Cracking the Code of Nonprofit Website Metrics With Laura Quinn of Laura S. Quinn Consulting

Introduction

So, we have a website. Is it working?

On this episode of Nonprofit Thrive, Ben Freda welcomes Laura Quinn, of Laura S. Quinn Consulting and the Nonprofit Website Insider newsletter, one of the most valuable resources in our sector. Together, we dive into the intricacies of measuring success in nonprofit websites. Laura emphasizes grounding metric selection in fundamental goals, such as credibility and engagement. She explores the relative challenges nonprofits face in defining and measuring website success. Additionally, Laura delves into practical strategies for setting up Google Analytics to track metrics.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:17] How nonprofits can avoid getting stuck in costly, unnecessary cycles
• [4:11] The importance of continuous improvement over large-scale overhauls
• [6:19] How Laura’s background in technology led to nonprofit consulting
• [10:54] The art of maximizing impact with limited resources
• [23:07] Why WordPress often serves as the default choice for nonprofits.
• [27:37] How metrics in nonprofits differ from for-profits
• [29:09] The importance of starting with fundamental goals for your website
• [29:45] Why website goals shouldn’t be superficial like “better visual design”; but should focus on impact
• [30:27] Proxy measures are vital; they indirectly indicate progress towards goals
• [36:54] Why donations are a straightforward metric if Google Analytics is set up properly
• [38:22] Where visitors come from to tailor donation strategies

In this episode…

The priorities for developing a website for a nonprofit organization are tangibly different from those of a for-profit company’s website. What approach can a nonprofit take to facilitate informed decision-making and iterative improvements?

According to Laura Quinn, grounding metric selection in the fundamental goals of a website is very important, steering away from superficial aims like visual design improvements. Instead, she advocates for goals that reflect tangible impact, such as increased credibility or engagement. Laura stresses the significance of proxy measures, which indirectly indicate progress toward these goals. For instance, she suggests using bounce rate and time on site as proxies for measuring credibility. Additionally, she offers practical advice on setting up Google Analytics to track metrics like donations effectively.

On this episode of Nonprofit Thrive, Ben Freda welcomes Laura Quinn, of Laura S. Quinn Consulting, to discuss the intricacies of measuring success in nonprofit websites. Laura emphasizes grounding metric selection in fundamental goals, such as credibility and engagement. She explores the relative challenges nonprofits face in defining and measuring website success. Additionally, Laura delves into practical strategies for setting up Google Analytics to track metrics.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Ben Freda on LinkedIn
• BFC Digital
• Laura Quinn on LinkedIn
• Laura S. Quinn Consulting
• Nonprofit Website Insider
• Stephen Musgrave on LinkedIn
• Eric Brown on LinkedIn
• Elise Newman on LinkedIn
• “There’s No Such Thing as the General Public With Eric Brown of Brownbridge Strategies” on the Nonprofit Thrive podcast
• “Harnessing the Power of Web Design for Wildlife Conservation With Elise Newman” on the Nonprofit Thrive podcast

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by BFC Digital.

At BFC Digital, we help nonprofit organizations thrive on the web so they can improve the world.

Our team of creative and tech experts understands that an online presence can help foundations and organizations accomplish their missions. That’s where we come in. Over the last decade, we’ve advised our clients on web design, front- and back-end development, and tech support.

We’re committed to supporting a select set of clients who continually inspire us with their vision for a better world.

To learn more on how BFC Digital can assist you in realizing your organization’s mission, visit bfcdigital.com, email us at info@bfcdigtal.com, or call 646-450-2236 today!

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:06

Welcome to the Nonprofit Thrive podcast, where we learn from the humans who are helping nonprofits succeed in the digital world. Now, let’s get started with the show.

Ben Freda 0:21

Welcome. I’m Ben Freda, host of the show, where we share the stories of leaders in the nonprofit tech space — the people behind the organizations, the foundations, and the companies that help nonprofits change the world.

This is episode number eight. We have had a lot of interesting episodes in the past, including an interview with Eric Brown of Brownbridge Strategies, who is ex of the Hewlett Foundation. We talked some interesting stuff about messaging and communications, and he mentioned that there’s no such thing as the “general public,” which was an interesting thing for me to learn.

We also had another past episode with, for instance, Elise Newman of the Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition, who talked about this great program they have where they’re getting supporters to each adopt one mile of Oregon coast and walk their mile every quarter and fill out a report about issues related to litter and stranded animals and crowds. It’s really interesting, so check that out if you’re looking for an interesting way to engage some supporters in the environmental space.

We have an excellent guest today that I’m super psyched to bring on. She’s somebody I met through her newsletter, actually. Before we get to her, though, I have to let you know that the podcast is brought to you by BFC Digital, where we help nonprofits thrive on the web. If you work at a nonprofit or a foundation or another type of social change organization, I’m sure you know that unless you’re doing a big old project, it can be really hard to find friendly, reputable, reasonably-priced web technology development help for your web presence.

