expect to find on it. Then ask them to navigate around and see what you find out. Repeat with any organisation who you view as a competitor…

Devolve your email marketing to those closest to your supporters — eMail marketing isn’t crazy difficult. Yes, you could be black listed, but it’s probably quite unlikely. It’s even less likely if you give people the right training and support. The opportunity is far bigger than the risk and those people in your organisation who know supporters the best are going to have more interesting things to say than any central team.

Stick quotes from your supporters on the wall — You need to keep reminding people in your team what the main user needs are that you’re meeting. The best way to do this is use the words of your own supporters rather than your own.

Get your CEO doing social media monitoring for a day — Nothing will help them understand the pressures of a digital team quicker than getting into your Twitter feed. Everyone who tries it loves it and always asks to do it again in my experience.

Find a trustee that is excited by Digital — Try and find someone who you think might be a good fit as a trustee who is going to support digital at the highest level. No matter what your job title is, you’ll know people who might fit the bill inside and outside your work life…

Set up Google Tag Manager & Google Optimise — A/B tests for free without any development resource. Get Google Tag Manager installed and start using experiments to drive forward your projects, content or products.

Look at Craft for what an editor focussed CMS can really do — Yes Drupal is a massively technical capable system, but it’s bloody difficult to use if you’re not a digital expert. Craft CMS (and others) make the learning curve much shallower which means you can get more and more teams using it to keep their content up to and in line with what users want.