Follow Up Report: Madison Nonprofit Day

First off, thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU!!  I really wanted to take a moment and thank everyone who participated in Madison Nonprofit Day—from the volunteers, to the presenters, to the participants. You all were fabulous and it was wonderful to meet you, and work with you.

Next… I wanted to send a report on the success of the first Madison Nonprofit Day. Despite the rain, which I’m still irked about, the day went very well. There were a number of hiccups and speed bumps, but surprisingly, the day ran much smoother than I had thought. Though that could have been exhaustion on my part, since at that stage I was having trouble remembering my own name. That said, 95% of the people I spoke to had a great time and thought the day a great success. The remaining 5% had complaints here or there—about specific workshops or amount of notice for participation.

Generally, speaking since the purpose of the day was to celebrate and raise awareness of Greater Madison nonprofit organizations, I thought it might be good to examine our success and failures by four milestones: 1) Attendance; 2) Outreach; 3) Awareness; and 4) Promotion. The milestones overlap a bit, but are variables of the ‘raise awareness’ component of our purpose. But first let’s review some quick stats:

• Over 2,100 people expressed interest in the event, regardless of ability to attend;
• The website had over 8,225 Page Views in approx. 1 month period;
• We had 205 Individual Event RSVPs; and
• We had over 320 Full Day RSVPs;
• We had 35 nonprofit participating organizations (speakers, panels, tours, etc.)
• Unique attendance is estimated at approx. 110 people;
• Workshop and Activity attendance for the day was approx 265 people (includes overlap);

So what does this all mean? This part is a little long, but let’s explore…

ATTENDANCE
Unique Participation. While attendance was definitely down, due to the rain; the rain didn’t kill the day. People showed up dry, slightly damp, and dripping, but they showed up. While it was hard to keep track of the number of unique individuals going in and out of workshops and activities; we had printed up 100 graphical schedules. All those schedules were used. So while, not every participant took a schedule, and some may have taken more than one for activities at the Goodman Community Center we can estimate about 100 unique individuals. Additionally, the Bike Rodeo by DreamBikes who had a planned rain location got between 15-18 kids participating, and then their parents or guardians as participants. So while, the estimate maybe a little low, I think 110 stands as a good number for unique participants.

Overall Attendance. It was much easier to track attendance at workshops. The average attendance per activity was between 11-12 people. But let’s further separate to get a better picture. There were 24 official events—12 workshops, 12 activities (no we didn’t plan that). The volunteering workshop, 12 Key Actions of Volunteer Program Champions was cancelled due to illness; and the activity, Charity Shiatsu was cancelled due to time and space constraints. So that leaves us with 11/11 workshop/activities. Though they weren’t cancelled, the Garden Strolls were rained out (definitely pre-defining a rain alternative should have been a priority for us). Art in the Park was moved inside, to the room made available by the cancellation of ‘12 Key Actions…’  and suffered greatly reduced traffic.

All that’s to say, in general, most of the workshops, despite rain, had fairly good attendance 15-20 participants. A few workshops had low attendance, but they were expected to draw maybe 5-10 participants, so they rain hurt them; but then a number of the outdoor activities were decimated by the rain, producing zero attendance, which reduced the overall averages to 11-12 people per activity.

General. Of those who did attend, the compliments did flow for the day itself, and especially for speakers or specific workshops. The Neighborhood Nonprofit Tours received great praise; as well as the Keynote, Drupal, and Leadership Workshops. More on this later.

Overall Rating: Successful.

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OUTREACH
For this purpose, outreach differs from awareness based on purpose. The purpose for outreach was to generate attendance. The purpose for awareness was to raise ‘awareness’. Our outreach efforts were also separated from general promotion efforts, though they greatly overlap. The website (www.nonprofit-day.org), Twitter, Facebook Fan Page, and Email were our primary outreach tools. Outreach has/had a more direct one to one/one to many component than promotion. The goal was to get people involved actively or passively. Peaking interest was great. Converting that interest into an RSVP even better. And of course converting RSVPs into actual attendance was the ultimate goal.

Twitter. We set-up the twitter account for Madison Nonprofit Day, fairly early, around May 2009. The goal was not to artificially inflate numbers, but to gain interest of followers one by one. To that regarded, we tweeted facts about Wisconsin Nonprofits in general, and Madison nonprofits specifically. We also promote other Madison nonprofit organizations who had Twitter accounts or Facebook pages (see awareness). We grew the account from 0 followers to 405 followers.

Facebook. The Facebook page was significantly harder, it took over a month to move from 25 fans to 45 fans, but 56 seemed to be a magic number. Once we hit 56 fans, it took only a few weeks to move from 56 to over 100 fans. Both Facebook and Twitter require a fair amount of communication effort, to keep people aware and interested.

Email. Our biggest outreach success, especially in terms of conversion from passive interest into RSVPs, was our effort to identify as many Madison-based listservs which we though might have an interest in such a day, and outreach to the list owners and admins requesting that they promote the day to their list members. Final tally, we limited to about 38 listserv contacts, of which 18 of the owners/admins agreed to send announcements. This generate 20% of our Direct Traffic hits for the website, and spiked our RSVP numbers over the 3 day focus period.

Analytics. The easiest way to measure our success with outreach is through Analytics. Unlike most sites, our web traffic was generate through direct links, not search engine referrals. In fact 45% of our traffic was Direct Links, 40% Referrals, and 15% Search Engine Traffic. Google Analytics was able to catch that email clients generate the most direct traffic links. So success there.

Failure. The easiest way to discuss failure is to just call it as it is. Our biggest outreach failure was the percentage of nonprofits we were able to contact directly. Excluding listservs, Twitter, and Facebook; we sent direct emails to over 450 nonprofit organizations. It’s a good number, but consider the 3,000+ nonprofits in the Greater Madison area, a tad low. I’d like to have seen something closer to 50% rather than 12%. So, lots of room for improvement.