At BFC Digital, we help our clients succeed on the web by being your friendly neighborhood web tech partner. We can help you fix your bugs, evolve your web presence, integrate your new donation system to your site, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we do the whole thing without ever making you fill out a support ticket … because support tickets are the worst. Go to bfcdigital.com to learn more.

So today, I am super psyched to have Laura S. Quinn on the show. She has helped nonprofits with websites for over 25 years. So, she’s the exact sort of person I want to talk to. These days, she’s a nonprofit website coach who supports nonprofit staff with weekly or bi-weekly calls as they work on website projects. She also serves as a website strategist. And she has a ton of experience doing this, which is why I’m super psyched to have her on.

And here’s how I learned about her: she has an excellent newsletter. And this is not me plugging it for no reason; I actually enjoy this newsletter, I read this newsletter, you should too. It’s called Nonprofit Website Insider. It comes out every two weeks. And I reached out to her to join the podcast today because I read an awesome article on her in her newsletter. So you must check that out. Thank you for joining the show, Laura.

Laura Quinn 3:26 

I’m so excited to be here. And this is interesting hearing about BFC Digital’s mission, because, in fact, the goal of the newsletter is exactly the same: to reach out to those nonprofit people who have a website who aren’t in the middle of a project. I feel they are so often, you know, the industry doesn’t talk to them. It’s all about these giant projects. And obviously, of course, in the nonprofit space, often it’s not about a giant project. It’s about just doing the everyday things to make your website great.

Ben Freda 4:13

It’s frustrating for us too, because we see we see these big projects happen, and then organizations can get stuck for years with something that doesn’t really change. They can’t really change it until there’s another multiple 10s- or 100s- of thousands dollars project. And it doesn’t really need to be that way. I mean, yeah, it shouldn’t be that way. It shouldn’t.

You can really evolve your presence as you go along. So we’re trying to make that happen more. So yeah, we are on the same page with that.

But before we get into that stuff, and I really want to get particularly into the articles you wrote in your newsletter about website metrics, because that’s something that listeners of the show will be interested in. I’m also interested in cracking this nut and figuring this out because metrics for nonprofit sites, of course, can be totally different from metrics for for-profit sites.

And there’s so much information out there about for-profit sites! But for nonprofits it can be a little different. And it’s hard to know what to measure and why and how.

But before we get there, I just wanted to start with your personal history. So I know you worked out of college at Accenture, which is big consulting firm. How did you get involved in technology first? And then also why nonprofits?

Laura Quinn 5:24

Yeah, I did. I started at Accenture back when it was actually Anderson Consulting, which now has a bit of stink on it, even more so than Accenture. So it was kind of a Hail Mary out of college because I actually — this is a little known fact about me — I actually have a degree in Apparel Management. As one of those things that of course ties into exactly what I did. So I decided coming out of college, after having a few internships, that that was a terrible place to work.

And so I did have an interest in technology, so I went to Accenture doing doing technology stuff there. The internet technology boom of the 2000s came upon us. And I said to the far-off bosses that be at Accenture, I’d really like not travel outside New York City. They had this model where, you know, they fly you off to a place like Toronto for the week.

Ben Freda 6:35 

I remember this. I remember this. This was a big deal in the late 90s, early 2000s. They would send you somewhere for the weekend, and you come back for the weekend or something.

Laura Quinn 6:42 

Yeah. Which is crazy. The carbon footprint of that is like, amazing. So I told them I’d like to stay in New York City, and I’d like to work on internet sites. And they’re like, you can’t have both those things. And I said: I can. And so I left, and I actually worked for another company. And the actual premise of that company sounds like a joke: I worked for a consulting company that specialized in startup Internet businesses in the 2000s.

It was a fabulous company with super smart people, at a time when a lot of these consulting internet companies were very fly-by-night. So I learned a lot there for the, you know, two-and-a-half years before the entire internet sector went boom. I was one of like the four last people there. A whole story, like a whole episode in and of itself right there.

Ben Freda 7:44

For sure. So this is like 1999-2000, right? Because that’s when I graduated college: in 2000. And I was in Silicon Valley and stuff, and I remember watching all of this implode as I was a senior, thinking: what is everybody gonna do now?

Laura Quinn 7:59

Totally. For a while living in New York City. it felt like everybody I knew that was in that sector was out of a job. My partner worked in data analytics, and he was out job for like, like three weeks and then got hired again. I worked in UX and user research and was a little less employable. In fact, it almost leads to my nonprofit story because I for a long time for a job and having trickiness finding a job, so about six months later, I settled very much on a job that was UX and business analysis, which wasn’t my background. It was what I could do. But it was with a consulting firm that worked primarily with large businesses including primarily Pfizer, and I was pretty unhappy about working primarily with Pfizer.

