5 Things That Will Make Your Digital Ecosystem More Effective in 2024

Creating New Year’s resolutions isn’t just for individuals, it can be a great exercise for a team. Resolutions provide purpose, a filter to run decisions through and something to work toward.

For many marketing and IT teams, making their digital ecosystem more efficient is at the top of their list of resolutions. This is no small task. Digital ecosystems are complex. They constantly change. They can be expensive and time consuming. There are a lot of options to expand and manage them. This list of things to think about can go on and on. 

It can be overwhelming to think about everything that might make your ecosystem more efficient, much less turn those thoughts into actionable tasks.

It’s often said, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This sentiment could not be farther from the truth when it comes to your digital ecosystem. There are more than 1.8 million nonprofits in America vying for support. Corporate philanthropy has dramatically risen over the past several years, but individual giving is not increasing. Waiting for your digital ecosystem to break is a surefire way to fall behind.

Here are five things you should do in the first six months of the year to make your digital ecosystem work better for your mission.

1. Define or Revisit Your Donor Flow

January is a great time to define or revisit your donor flow because the giving season has wrapped up, and the data available to tell this story is fresh. After all, understanding your donor flow is key in making strategic decisions about your digital ecosystem.

Create a digital ecosystem map and chart your key personas. Revisit this map every quarter to ensure that you’re connecting with your audiences and providing the information they need at each step of their journey. People typically touch more than a single channel when they engage with a brand, so understanding how your audiences use different channels at different points in their journey allows you to plan content and think strategically about where to invest.

For one organization, this exercise revealed a flow from blog to email to first-time donation (no surprise). After putting the data over the journey, there was a drop-off between reading a blog post and signing up for emails. As a result, adding an email sign-up banner in the middle of blog posts and again at the bottom of the post increased the number of people signing up for emails after visiting the blog by 30% year over year.

2. Update Your Google Ad Grants

Set aside time to actively manage your Google Ad Grants. Paid advertising is the most efficient and effective way to test new ideas, stories, calls to action (CTAs), etc.

The first quarter is the perfect time to revisit your search ads and start testing because it gives you enough time to analyze results before setting up your end-of-year efforts, ensuring they are fully optimized.

When you’re thinking about search ads, break them out into two categories:

• Branded keywords. This is a great place to test different versions of your vision, brand promise and purpose statements. Using branded keywords to evaluate these elements allows you to test with an audience that is already familiar with you, yielding more valuable information.
• Non-branded keywords. Use Google Search Console and Google Trends to do some research. Using non-branded keywords is perfect for testing stories and stats because the audience that sees these ads is familiar with the issues, but not necessarily with your organization.

Expanding your search ad program in this way helps maximize the return on investment. I have seen this increase ad grant usage dramatically, as well as improve effectiveness for actively managed ads.

3. Create Community Management Guidelines

Success on social media means capitalizing on moments and actually being social. A big part of this is actively managing your community and establishing a strong brand voice. 

The first part of the year is a great time to implement community management guidelines and put a process in place to actually be social on social media. To do this, create a living document or spreadsheet where you log common questions, comments, engagements, etc., as well as your approved branded response to each.

Having a document like this allows more team members to meaningfully support your social efforts. As a result, this can lighten the load on each person working with your social channels and ensure a consistent brand voice.

4. Customize Calls to Actions

Nonprofits tell stories that evoke emotions and encourage action. They connect people to causes and often leave the person consuming the content with a question: “How can I be a part of that?” 

Customizing CTAs early in the year allows you to implement a process so it can be  included as part of the content creation flow down the road. It will likely need to be done a little at a time because it takes time to come up with the best ways to customize CTAs across your website. Start with a CTA audit on your top pages and think about the visitor. Does your website empower them to make an impact? Does it show them what to do next?

One organization added text-based CTAs to the end of its blog posts. The idea being that if someone reads the whole post, they’re invested in the story. If they are presented with a generic CTA to donate, they are being taken out of the flow and made to think. In this case, using a custom CTA increased traffic from blog posts to the donation page by 15%.

5. Test Different Email Send Times

One of the simplest things to test with emails is send times. Testing emails is nothing new. Experience shows that changing send times can increase email effectiveness across several key metrics.

The beginning of the year is a great time to test this because it can take a while to get a statistically significant amount of data about email, depending on the size of your email list. This allows you to use data to make emails more efficient later in the year. 

Don’t just test the time of day, but the day of the week and time of the month as well. Start by classifying your emails into “intent buckets” — newsletters, appeals and asks, informative, invites, etc. — then look at send times over the past year. This will help you create a test plan.

While digital ecosystems are complex, they provide ample opportunity to evolve, to test things and to connect with passionate audiences. 

Change doesn’t have to be a complete 180 degrees, but a series of small shifts can build momentum and provide the necessary encouragement to keep working toward a more efficient digital ecosystem. This resolution doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Break it down and try to optimize one thing at a time on each channel.

The preceding post was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.