Retaining current members costs less than recruiting new ones and saves your staff time and energy. Additionally, a high retention rate shows that people find their membership value in line with the price, which bodes well for enticing new members to join. Overall, retaining members is vital to the long-term success of associations and nonprofits with membership programs—and data plays a key role in this effort.

Collecting data and extracting insights from it helps enhance the member experience and boost member retention. Member preferences and interests differ from organization to organization, so it’s essential to have accurate, up-to-date information that will guide your membership program’s decision-making. Below, we’ll walk you through three ways to make your data work for you.

1. Calculate your member retention rate.

The first step in leveraging your data for member retention is to know what your member retention rate actually is. A retention rate provides a baseline for how well you’re preserving members between renewal periods. It allows you to set a goal for the rate you’d like to achieve or maintain. Future updates show how different approaches impacted your efforts to reach that goal.

This ongoing calculation is important to prioritize for several reasons:

• Member retention impacts your association’s overall reputation. If you can’t retain members, you don’t benefit from word-of-mouth marketing. Prospective members may come to view your organization as unreliable or unsustainable.
• Retaining members allows your organization to generate more revenue with fewer expenses. The more members you retain, the less you have to emphasize your resources toward a membership recruitment budget.
• High membership retention can lead to a higher acquisition rate. When you retain members, they’re more likely to tell their wider network about your association. These peer referrals can make recruitment easier.

Calculating your annual member retention rate is simple. Divide the number of members you currently have by the number of members you had in the previous year on that same date. Multiply the resulting number by 100 to get a percentage.

2. Collect key types of member data.

To start collecting data that will help boost member retention, look at your association’s existing data and identify information gaps. You can add fields to your membership applications, send surveys to existing members, or take notes during member engagements to help fill these gaps.

Using membership software makes keeping track of member data easier. All your information is organized in one place for gleaning crucial insights into your member experience. In particular, here are three data types you can collect to help retain more members.

Member Engagement

To build lasting relationships with members, you need to know when and how much they interact with your benefits and services, such as:

• Job boards
• Discussion forums
• Volunteer opportunities
• Educational offerings

This lets you determine which activities your members prefer. It can also provide insights on the days and times that work best for members.

Event Attendance

Events are an important way to bring members together and engage them with your association. Use your event management tools to track event attendance. You can identify the event types your members value most, including whether they’re virtual, hybrid, or in-person. If you keep throwing monthly happy hours that few members attend, but find that your quarterly online webinars are packed, use that data to adjust your event calendar accordingly.

You can also collect member data through pre-event and post-event surveys. These let you gather feedback directly from attendees and gauge their satisfaction with each event. They’ll appreciate that you’re taking the time to seek their opinions—just make sure you follow through on their suggestions.

Membership Level

If your membership operates as a tiered model, one of your association’s goals likely involves promoting membership upgrades. Organizations with different membership levels should track how many members they have in each and how that number changes from year to year.

This can indicate how appealing each membership level and its associated benefits are to members, letting you make adjustments, as needed. It can also shed light on which member cohorts are most likely to upgrade each year, which can inform how you conduct renewal outreach to these individuals.

3. Implement improvements to retain members.

Your data is only as good as you use it! Once you’ve gathered the information above, it’s time to leverage insights from the data. Use these to improve your membership program in ways that encourage members to renew year after year.

You may want to make a list of the different aspects of your association that you’d like to address, along with notes on the next steps you’ll take for each. Here are a few areas to consider, plus questions that can help you determine next steps:

• Member onboarding: Do members feel welcomed when they join our association? What frequently asked questions come up that we can better address upfront? Is anything missing from our welcome packet?
• Member benefits: What benefits do our members use most? How can we better promote or change our underperforming activities? Would investment in learning management software help our members with their goals?
• Member communications: What forms of communication do our members prefer? Are we checking in with members frequently enough? Is there a social media platform we could better leverage?
• Member appreciation: Do our members feel appreciated? What are we currently doing each year to thank our members? What is a new event we can try to ensure our members know we value them?
• Membership website: Is our membership website easy to use? Are there additional resources or discussion boards we should add to our website?

Remember that improving your membership retention strategy should be an ongoing process. The more information you collect, the more equipped you’ll be to make impactful improvements to boost your results.