So I actually worked there for some time, but as a sideline, I started a company that worked with nonprofits called Alder Consulting. We were working with a small- to medium-sized nonprofits to do clever technology solutions, like websites on a shoestring, for content management systems like Drupal or WordPress. I worked with a independent guy — who’s now at Capellic, his name is Steven Musgrave — and he had his own content management system. We didn’t integrate an entire system, but we would have a bunch of static pages, and then we would have a CMS underneath it for the things that needed it, like an event management system or things like that. And we worked with a fabulous independent graphic designer.

And so it’s interesting now to come back around to the coaching work that I’m doing. And I did that for 4, 5, 6, 7 years. So quite some time — and not all of it full time — but I got all of this experience working with small nonprofits, asking “what can we squeeze out of this budget in a responsible way?” Like, not “let’s build something crappy with this budget” but “what can we build that’s great and sustainable, that is designed to be low budget” is one of the things that I’m passionate about, that is really exciting to me. That was also really interesting.

Ben Freda 11:19

So how did you do this? How did you know what to … I mean, obviously, with a small budget, and everybody can probably relate to this, you’re making some trade-offs, right? Like, you’re not gonna get everything.  This is like 2000, early 2000s, I would imagine —  how did you decide what to leave off the table in those tiny engagements?

Laura Quinn 11:39

It would feel a little … Well, I don’t know, I was going to say it would feel a little different now, but I don’t know that it would.

It was primarily a feature set that we were leaving off the table. So relatively inexpensive, we were simply making pages and text. We felt that graphic design was important, and we also, in that circumstance, didn’t really have to think about it because I worked with a fabulous graphic designer who didn’t charge any more for a great graphic design.

So one of the things that we didn’t do, which was certainly one of the ways to save on graphic design, is that we did not do a million iterations of graphic design. So there was the understanding that it’s going to be one version of the thing. You’re not going to see five possible directions for your homepage, you know — you’re going to see one version and do some tweaks. We were lucky in that it was also cheaper, because — and this is something I  talk people through as a coach — we were a bunch of independent consultants, tied together by me as a project manager. We were lucky that we never got into a bad situation where either one of the one of the partners I was working with decided that they hated all of us, or one of the clients decided they hated us, because it wasn’t a very protective structure

Actually, as a nonprofit, if you have project management skills internally, hiring three or four independent consultants, or hiring a graphic designer and hiring a functional designer, and then hiring a website development firm to do some other things, can actually be notably cheaper. You do take on more risk, as you know, if they don’t talk to each other or do things right.

Ben Freda 14:07

That’s really interesting. And I don’t know if I’ve had that experience where I’ve seen a nonprofit do that, but I could absolutely see how that could work. I mean, when we do big projects, we’re doing it all. However, we’re more expensive than doing it internally. I mean, we just are, because we’re an agency.

So you’re saying you could have, let’s say, the communications person or whoever in the communications department be like, “I know enough about websites to be able to project manage this,” and go out and hire a designer, do the iterations with the designer, and then go out and hire someone to code that design out.

Laura Quinn 14:41 

I would add on to that mix that I think it’s important, unless that communications person internally in your organization just knows a ton about website, I think it’s important to have a strategist or a functional designer to define what the site is, what the sitemap is, to do the wireframes to do the structure of the page.

And then yes, the graphic designer takes the structure of the page to build them out.

But then yes, absolutely, there are a fair amount of firms that only do the back end. And in fact, if you go to them to do the whole site, the firm will, in fact, contract out the graphic design themselves.

Ben Freda 15:28

Oh, interesting. Yeah, sure. Some firms will do that. Yeah, no doubt. That’s an interesting approach. And I would suggest people try that too. I mean, I think the difficulty would be, at least for our clients, not knowing how these things typically go, you know. Not being able to expect to set expectations for how they go.

And then number two is, you do need somebody who’s watching the designs, because the choices made in the design and strategy phase can really affect the the amount of effort and cost the build will take. Plus, like, future concerns, like: how are you going to keep this maintained?

But but if you could bring someone in to do that, or if you knew to do that yourself, you could absolutely, I think, put those pieces together. That’s interesting.

Laura Quinn 16:14

I 100% agree with all of those risks. I think that it is something that you should approach with a lot of caution, knowing that either you’re incurring risk that things are going to go awry, and you’re going to have to start over. Or that it is going to take a fair amount of time internally to manage it. It’s not something where people should think they are silly for not having done this strategy.

Ben Freda 16:47

It’s tough.

Laura Quinn 16:49 

Yeah, it’s tough. Not to plug myself too much, but I think that what I’m doing now as a website “coach and guide,” which is officially when I call myself, is the idea of making stuff like that a little more accessible.

