Community Foundation Santa Cruz County: Blog Dashboard - Feb. to Sept. 2013

MONTHLY BLOG DASHBOARD SEPTEMBER 2013

http://www.cfscc.org/philanthropy831blog

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KPI: 50% increase in monthly unique visitors, from 173 to

260.

Unique visitors decreased 22.5% in

the past month. Up and down, up and

down.

KPI: 67% increase in monthly average

subscribers totaled across nine main feeds,

from 6 to 10.

Subscribers dropped 30.44%. Top

feeds: "About Nonprofits, Local Philanthropy, and

Our CEO".

KPI: 50% increase in total comments per month, from 2 to 3.

Comments went down 100%. Hearing

crickets.


TAKE-AWAYS: SEPTEMBER 2013

Assessment of factors contributing to (+/-) in achieving our goals:

• Online activity? What goes up must come down, right? The old adage could apply

in this case.

Three of six posts were from guests this month: Ian Slattery, Dan Cohen, and Mireya

Contreras Gomez and Darrie Ganzhorn teamed up. These generated 9, 9 and 17 unique

visits respectively. While the last guest post (about LEAD) had the highest number of

visits, they were fleeting, averaging a duration of only 5 seconds. Ian's post about

video production myths averaged 16 seconds in visit duration. The post from Dan

Cohen about Communications Strategy kept folks on the page the longest—with an

average visit duration of nearly 5 minutes.

Staff posts came from Luis, Randy and Kim—with unique visits 21, 6 and 12, and

average visit duration 1:18, 0:28 and 2:03, respectively. No surprise Luis' post got viewed

the most out of all six posts. It was honest, vulnerable and well written. It also

coincided with high percentage of new visitors.

Bounce rate for the entire blog averaged 59% for the month. Two posts had bounce

rates below the average (Dan's with a terrific 27%, and Kim's with 47%).

Cross-promotion on Facebook and Twitter generated the usual mild responses—a

couple comments, some likes and a retweet from one of the guest bloggers. No blog

promotion on LinkedIn in September. Kim's post was boosted on FB, which did not

result in more visits unfortunately.

We saw a drop in our big spike in subscriptions from last month. The following are still

the most popular feeds: About NPs , Local Philanthropy , Our CEO and Christina.

• Offline activity? On Sept. 22, for over an hour Embolden talked almost exclusively

about us, our blog and our use of Google Analytics, to hundreds of community

foundation professionals during the morning plenary of the AdNet and CommA

conference in San Diego. Could explain higher percantage of new visitors that day and

the days following.

• Other Traffic Patterns? Average pages per visit for all the month's posts were: Ian

1.55, Luis 2.18, Randy 1.5, Dan 6.09 (not surprising with its low bounce rate), Kim 2.47,

and Mireya/Darrie 1.28.

MONTHLY BLOG DASHBOARD AUGUST 2013


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260.

Unique visitors have increased 72.41% in

the past month. A move in the right

direction.



from 6 to 10.

Subscribers have grown 24.46%. Top feeds this month:

"About Nonprofits, Local Philanthropy,

Our CEO and Christina".


Comments went up 500%. Guest posts attracted the most

engagement.


TAKE-AWAYS: AUGUST 2013


• Online activity? Of note: three guest bloggers this month (Dan Baldwin and Janet

Shing of Community Foundation for Monterey County, and Baillee Serbin), two of

which generated some comments and buzz on their channels.

Folks continue to subscribe when asked (we pushed in 8/28/2103 Nonprofit

News)—especially to the feeds About NPs , Local Philanthropy , Our CEO and Christina .

We're regularly promoting blog posts across social channels (Twitter, Facebook and

LinkedIn).

Tried something new this month and paid a small amount to boost a Facebook post

about Lance's Kittery blog (8/2/2013). While the boosted FB post about Lance's blog

reached over 1K people compared with a non-boosted post about Christina's blog

(100+), CC's blog ended up with more views (200+) than Lance's blog (100+).

Luis, as our blog editor in chief, has been keeping posts fresh with real-speak language

and interesting graphics (Romy & Michele, e.g.)

• Offline activity? We talk about our blog to people. Other offline promotion we

could be doing more of?

• Other Traffic Patterns? Hopefully we see subscriptions continue to rise as we give

readers content that interests them.

MONTHLY BLOG DASHBOARD JULY 2013


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260.

Unique visitors have decreased 18.88%.

A continuous up and down.



from 6 to 10.

Subscribers have grown 266.67%!

"About Nonprofits, Local Philanthropy, and Our CEO" feeds

skyrocketed.


Comments have remained steady at none. Another month of readers

keeping mum.


TAKE-AWAYS: JULY 2013


• Online activity? Pushes to get folks to subscribe are working. We saw a huge jump

in subscriptions, especially to the feeds About NPs , Local Philanthropy , and Our CEO .

We gotta produce content that gets people commenting more regularly. A few

possible things we could try to increase blog comments?

(Source:http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/31-proven-ways-to-get-more-comments-on-your-blog.html)

Try Different Media – If you always publish text posts, try making a video or drawing a

cartoon to make your point. If you’ve been messing around with photoshop and have

some cool cat-zebra mashups that you’re proud of, post away! (If you decide to do a

video, PLEASE don’t begin with, “well, I wanted to talk to you about …. today.” Just

get into your topic and rock it.)

Ask for comments - Email friends, beg on Facebook, promise to film naughty twitvid’s

in exchange for comments. Remember when you posted your very first article and

begged your friends to read it and comment? It works even better now that you’ve got

some friends who actually know what a blog is! (This actually works. I had a friend

email me earlier asking for a comment on an article she’d written that was in an area

of interest for me. Guess what? I commented gladly!)