Use Data to Retain Members and Grow Your Association

Retaining members is key to your membership organization’s growth, as doing so reduces recruitment costs and improves your reputation.

By using member data to inform membership decisions, your association or nonprofit can better communicate with, appeal to, and appreciate your members—three steps critical to retaining members year after year.

Your nonprofit’s website is an essential tool for marketing your mission and pulling in support for your cause. It’s where your supporters learn about your organization, give online gifts, sign up to volunteer, register for your events, and more.

But sometimes it can be difficult to discern exactly how well your website is working to encourage your supporters to take these actions, or even what it is that gets them to visit your site in the first place.

The missing piece to this puzzle? Data, and lots of it—information about who your supporters are, what motivates them, how they journey to your website, and what they do once they’re on it. And learning to harness the power of data can help you in your efforts to enhance your website’s performance and improve it as a marketing and fundraising tool.

In this quick guide, we’ll help you get started tapping into your donor and website analytics data so that you can take your web presence to the next level. Let’s get started.

Gather relevant data about your supporters.

Start by gathering data about your supporters and your website. There are lots of ways you can do this, but you’ll typically need two main tools:

• Your nonprofit CRM. Your CRM is where your organization stores everything it knows about your donors, volunteers, and other supporters. Use it as a resource for learning about your target audience’s demographics, giving histories, and participation in campaigns, events, and volunteering opportunities. If your CRM is disorganized or your data hasn’t been updated in a while, consider investing in data append services to ensure everything is accurate and up-to-date.

• Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a data collection and analysis tool that gathers information about the people who visit your nonprofit’s website, like what channels they took to get there, what pages they view, and what actions they take. Google Analytics is free to use and even allows you to set and track goals for your website so that you can optimize your digital presence. To learn how to get started with Google Analytics for your website, check out Cornershop Creative’s ultimate guide.

While these are two solid resources to get started with gathering the relevant data you’ll need to improve your website, you can also use:

• Surveys to find out what your supporters think of your website, including the user experience (UX) and content
• Performance tracking tools like Google Search Console to track organic search traffic and monitor your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts
• Email analytics to understand which email content drives traffic to your website
• Social media insights to see which content gets the most engagement and drives traffic to your website
• A/B testing to compare different versions of website elements (like your donation page) to see what version performs better

Gathering data from the right tools will allow you to get a holistic view of your website’s target audience and how well your website is accommodating your audience’s wants and needs.

However, as you gather this wealth of information, it may start to feel overwhelming. This is why you need a solid strategy for analyzing your data.

Analyze your data for patterns and trends.

Learning to tease out actionable insights from your supporter and website data can be tricky. But once you unlock the patterns and trends that are in your data, you’ll be equipped to make design choices for your website that will meet your audience’s needs and expectations.

Here are some tips for analyzing your data:

Get a general idea of who your target audience is and what motivates them.

Begin by looking closely at your audience’s demographics (age, gender, race, ethnicity, marital status, employment status, etc.) and psychographics (attitudes, values, interests, beliefs, etc.).

Next, examine their engagement history, reviewing past donations, hours volunteered, and events attended. You’ll also want to look at your donors’ communications preferences and how past outreach and marketing efforts have been received.

From there, you should be able to identify in general terms who your supporters are. For example, an animal shelter might determine its supporters are (generally):

• Women in their twenties and thirties
• Making $60,000-$80,000 annually
• Passionate about animal rights, the environment, and outdoor activities
• Giving to and volunteering with multiple environment- or animal-focused nonprofits each year
• Donating $250-$500 to the nonprofit each year
• Apt to engage with the organization the most via text and social media

Create a supporter persona.

Get more specific by creating a supporter persona. A supporter persona is a fictional representation of a real supporter comprised of traits that represent the trends you see in your organization’s data.

For instance, continuing with the example above, the animal shelter’s persona might be “Camille Adams,” a 30-year-old woman who cares about animal rights and the environment and who enjoys hiking and mountain biking. Camille volunteers with a climate advocacy group and gives the animal shelter $300 on an annual basis. She also follows the shelter on Instagram and Twitter and responds well to text-to-give campaigns.