So basically having somebody who is meeting with you weekly to be able to say, “oh, have you thought of this?” Or, “oh, I’m really worried about what that designer has given you, I think that that’s going to cause you a lot of trouble.” Or, even, “I don’t think that graphic designer knows what he’s doing.” Or, even, “that looks fabulous! Pay that graphic designer more.”

But I think it can both add  kind of confidence to somebody who isn’t … I mean, I feel like in the nonprofit sector, there are so many people who are wearing so many hats, and they can’t possibly know everything they’re doing to 100%. You know, like, “oh, I’ve done it all 100 times before,” adding confidence to somebody who may not feel like they know everything they need to know for that role. And then actually decrease risk and possibly, I think, in a real way, decrease the amount of money you need to spend for your project.

Ben Freda 18:23

I love this. I love this because a lot of our clients are — we call them accidental techies. Somebody made that term up, we didn’t make that term up. I don’t know who did.

Laura Quinn 18:36

It’s been well-used in and around the sector.

Ben Freda 18:41

Yeah, it’s a well-known thing. But yeah, accidental techies. They have joined the nonprofit, right, because they’re sort of mission-driven, they’re interested in the mission, they want to do good with their life. They are usually experts at communication or something like that, or being a program manager.

And then because they are, I don’t know, because they have the newest phone or because they like are younger, or whatever, they’re all of the sudden in charge of the technology. And they’re like, crap, I have to figure out how websites work and what the technology is, and someone said the server is going down, what is the server? You know what I mean?

So you have these people are doing tons of stuff. And given that the technology is always changing — it’s a very quickly evolving world — it’s hard to know everything.

I mean, my job is technology. And I still don’t know, for instance, the ins and outs of how AI might be used in different things, you know what I mean? It’s impossible to keep up!

So I can absolutely see having someone like you around to bounce ideas off of, to know if someone is doing the right thing. To ask what are the things I should be looking out for?

The technology is really interesting, and you can get into it and you can work on WordPress and stuff, but really having somebody who can back you up would be hugely helpful.

Anyway, I want to talk quickly before we get … you know, it’s fun doing these interviews when they go off on a tangent because it’s interesting. But before we get into the the metrics questions, I wanted to get back to that early career stuff.

So, you end up doing Idealware. Did the consulting stuff turn into Idealware, or how did that work?

Laura Quinn 20:27 

Yeah, the consulting stuff led me to Idealware.

For those who are not familiar, Idealware no longer has the same name, but it’s still around. It’s a nonprofit that is all about helping other nonprofits choose the most effective software and technology solutions based on research-based information.

If you’re looking for that, it is now one of the programs of Tech Impact. They have the Tech Impact Learning Center with a lot of resources. For instance, there’s a consumer’s guide to low-cost donor management systems, which is a very rigorous review of donor management systems and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

Ben Freda 21:16

I remember first seeing these in maybe  2008, or something, I can’t remember what the year was — and thinking oh, my gosh, this is such a good resource.

Laura Quinn 21:24 

Yeah, it came about because I really wanted to have these resources as a consultant. It didn’t make any sense as a independent consultant to do it for one client, but it absolutely makes sense as a sector to have these resources.

So yeah, I was the founding executive director. And for a while it was a very expensive hobby, for me while we got off the ground. I’m sure a lot of people who have founded a nonprofit know, the expensive hobby of not having a funding stream to start. And then over the next 10 years, grew it to about a half-million dollar organization. We had about six, seven people, another executive director, and then merged with Tech Impact. I felt like that was a successful stage of my career. Also, just so useful to understand the ins and outs of the actual nonprofit world. You know, it’s one thing to consult to nonprofits — and I’ve consulted in one way or the other for basically my entire career — but to understand, as from an executive director perspective, what that means is pretty invaluable.

Ben Freda 22:58

So here’s the question for you. What did you choose as your CMS for my own website, for Idealware?

Laura Quinn 23:08 

I don’t completely remember — but I think we were on Drupal. I it was either Drupal or WordPress. And it was actually picked because we knew it didn’t matter that much — which actually an important thing to know. So we knew it didn’t matter that much, and we had a developer who was going to develop it at like half cost or something. So yeah, picking something that you can maintain in the long run. We certainly wouldn’t have done that if it was something, you know, crazy or obscure. But neither of those options were crazy or obscure, and the firm would do it for us. So that was it.

Ben Freda 23:53

Hey, that’s a good reason! We always tell people, it’s up to you, which CMS. They can both do the same thing. There are maybe some fingers on the scale either direction. Like, what you like using better is a good finger on the scale. Or, if you have certain types of functionality you’re looking for, there are certain things one might do better, but that’s somewhat rare. It really just has to do with some particulars to you. So your particular was, we have a good vendor who will give it to us for half price.