Overall Rating: Moderately Successful.

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AWARENESS
Raising awareness was one of our larger goals for the day. While I’d qualify the day as a success, I call this goal a work in progress. I think we did well, but could have done a lot better. Time was the major issue in this area. The goal was to get people to explore some of the many organizations involved in the day, as well as to push people to Madison nonprofits using social media. We did well on the social media front, we sent over 900 users to 35 nonprofits on Facebook for a total of 1376 visits. We, unfortunately, had no method to measure how many people we were able to convert to followers for nonprofit Twitter accounts; but we did recommend follows for around 25 accounts.

Failure. The website profiles and videos were to planned to be a major push, but failed to lift off. Our failure here was not interest, the profile pages received 256 visitors for 670 visits; and the videos received 170 visits for 497 views. Our failure was time-based. It took too long to collect data for the profiles. Some profiles of organizations were coming in the week of, and others we still don’t have. The logistics team was overwhelmed, and the media team got caught in a wave of their own work projects. Since so much of the information was missing, we decided to promote specific videos or profiles, instead of getting people to explore the entire section of the site.

Success. People went to this section, regardless of lack of promotion, and even more specifically, regardless of a section page that informed them the area was under construction. They found profiles and videos, and watched and read. So we know the interest can be cultivate, with a little more time and energy in building the information and infrastructure. An additional awareness success, is that Madison Nonprofit Day was contacted by Knupp & Watson’s to recommend potential applicants for their Goodstock program.

Overall Rating: Working on it.

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PROMOTION
Promotion was and is about making people take notice of the day, in some measure. Obviously, increasing attendance and participation was also an outcome of promotion, but in general, even getting people talking about the day—regardless of their desire or ability to attend was part of the measure. To that regard, while there is always a lot more work to do, I think we did well overall. The website did over 8,000 visits in about a one month period. We work with nonprofits where monthly traffic after years of existence hoovers around 2,000 visits. So it’s not Google or MSN, but it’s pretty good level of people taking notice.

Analytics. The easiest way to measure success with promotion is also through Analytics. Almost all the flyers directed interested parties to the website. We used a URL Shortening service, SnipURL to track links where we sent people directly to the website or a specific page on the website. Our shorten urls, did very well—averaging about 35 clicks per submitted url, and over 500 clicks for front page [ www.nonprofit-day.org] urls. Also as mentioned, Google Analytics measured over 2,000 unique visitors to the website, for over 8,000 page views. The average number of pages viewed per user was 5.6 pages, and the average time spent on the site was fairly high 7min 10 sec. Generally, speaking the average user spends less than 3 min on a website.

Facebook Ads. We complimented our general promotion efforts, with Facebook Ads, for two reasons: 1) to get the word out to a much larger audience than we had immediate access to; and 2) to explore how Facebook Ads work and if they were cost effective. With the Facebook Ads, we decided to pay per click, rather than per impression, and set a budget of $50 per ad. We did two ads—one at the beginning of August, and one the week of the event.

Total we payed $92.40. Our target population was Facebook users living within 50 miles of Madison who were over the age of 18 years old. Possible viewers was upwards of 500,000.

The first ad, we bid $0.15 then went up to $0.45 per click for an average of $0.37 per click. We got 391,388 Impressions (people who were exposed to the ad, but may not have seen it); and 157 clicks. This provided a nice jump in our Facebook RSVPs, but little traffic to the website.

The second ad, the goal was to get Facebook RSVPs to convert to website RSVPs. On Facebook people could only RSVP for the full day, and not individual workshops; we wanted more people to register for individual activities. Apparently, the week of the event was a bad week for bidding. Our first starting bid of $0.15 netted us no impressions. It seemed the bids in Madison were going for $0.75 to $1.10 per click. We changed our bid to $1.05. This got us 104,783 impressions, and 46 clicks. (Remember, we put a maximum on the total amount to spend at $50). While the click through number wasn’t as high as we hoped, that was limited by us, and the raised price of the bid. But based on traffic reports, each of the more than half of those who clicked (25), converted (registered and did individual RSVPs).

Failures. Negotiations with the Onion to get a free ad, and a potential sponsor to pay for an ad in the Isthmus failed. Another 3-4 volunteers or another 3 weeks of time, could have changed these outcomes though.

Success. We received a radio interview, a couple podcast mentions, and a write-up on the Examiner.com from our PR efforts, as well as listings in a number of online and print calendars.

Overall Rating: Moderately Successful.

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So that’s the summary of efforts for Madison Nonprofit Day. I’ll be posting a summary of the evaluations, hopefully within the next two weeks. What, I can say overall about the day is:

• participants were walking up to me all day, to express their enthusiasm and gratitude to be part of the day;
• participants and non-participants expressed their desire for the day to become an Annual Event;
• more organizations wanted to participate than we could handle, especially since a number required brainstorming sessions to identify ways that would both promote their organization and provide valuable information or activities for the general public;
• the Walking Tours were an astonishing success, all the reviews were incredibly positive, despite the rain, and length of the tours;
• people wanted more workshops, and more opportunity to network with other nonprofits;
• nonprofit professionals and volunteers wanted quick and easy ways to learn what other nonprofits were doing;
• a number of individuals volunteered to work on next years event and or to receive email

Again… Thanks for your time. Thanks for your energy. And thanks for your enthusiasm.

Sincerely,
Alnisa

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Alnisa Allgood
Executive Director
Nonprofit Tech
t. 608.241.3616
e. alnisa@nonprofit-tech.org

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