With a supporter persona like this, you have a clear audience member to keep in mind when optimizing your website or creating content. You can ask yourself questions like, “What would they think of this web page?” or “How would they respond to this blog post?”

Examine supporters’ conversion journeys.

Understanding who your supporters are is only half the battle. Next you need to understand how they behave on your website and what it takes for them to complete a desired action, like making a donation, signing up for your newsletter, or registering for an event.

Here are a few tips for analyzing conversion journeys:

• Look at your website’s traffic sources (such as organic search, social media, email campaigns, etc.).

• Set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics to identify the pages visitors view and engage with before taking an action.

• Take a close look at how well your content guides visitors through the conversion funnel from awareness to action. This will include looking at the calls-to-action (CTAs) across your website and how you link pages to one another.

• Identify any parts of your conversion funnel where visitors are prone to dropping off.

As you begin to see what is and isn’t working on your website, take note of the good things you’re already doing that you can apply to any problem areas. Also prioritize the most important fixes. For example, the steep drop-off you’re seeing on your donation page should likely be addressed before you figure out why one of your blog posts isn’t getting as much attention as the others.

Use audience insights to improve your website design.

Now that you’ve discovered the trends and patterns awaiting you in your data, you can begin to make positive changes to the design of your website that will enhance the UX and encourage more of your visitors to use your website to take action for your cause.

Here are some areas to focus on as you make improvements:

• Navigation. Prioritize smooth and easy navigation. Ensure your navigation menu links to your most important pages and is easy to view and click on no matter what page a visitor lands on.

• Overall visual look and feel. Your website should have a cohesive look to communicate your organization’s professionalism and help visitors feel they can trust your site. If your brand look needs some defining (or refining!), Kwala recommends building out a brand kit that includes elements like your color palette, typography, and logos.

• CTAs. CTAs are phrases, often formatted as clickable buttons, that encourage website visitors to take an action. Ensure your CTAs are eye-catching and brief, directing your visitors to your most important action pages.

• Mobile optimization. Since over 55% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, making sure your website is mobile-friendly is a must. Ensure that your web design will adjust to fit multiple screen sizes and that buttons are thumb-friendly. You should also compress any large files, like images, that could slow down your load speed.

• Accessibility. Ensure that people of all abilities can access your website. Review the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines and follow best practices such as ensuring that your website can be navigated by keyboard, images include alternative text (alt text), and text and background colors provide a high contrast for readability.

After making initial changes to your website, monitor your progress using Google Analytics and make adjustments as needed. You can even set goals for seeing improvements in things like event sign-ups or online donations and establish metrics that you’ll track to see your progress toward those goals.

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For your own site to join the ranks of the best nonprofit websites out there, you need data on your side. When you understand who your supporters are and what they need from your website, you’ll be able to make enhancements to your website that lead to more support.

Revisit your data often and practice good data hygiene to continue gaining useful insights about your community. And, to take your website to the next level, consider leaving the design work to nonprofit web design experts. You can do this!

Whether your nonprofit is putting tons of time and resources into digital marketing or just dipping your toes into more than email, one thing is for sure: you need a method of measuring your results so you know what’s working and what isn’t.

For many nonprofits, it’s challenging to be strategic about digital marketing. With many channels — sometimes overseen by different people — it’s not unusual to create content and messages but not really have a cohesive understanding of how any of it’s performing. We’ll break down how to gain that understanding by tracking the right marketing metrics.

The Key to Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Your digital marketing strategy likely involves several channels, including:

• Your website
• Email
• Social media
• Ads
• Mobile marketing
• Online fundraising campaigns, such as peer-to-peer platforms

The key to developing a strategy that accurately measures the performance of all of these channels is in your data. But what exactly should you be looking at? 

Tracking key digital marketing metrics is the first step to making sense of how your initiatives are going, where you need to adjust, and where there’s room to grow. Tracking is not a strategy in and of itself. You still need to analyze your data to get the most out of it. But before you can try an experiment or make data-informed decisions, you need to measure what’s going on. 

Metrics can give you a baseline to compare your results, help you see where things are flourishing (or going awry!), and help you measure your progress over time. 