Laura Quinn 24:28

I think things have changed a little since then. These days, my finger is on the scale pretty hard towards WordPress, unless there’s a special reason. So to me, WordPress is the default, unless there’s a reason to suspect that something else might … Though, certainly on the low end — my own personal laurasquinn.com is on Squarespace — so there’s a low-end solution that doesn’t need something as complex as WordPress. But otherwise, I think WordPress is a good default, unless you have some really complicated use cases, and then it’s worth weighing. It’s not to say that that WordPress can’t take on those use cases. It’s just that, okay, Drupal then enters the equation, right?

Ben Freda 25:21 

Yeah. And for us, those things are a lot of different access levels, for instance. So like, if you have a lot of different access levels, that might be a good reason to do it. Or a fairly complicated integration, or a web services something-or-other. Yeah, but same: in general, recently, it’s been moving towards WordPress, for reasons like admin usability, more or less.

Laura Quinn 25:41

Yeah, and there are more and more people moving into the WordPress world. I apologize if you specifically maintain Drupal — but people are moving out of the Drupal world. It is looking like five or ten years from now, it will be somewhat easier to find somebody to maintain it for you, for sure. I don’t think that’s a current concern with WordPress.

Ben Freda 26:13 

I think that’s absolutely true. I mean, we are sort of agnostic between them all — we work on WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, all that stuff. Actually, we started as a Joomla shop. I used to work with Ryan Ozimek at Soapbox Engage. Great dude. He was actually on the number one podcast episode. He’s a great dude.

But back when I worked with him, it was all Joomla. I mean, what we were doing was Joomla. And that has sort of died out, unfortunately.

Laura Quinn 26:39 

Yes, I would not recommend Joomla these days.

Ben Freda 26:43 

Anyway, all that is to say, when I first saw your reports in 2008 or 2009, you had reports on CMSes, donation systems, all that stuff. I was like, wow, this is a great resource! So, so good.

And then when that ended, you ended up jumping into the consulting that you’re doing now. Right?

Laura Quinn 27:01

Yes, in kind of various forms. I’ve been essentially an independent consultant since I had a brief stint with an agency that works with nonprofits. But, yes, I’ve been doing website consulting to nonprofits since then.

Ben Freda 27:25

So let’s get into the thing I wanted to ask you about, which the article that I read in your newsletter about metrics.

Metrics is a big black box to me in some ways. There are a lot of things you can measure, and we have measured a ton stuff in the past. But the hardest part for us is to conceptualize what to measure and why.

And, you know, a lot of the stuff you read online, or the people that I speak to in web development who are doing for-profit sites, it’s much more obvious. It’s almost like a math equation. Like: we want people to buy a pair of shoes, and each pair of shoes goes for 50 bucks. We know exactly how much money we can spend on ads, multiplied by the drop-off rate, multiplied by the whatever the conversion is, blah, blah, blah. It’s almost like a math equation.

But in nonprofit world, it’s not like that, really. So can you talk a little bit about how to conceptualize what to measure. And one of the things I loved about your article was that you do have like a process that you’ve laid out for people to follow to start to get at these. It’s a big question, open-ended, but I think people really find it useful to hear about.

Laura Quinn 28:27

So I feel like there are two whole buckets of thoughts here. There’s the what do I measure and why? And I’ll talk about that first.

And then there’s, I feel like, it’s important to think about not just, what do I see? So even once you’ve decided, alright, I’m going to measure these six things, because these reasons, you need to, in fact, embed that in a process and decision making, if you expect to actually do it, and to have value in it. So I feel like there’s a what do I measure and why? And then, how do I actually do that?

So starting with the what to measure and why. I think it’s really important to back up to what are your fundamental goals for your website. Hopefully, you’ve defined your goals at all. But if you’ve defined goals, you’ve defined them as to what you want to increase or decrease in the world.

Too often, people define goals as things like better visual design. I would say that’s not a goal, that’s a tactic.

I’ve chosen a hard example for myself, because the goal there would imply … if I feel like my visual design is is not great, it implies that I am hoping that over the course of, for example, a redesign I did last year, I’m now engaged in trying to measure whether I have increased credibility. So that’s hard one for me, but I’ll walk down that path.

Or, you might choose a more tactical goal, like more donations is an obvious one. Or, more increased engagement on our articles. We want people to actually read and learn from this information on our website.

So, you start from those goals. So you then say, what can we measure which is either directly measuring those things? Or, what is what we in the research world call a proxy measure for those things?

So, a proxy measure is: okay it’s not exactly that, but we would expect to see an increase in X, if we are doing a good job. For instance, credibility is a good one. Unless you’re going to literally go out and survey people and say, “Do you think this is a credible website?” You could actually do user research to actually, you know, pre- and post-, you could do user research to determine that. But if we’re looking at it through website metrics, then you want to think through what actions would someone take on your website that would imply they find you more credible?

And actually, although I’ve chosen a hard one conceptually, I think this is a fairly straightforward one to measure. Because you would expect that people, you have less people just kind of looking at your website, briefly, and then saying eh, not for me.