Extend Comments – If you get a bee in your bonnet while reading another blog, don’t

waste your passion in a long comment. Put your thoughts into an article for your own

blog and link back to it in a short comment on the post that inspired you. “Extending”

a conversation in this way means more comments for everybody involved. (Linking

back to the inspiring post is good business and makes up for any self-promotion you

might have done in the comment that linked to your article.)

• Offline activity? Should we promote the blog URL in our email signatures? (I know

Luis, but maybe there's a format that doesn't look overcrowded??). In our print

materials? We should make sure our audience is aware we’re a business whose

blogging by putting the URL and blog-related call to actions in our annual report...We

could have included a small bubble CTA.

Source:

http://smallbiztrends.com/2012/12/places-to-promote-your-blog.html

• Other Traffic Patterns? Unique views have consistently gone up and down from

month to month.

MONTHLY BLOG DASHBOARD JUNE 2013


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260.

Unique visitors have increased 44.44%.

A move in the right direction.



from 6 to 10.

Subscribers have grown 25%. Hooray!

Greatest bump in "About Nonprofits"

feed.


Comments have remained steady.

Readers once again had nothing to say.


TAKE-AWAYS: JUNE 2013


• Online activity? We could be doing more both online and off to drive traffic to the

blog. Pushes to get folks to subscribe seem to be working.

• Offline activity?

Resources going forward:

http://smallbiztrends.com/2012/12/places-to-promote-your-blog.html

• Other Traffic Patterns?

• Project activity? We gotta step it up and produce content that gets people

commenting more regularly. See resource below for some proven concepts for

increasing blog comments. Note: not all these methods are endorsed.

Resources going forward:

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/31-proven-ways-to-get-more-comments-on-your-blog.html

MONTHLY BLOG DASHBOARD MAY 2013


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260.

Unique visitors have dropped 38.89%.

Yikes.



from 6 to 10.

Subscribers have increased 33.33%.

Efforts to push subscriptions may

have helped!


Comments have decreased 100%.

Quiet month.


TAKE-AWAYS: MAY 2013

This tells us we're not doing what we need to do to entice and engage readers. How

can we learn from this so we can get closer to our goals next month?


• Online activity? We pushed subscribing to the blog in Nonprofit News (April 24), on

Faceboook (May 8) and in Nonprofit News (May 30)—which could be reason for minor

bump (three) in subscriptions.

We noticed a pattern that communications-related posts by Luis generate the most

new visitors . Probably because Luis tries to cross-promote these on Twitter and to

professional groups like CommA and The Communications Network.

• Offline activity? Sometimes we feel like pests trying to get some of our main

authors to commit to a consistent frequency of posts. Nevertheless, we'll continue to

nag! Because we know readers like a regular pattern of content that they can count

on.

• Other Traffic Patterns? We wondered if Beth's mention of our blog project in her

May 31 post "How To Make Sense of Your Social Media Metrics" would spike visits. But

we saw nothing out of the ordinary.

• Project activity? We've been so busy finalizing our measurement and visualization

(changed our minds four times before finally deciding on the right subscription metric),

that we've ignored the work needed to actually get to our goals!

It was necessary to lay the groundwork and work out all the kinks for expressing our

measured results, though now it's time to get back to the work at hand. Like making

sure every post contains several of the tried-and-true formulas that make people lean

into and read content.

Are we writing for a single reader? Using proven headline formulas and compelling

subheads to grab attention? Writing more concise, relevant and useful content to

expand the reader's value? Taking advantage of numbered lists and strategic

formatting like bolding important concepts? What about deep image captions (2-3

sentences long)?

Time to focus on helping readers get, give or do something—and in the process, we'll

bet we surpass all our measurement goals!

Resources for moving forward:

http://www.copyblogger.com/10-sure-fire-headline-formulas-that-work/

http://www.copyblogger.com/scannable-content/

http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-write-headlines-that-work/

http://www.copyblogger.com/scientific-copywriting/

MONTHLY BLOG DASHBOARD APRIL 2013


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260.

Unique visitors have grown 29.59%, the

first positive growth in 3 months.



from 6 to 10.

Subscribers have remained steady.

Darn!


Comments have increased 100%,

slightly above our goal.


TAKE-AWAYS: APRIL 2013

A pretty good month. We're on an upswing with traffic and engagement is

back up as well, though not where it was a couple months ago. And we've yet

to hit our goal for subscribers.


• Online activity?


• Other Traffic Patterns?

• Project activity? Subscriptions: Even though we worked with Embolden to

ensure our Feedburner tools were working and began pushing "subscribe" on

newsletters and FB, subscriptions dropped.

MONTHLY BLOG DASHBOARD MARCH 2013


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260.

Unique visitors have dropped 38.42%. Time to step it up.



from 6 to 10.

Subscribers have increased 12.5%. We've still yet to reach our goal.


Comments have decreased 80%. The

chatter dropped.


TAKE-AWAYS: MARCH 2013

Not the best month. Visitors declined for the second straight month. A lot less

engagement than the previous month. And, while subscriptions went up

slightly, we still haven't reached our goal!

Top factors that substantiated ups or downs, or things of note



• Patterns?

• Goal activity?

MONTHLY BLOG DASHBOARD FEBRUARY 2013


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260.

Unique visitors have decreased 25.64%.

Uh oh.



from 6 to 10.

Subscribers have remained steady. Still

below our goal.


Comments have grown 400%. Wow!


TAKE-AWAYS: FEBRUARY 2013

Well, it wasn't the best month for traffic or subscripions, but we did do well on

engagement. In particular, the February 21 "Social Media Waters" post really

got people talking.

Top factors that substantiated ups or downs, or things of note



• Patterns?

• Goal activity?

Documents

Community Foundation Santa Cruz County: Blog Dashboard - Feb. to Sept. 2013