Standards for evaluating performance of a nonprofit's Web site
Lefchick, Basil
In the world of nonprofit associations, are there any industry standards, benchmarks or rules of thumb
for evaluating how well the organization's Web site is doing?
For example, if 50 percent of your membership registers to use your Web site, is that
average, above or below average? What about volume of traffic to your
site, length of visits, number of repeat visits, etc.?
Thanks.
Basil Lefchick
Association Marketing
National Rural Electric Cooperative Assocation
Phone: 703-907-5583
E-mail: basil.l...@nreca.org
www.liok.org
> In the world of nonprofit associations, are there any industry standards,
> benchmarks or rules of thumb
> for evaluating how well the organization's Web site is doing?
>
> For example, if 50 percent of your membership registers to use your Web
> site, is that
> average, above or below average? What about volume of traffic to your
> site, length of visits, number of repeat visits, etc.?
I am involved with one site. I am sure there is some nonprofit
organization which claims that it has standards. Who cares. Registers
users make sense for some organization and make no sense for others. I
bet that they site like russianjews.org cares about their people on
their email list. Other nonprofit organizations do not even have a
email lists.
Traffic is important. That is how you judge your marketing success or
failure. Repeat visits are important for only some organization.
Anyway, these days is merky. Non profit, profit...Profit judges by how
much money it makes.
How non profit judge itself?
How much money it spent?
i dont know.
http://www.liok.org
Helen Seal
bj...@nreca.org wrote on 1/14/02 6:11 AM:
Basil,
As with almost all performance measures this would depend on a number of
factors from what the organizationąs goals are to who the site's audience
is.
There are some measures for things like click through rates on untargeted
banner ads but building a community for a specific niche is another matter.
For instance the site WebReference makes some claims about this type of
thing:
http://www.webreference.com/dev/banners/research.html
The web is still new and the ways in which people are using the internet are
still changing rapidly. If you want to benchmark your site try contacting
the web masters of other sites that try to do what you do or reach out to
the same audience as you. See if they'd be interested in compiling those
types of statistics to share.
Before you do that, make sure those numbers will actually mean something
about what your site is supposed to be doing. Once you start measuring
something as an indicator of how well you're doing, that is the metric
you'll put the most effort into. There's not much point putting effort into
meeting a bench mark of long site visits if your goal is to have the site
answer potential members' questions quickly.
Helen
--
Helen Seal, Technology Consultant
CompuMentor
Tel: 415.633.9353 Fax: 415.512.9629
http://www.CompuMentor.org/
http://www.Techsoup.org/
J Cravens
standards,
> > benchmarks or rules of thumb
> > for evaluating how well the organization's Web site is doing?
It depends on the purpose of the web site.
Raw traffic numbers are, for the most part, meaningless. 50,000 cars drove
past a billboard, 50,000 visited your web site. But how many of those
visitors turned into donors, volunteers, ticket buyers (if your nonprofit
is, say, a theater), clients, event attendees, etc.? How many people became
educated about a particularly issue or approach to a community problem that
your organization promotes? And on and on....
Here's some ways to gauge the value and impact of your web site, IMO:
-- what are the top 10 most visited pages? When visitors go to your site,
what do they do? For instance, if your organization is trying to promote HIV
education, and the first page a visitor goes to after your home page is a
page of links to other organizations, rather than the fabulous online
resource you developed regarding HIV education, there is a disconnect
happening.
-- what are the top 10 reasons people call your organization on the phone,
and are the answers they are given well-represented on the web site? If so,
are the pages that host these answers among the top pages visited by users?
-- what is the mission of your web site? What is the mission of each section
(the section to raise funds, the section to promote volunteerism and recruit
volunteers, etc.)? Is each section meeting its mission? (i.e., is the fund
raising section raising funds?)
-- have you surveyed your volunteers to find out how they use the web site?
(if at all?) What about donors? Clients? The general public? Don't just do
the survey on the web; do it via email, and offer a paper, off-line version
as well. Hand out the paper survey at board meetings, volunteer meetings,
etc.
-- do you ask every caller, every attendee to an event, how they heard about
your organization? And, if so, how often does the person mention the web
site?
-- how many other web sites link to your web site? Are other web sites
referring to your web site's resources and information?
-- in terms of traffic, is your percentage of traffic going up, down, or
staying the same each month?
-- for your interactive areas (message boards, chats, newsletter signups,
etc.), are people using them consistently?
And so forth...
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Jayne Cravens
jayne.cravens "at" unv "dot" org
Online Volunteering Specialist
United Nations Volunteers [http://www.unv.org]
Bonn, Germany
UNITeS [http://www.unites.org]
Netaid [http://www.netaid.org]
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