Ben Freda 32:04

So, longer engagement time?

Laura Quinn 32:06

Yep. Longer engagement time. What I just said, looking at your website and saying “they’re not for me,” that would be your bounce rate. Bounce Rate is a confusing metric, but it’s basically people who leave your site after less than 10 seconds. It’s not necessarily completely bad, but if you compare it over time, certainly you would hope for it to go up. Looking at your about page and bouncing would be a bad metric, because if someone is going to your about page to understand you, then logically, you probably want them to go someplace else. They’re not there to “understand you,” that’s not logically, probably, the goal. But a big caveat for your contact information — because there’s probably a lot of people who come to your website just to find your contact information.

Ben Freda 33:14

For sure. Bounce rate’s always been a tough one for me too, because it does seem like it’s capturing how well you’re communicating what you’re doing, but it’s also capturing the quality of the traffic coming in. So let’s say there’s a link to your site in a New York Times article or something, and they link to your site — but they actually meant to link to a different site. And so you get a bunch of people mistakenly coming in, but they’re all going to bounce. Is that bad? Are you doing anything wrong there? Do you know what I mean? So, sometimes it has to do with the traffic coming in, which is tough too.

Laura Quinn 33:43

I totally agree that it is tough. I feel like people take it too seriously as, “holy crap, we’ve got a 40% bounce rate, we need to decrease that to 5%.” One, that’s never going to happen; people are going to bounce. And also, there are sometimes good reasons to bounce. There’s a good article in my newsletter about this. I suspect by the time this podcast launches, the next issue of my newsletter will be out, so look for it in the Website Insider. I’m very excited — you can now google “nonprofit website insider” and you actually find my newsletter.

Ben Freda 34:38

Nice! Excellent. That is excellent.

Laura Quinn 34:40

I have a new one coming out, in which there is an article on metrics measuring the engagement of informational articles. It has a list of helpful articles, and one of them is about bounce rate and reasons that people might bounce. One of them is exactly what you said: there is an offsite link which is incorrect. Not all of these reasons are bad! Another: they found your phone number and have left. That’s great, that’s what they were trying to do. Or: they’re in crisis, and they found the number that they need to call in less than 10 seconds. Fabulous. That’s awesome.

Ben Freda 35:35

Yeah. So this is that’s a tricky one. But anyway, I interrupted your train of thought, which is what happens with this podcast, right, because we go on tangents. But anyway. So, you’re looking at, not the tactics, but what the goals are. So continue in that vein, if you don’t mind.

Laura Quinn 35:58

So we we talked through one flow: starting at the goal and thinking through metrics and proxy metrics. So we talked about increasing credibility as what one might measure. So things like bounce rate and time on site, conceivably returning visitors (though returning visitors is always hard for a bunch of reasons).

I feel like donations is a fairly easy one if you’ve set up your Google Analytics with the right stuff. When you think about these very tactical, conversion-based things, you really want to set up Google Analytics with what’s called “events” in Google Analytics. So basically, somebody clicking on your page about donating is an event. And then someone actually submitting a donation is an event. And if you set that up correctly, it will actually show you, for example, where were people when they got to your donation page? How many people on your donation page actually submitted the donation form? It’ll show you what in the corporate world is called “the funnel” and how people got through that.

So that one is not hard — or, it’s not time consuming to set up events in Google Analytics. It takes either know-how or some pretty detailed study and step-by-step through some instructions. For that reason, that is another article that is coming in this issue.

Ben Freda 38:03

Yeah, it has gotten more complex — that Google Analytics interface has gotten quite complex. And you can always call us, and we’ll do it for you! But you can also do it yourself. It’s really not something that you need to know how to code to do, if you can follow along.

Laura Quinn 38:17

I call it, like, if you’re a technology intrepid. If you can machete your way through the jungle, you can make it happen.

Ben Freda 38:32

For sure. Okay, so you’ve got your donation page. And you’re measuring the funnel. And the point of that is to figure out where people are dropping off and make changes over time, and measure whether those drop offs are decreasing?

Laura Quinn 38:46

Yes, absolutely. And also, too, something that is also very useful to look at is where people are coming from. So, for example, people are coming from this impact story which has a link to donate — so, we should do more of those. Or, people are coming directly from the homepage, that’s interesting. Or, people are coming directly from Google search, implying that they are looking for you in order to donate. That’s not a very common scenario, but it certainly would be interesting if they were. So basically, you can think through what is working in order to move people to donate and do more of that.

Ben Freda 39:32 

Gotcha. And when you talked earlier about the process of it — so, you know to measure and then there’s a part of a process where you’re like, “I’m gonna measure for a while and I’m gonna make changes and re-measure?” Or, how does that work?

