Real life Charity Digital Maturity KPIs
How do you measure whether your organisation is on the path to ‘Digital Maturity’? Here are a few thoughts taken from my experience and others around the charity sector. Hopefully they’ll help you make the case for your ongoing investment in digital and give you a way to measure your progress.
NB — when I say sector I mean the charity sector. When I say Industry I mean the advertising / marketing industry.
% of marketing spend on Digital
Arguably, the simplest and easiest thing to measure — this is a great KPI that Directors can understand and can help drive real change at a senior level. Digital Adspend makes up 46% of the total of UK advertising in the first half of 2016 according to WARC and the IAB. ZenithOptimedia puts it at closer to 25–30%.
Regardless, Nielsen put the Third Sector’s digital spend at £5.5 million out of a total of £458 — or 1.2%.
From my time working with them, I think that Nielsen may underestimate digital spend by a factor of 10. I’ve seen internal spend reports vs what they are able to measure and they are way off. They still struggle to genuinely understand Facebook spend because of their methodology and we know that is the primary channel for most charity’s digital advertising at the moment.
But even if we multiply what they report by 10 times, we would still only be at 12% of our overall media budgets, and that is still way below the overall industry average.
Digital marketing simply does work. Otherwise the rest of the industry wouldn’t be spending as they are. Make sure your directors and marketing teams know this and take steps to help drive their adoption.
% donated online
More of a reflection of your donor’s habits than your own actions, this is still an important metric to track. Even the biggest charities are still only seeing between 10 and 20% of their donations taken digitally, once you take into account services such as JustGiving. The bigger campaigns are a much higher % than that though — with initiatives like Race for Life probably pushing past 50% (NB — this is a complete guess on my part).
The figure itself is important, but probably less important than the trends you see as an organisation. There should be a natural increase that we can attribute to trends in society. If you are seeing a dropping % then you need to seriously consider your strategy for recruitment of donors. Even those organisations with ‘traditional’ charity audiences should be seeing growth given the rise of digital skills across generations.
This doesn’t mean you should be eschewing your traditional channels, but it does mean that digital is becoming / has already become the go to response mechanism for most public audiences.
How much you argue about the Homepage
Not quite the same statistical rigour involved here, but it’s still a valuable indicator nonetheless.
In digitally immature organisations, the homepage is the battlefield on which numerous political wars are waged. Rather than focussing on what users actually need from it, the person that shouts loudest and holds the most political capital will undoubtedly end up with what they want on it.
In a more digitally savvy organisation, the user needs have been well established, and there will be an editorial process for the homepage which is understood and bought into from the whole organisation. Therefore, the number of arguments should decrease.
What % of your organisation have spoken to a user of your website in the last 3 months?
Given that audiences and their needs are changing at such a rapid rate if everyone in the organisation isn’t speaking to them on a regular basis, then you’ve got no hope of keeping up. This doesn’t need to be in a formal, user testing / research setting (we’re not all working at the GDS!) but should be something that’s done as a matter of course rather than just when new products are being developed.
What metrics do your Board want to see?
‘Vanity Metrics’ is a concept increasingly well understood across digital teams, but what really matters is the numbers that your senior leadership want to see. If they’re asking for number of sessions lasting more than 30 seconds, rather than ‘hits’ of the website then you’re doing a great job.
If they’re asking for individual metrics based on each of your audience personas and their journeys, then you’re really onto a winner.
Do your HR team insist on digital skills being on every job description?
HR should be your best friend in getting the rest of the organisation to hire people with digital skills, no matter what the role. If you can get to the point where they mandate that all role profiles need to have some level of digital capability, and to understand why they’re doing that, then you’ll be a huge step closer to digital maturity.
How quickly could your Finance team set up a new payment provider?
The last couple of years have all been about Apple Pay, BitCoin and Paypal, but who knows what the next new payment system is going to be that has a huge impact on your donation form conversion rates. You need to work with your finance team to allow you to test new ways to pay that you haven’t even envisaged yet.
What % of your organisation logged into Google Analytics this week?
In the free edition of GA, there’s no way to audit the last time users logged into the platform, so you’ll have to do this one by feel / speaking to people. But, if you’re organisation is digitally enabled, then every single person within it should have an interest in at least some small (or large) part of the website.
If that’s the case, then everyone should be looking at some form of data each week. This is true whether you’re the CEO looking to understand whether a freshly launched brand initiative is having an impact in interest of the charity, or a content exec trying to find out if your copy amends made an impact on dwell time on a particular page.
In digitally mature charities, the ability for understanding digital data, should be distributed across the whole organisation, rather than reliant on the digital team providing them.
The number of microsites produced / year
Many organisations have been through a similar process in the last 10 years. Firstly they started off with no central digital team, so numerous departments set up their own presences online, often focussed on a particular campaign or product = lots of microsites.
Next, realising the difficulty this was causing (largely driven by Google’s hatred of duplicated content) organisations centralised their digital operations and pulled everything together under one roof = a lot less microsites.
Now, the most digitally advanced organisations are trying to devolve that responsibility back out to the rest of the organisation so that the experts in the content / users / campaigns can have digital at their fingertips and integrated with everything else they do.
At this stage, the number of microsites produced could easily return to the bad old days. However, if the modern digital team has done its job, all the teams that are now empowered to manage their own digital work, will understand both the short term and long term impacts it will have on their products and so will avoid, unless absolutely necessary.
NB — This isn’t to say that microsites / separate product websites are wrong, it’s just to underline that they should be used with caution and in particular circumstances, rather than be the default approach due to their ease of set up.
William Joseph run Digital Transformation projects and programmes for the UK’s largest charities. Get in touch if you’d like to know how we can help push you towards the right side of these KPIs — james@williamjoseph.co.uk