Think Before You Track

While you can track many different metrics, not all of them will give you the information you need to make decisions. Scrupulously counting up the likes on each individual social media post may not be as useful as monitoring how many people who click through on social posts make a donation, for example. The metrics you track should help you adjust and refine your strategy and help you reach your goals.  

In order to know what you should track, it’s helpful to first consider what those goals are. What are you trying to accomplish with your digital marketing? Some possible goals for your digital marketing include:

• Raising more awareness of your cause.
• Raising more money.
• Attracting new donors.
• Recruiting more volunteers.
• Promoting an event.

Once you’ve chosen your goals, consider how the metrics you track relate to them. What do you need to know in order to understand whether or not you’re making progress?

The 5 Digital Marketing Metrics To Track

These five metrics are not the only possible things you can track, but they’re a great place to start. 

1. Conversion Rate

How many people take action and make a donation in response to your marketing? Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who “convert” from people who received a marketing message into people who make donations. You calculate it by dividing the number of action-takers by the total audience, then turning that number into a percentage.

For example, if you send a fundraising email to 6,000 people and 200 of them click on the donate button and make a gift, your conversion rate would be approximately 3%.

200/600 = .03 

.03 x 100 = 3%

You can compare your conversion rate to past performance or industry benchmarks to see if your communications are inspiring people to take action.

2. Cost To Raise A Dollar

How much are you spending on digital marketing initiatives? Is it worth it? Keeping an eye on how much it costs to raise a dollar can help you see how efficient and effective your fundraising is.

To calculate the cost to raise a dollar, divide your fundraising expenses by the total funds raised. So if you spend $5,000 on a campaign that raises $20,000, your cost to raise a dollar would be 25 cents. 

5,000/20,000 = .25

If you discovered you spent $15,000 to raise $20,000, your cost to raise a dollar would be 75 cents. At that point, you might want to start tweaking some things. The big exception is if the thing you’re analyzing is a new donor acquisition campaign, in which the initial cost to raise a dollar is high. These campaigns are run in the hopes that first-time donors will become sustaining supporters with a greater donor lifetime value than the first gift alone.

3. Click-Through Rate

How often do people who see your ads, read your emails, or see your social posts actually click on a link? Your click-through rate is a good metric for assessing how engaged your audience is and how well your content is performing. 

You calculate your click-through rate by dividing the number of clicks by the number of times the content was shown or the number of people who received the communication (impressions). If your Google or Microsoft Ad was shown 1,000 times, and 100 people clicked on it, you’d have a 10% click-through rate. 

100/1000 = .1

.1 x 100 = 10%

Once again, you can compare your results to your past performance or to existing benchmarks to get a sense of whether or not people are engaging with your marketing. Click-through rate is different from conversion rate, however, in that it only measures if audience members click on a link, not if they complete the action you suggested. 

4. Total Online Revenue

This one is very simple: how much money are you raising through digital channels? Is that number growing or shrinking? How do this year’s results compare to last year’s? Is one quarter out-performing others? 

When you know how much you raise online, you can identify where you can expand your digital marketing and put additional resources. 

5. Email Response Rates

With changes in Operating Systems and privacy settings, email metrics continue to evolve. Click-through rate and conversion rates are important, but consider tracking your email response rates, too. Your response rate is simply the percentage of people who responded to your email, compared to the number of emails delivered. If they filled out a survey, answered a question, or wrote back to you, they responded. 

For instance, imagine you sent a post-event survey to donors who attended your event. If it was delivered to 5,000 people and 500 people completed the survey, you’d have a healthy 10% response rate.

500/5,000 = .01

.01 x 100 = 10%

You can use your response rate to discover how engaged your audience is, and if that engagement changes over time or in response to different things. If you find that you get a 10% response rate when you send a survey, but a 15% response rate if you send an informal email asking a single question, you may decide to take a break from surveys. If you notice your response rate increases when you change email formats or include a personalized greeting, these insights can help you engage your audience better.

Let Metrics Be Your Guide

If you haven’t tracked metrics before, you don’t have to start doing everything at once. Consider your goals and pick a couple of metrics that will help you understand how you’re progressing toward them. Track those over time and share them with your team. As you get comfortable with those, you can add more. 

Metrics help you make data-driven decisions, which in turn help you get better results. Start tracking, so you can start growing today!