Laura Quinn 39:45

The process is critical here, because I feel like so many people have defined the list of things they’re going to measure … but then their process of actually measuring it gets kind of lost. It gets lost again in what you could measure. So, somebody maybe is responsible for measuring, but as soon as you go into Google Analytics or whatever tool you’re using (which is likely to be Google Analytics), it’s so easy to go down the rabbit hole and wander away and get lost and spend hours.

So you basically say, all right, let’s make a plan. We’re going to measure these five things, and we’re going to do that every two weeks, with the idea that we are going to set a meeting every month to talk about what our metrics are telling us. Then, we’re going to make changes in content (or other things, but likely content) every month or two months in reaction to what we’ve learned.

Fundamentally, if you’re not going to change anything based on what you’ve learned, you’re not measuring anything. So it all should be it should all be based on what information do you need to make the decisions that you want to make about the site? How often are you going to make those decisions? And how often are you going to actually make changes?

And there’s more process than that, potentially, if you’re a larger organization, because you need to decide who does what. And decide whether you need to summarize it up for the powers that be so the decisions that can be made, are made. But if you imagine yourself as a small team, it’s pretty straightforward. It’s like, okay, there are a couple of people gathering to say, “oh, this is working well,” or, “oh, we tried this experiment last month, we put this thing up, that didn’t work well. So let’s not do more of that. Let’s try this other thing instead.”

So, the metrics themselves can be a static process of what you’re measuring. But it is part of this incremental improvement of, in my experience, usually content. You certainly could improve other things. But not everybody has, you know, a partner like BFC Digital, who can easily tweak things over time for them.

Ben Freda 42:45

I’m also interested in just in your experience — what are some things that have changed that have actually had an impact? And what are some things that you changed that you thought would have an impact, but didn’t? I know it’s tough to put you on the spot like that. But I’m just curious.

Laura Quinn 43:03

Yeah, I can certainly give some examples. I’m trying to think that through. A lot of my work is around deep informational websites. So, it’s people who have a lot of content and are trying to educate visitors. And so there’s always a lot of work to be done and thought to be put into: is this plain language enough?

Ben Freda 43:40

Is this plain language … so, not jargony, you mean?

Laura Quinn 43:44

Not jargony, yes. “Plain language” is a specific term that you can go out and Google for far more information than you ever wanted to have. So, like, not very many clauses in the sentence, and at a low reading level.

For instance, I work on some legal aid sites. And if you’re working in educating people about government programs, a lot of times you are trying to reach out to an audience that might not have a high literacy rate. Sometimes you get stuff that’s put up there [on the website] by lawyers that I have trouble reading.

So, we say, “is it plain language enough?” But then, there are often stakeholders who are asking, essentially, is it too plain language? And you’ve got a lot of people, especially content matter experts or subject matter experts, who say, “well, this is so dumbed down that it’s not useful.”

And so, trying to think through things like that, you can get metrics like time on page, or how many people scroll down 50% of the page? There are some issues with that one as well. Those are pretty good proxies for … I mean, obviously, if people spent 30 seconds on your very detailed article about how to get a divorce, they probably got less information from it than somebody who spent, you know, two minutes on it.

Ben Freda 45:42 

Yeah, or scrolled? I mean, to see the article, you have to scroll some. So let’s say, you know, only 10% of people are scrolling. So yeah, you can measure that kind of stuff.

Laura Quinn 45:52

Yeah. Scroll rate is a good rate. It tends to be a little inflated, because it’s a common user behavior to scroll all the way down and all the way back up quickly to see …

Ben Freda 46:01

Is that right? I didn’t know that it’s a common user behavior to do that.

Laura Quinn 46:05 

In user testing, it’s very common.

Ben Freda 46:09

And I do that too, now that I think about it. I have this instinct to just see how long the page is. That is so weird. I never considered that.

Laura Quinn 46:20

Yeah, so you hear a lot with websites about scanning the page, that you need to make your stuff scannable. That’s one of the reasons: people are scanning for headers and stuff like that. They are seeing how long it is, or they’re seeing if it seems like it’s worth their effort to read. Can they skip ahead, all of that.

But regardless, that’s why your scroll rates might be inflated. But comparatively, you know, this article to this article, or this article that we’ve now improved compared to what it was two weeks ago, that’s the type of thing, a very tactical example of what you might do. Donation stuff tends to be very tactical.

And if you want to get super tactical, and you have a large audience, you should absolutely think about A/B testing, which is a totally different thing. But assuming you don’t have a big enough audience for A/B testing, which is probably a lot of the nonprofit world, you can do things like, “alright, I’m going to change the wording on my donate page, and I’m going to add something about our impact onto this donate page, and then I’m gonna wait a month.”

I mean, you’ll have some trouble if you have a lot of traffic in order to have any kind of idea as to what’s just noise and what’s not, but if you wait long enough, you should be able to track the metrics to say, “oh, that actually seemed to go in a good direction, maybe let’s do more of it, and see if it continues to go in a good direction.”

If you don’t have a ton of traffic, it’s hard to know whether what you’re seeing is just random fluctuation. So, go in small incremental steps and just see if the metrics move with you in small incremental steps. It’s more likely to be real if it continues to go up over time than if it went up, even up for two periods, and then it dropped.

Ben Freda 48:41

I guess you’re right, you do need a high enough N, I guess, in stats world to have a result.

Just so people know, can you explain what A/B testing is? And why that’s different from just testing tweaks over time? And also, what kind of traffic you would need to actually do a good A/B test?

Laura Quinn 49:00

Yes, a detailed question.

An A/B test means that you’re going to actually have two different … so, as opposed to measuring a baseline that I have today and for the last two weeks, and then I’m going to change it, and for the next two weeks, I’m going to just see what happens.

An A/B test is: I have both of those options up on the site at the same time. You can decide how many people you want to see one, but you usually say, “alright, I’m gonna show 10% or 20% of people this alternative option, and I’m going to see what happens with it.”

It used to be the case that there was a Google tool that would help you with the implementation of A/B testing. That’s not as true anymore. And so this has become a little harder to do as a DIY approach.

I actually need to now look into it. I’m not actually sure if you can — it’s definitely not free. I don’t know whether it has gone from free to, you know, maybe you can pay $100 for two months and just what you want. But those tools then help you to understand how much traffic you need and how long it will take.

It depends on how big the what’s called “the lift,” or what the difference is. Let’s talk about a donation page, just because it’s easy to talk about. So if you’re doing an A/B test, and every single person donates for your B variation (this new thing you’re trying) while nobody donates on your old thing, then it doesn’t take all that many people for statistically for it to be very likely that this thing is making a difference.

However, in the real world, what we see is this thing has a … like a 5% increase would be quite substantial. So, either you need lots and lots of people. What you need is either thousands or tens of thousands of people coming through, or a really long period of time.

Ben Freda 51:56

I see. Okay, yeah.

Laura Quinn 51:59

And it’s not typically done for a long period of time; it’s not typically done for, like, four months. I feel like so much changes over that period of time anyway.

Ben Freda 52:11

You have all these external factors that can screw up your data and stuff. From what I understand, it’s usually a day or two.

Laura Quinn 52:17 

Yeah. So I’ve certainly seen them for like, a week, or something like that. My partner works for LL Bean, and it’ll go up for a couple of hours.

Ben Freda 52:28

Exactly. And they get a ton of data from a couple of hours.

Laura Quinn 52:32

And, in fact, they’ll just put it on a very small slice. Only like 1% of people will see it. They’ll put it out for a couple hours. And the advantage there is that a lot of things you could do might have a detrimental effect — and if you’re talking about something like, you know, the purchase of boots or clothes or outdoor equipment or all of the things that LL Bean sells …

So, certainly don’t assume that anything you’re going to do to your donate form will have a good effect!

Ben Freda 53:13

You might screw it up!

Laura Quinn 53:15

Yeah, you might screw it up.

Ben Freda 53:16

Listen, Laura —I feel like we could talk for hours about this. Unfortunately, we are reaching the end of our time. I swear, we’ve got to do this again, though, because there’s so much more to cover here. Not just about metrics, which is a huge topic in and of itself, but I know you’re a huge expert in user experience and user research and how to get people through and get people what they need on a website site and et cetera, et cetera. We got to do this again.

But before we do, the last thing I should ask you is: where can people find out more about you and your work? Where can people sign up for this newsletter that I keep saying is so great (because it is and people should sign up for it)? Give them that information.

Laura Quinn 53:16 

Fabulous. Yes, I am pretty findable on the web. So Laura S. Quinn, exactly like it sounds. I am Googleable by my name to find my site, which is exciting, which in fact is simply laurasquinn.com. There’s a page there for the newsletter, but I won’t try to give it to you verbally. If you go to the site, scroll down, and it’s in the footer.

Ben Freda 54:26

Click on “newsletter.” Because the whole reason we’re having this conversation is because of your newsletter, that’s how I found you and yeah, it was super useful. It has been for a long time.

Laura Quinn 54:36

So I’m so glad that it is. I feel super strongly that I don’t want to send out crap that people don’t want to receive. I want to send out things that will actually be valuable to you know, all of the incredibly hard-working people in the nonprofit space.

Ben Freda 54:54

Yeah, and I’m saying this completely honestly — it is very useful and valuable and full of really good information. And there’s a ton of newsletters people do for marketing reasons or whatever. But this this one is actually very very useful so people should sign up. It has been so good to talk to you, and thank you so much for coming on. We’ve got to do this again.

Laura Quinn 55:14 

Absolutely! This has been such a pleasure, Ben. Thank you so much.

Outro 55:19

Thanks for listening to the Nonprofit Thrive podcast. We’ll see you next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.