TruthyPR

Actionable Analytics: 3 ways nonprofits can target a competitor's web visitors with Google Ad Planner

The recent launch of Google for Advertisers is really just a wrapper a number of useful Google tools you already knew about.  But it gave me a good excuse to spend a little time with Google Ad Planner, a good basic tool for figuring out some demographics about who is visiting a website, or how to find the surfing habits of particular demographics.

(To find contrarian views on why you might not want to use Google Ad Planner, go to the end of this document for my "On the other hand" take on the issue.)

There are some really useful things you can do with Google Ad Planner.  I've identified three here, but there are a ton more.

Compare the demographics of the audience of two competing websites

This is really easy.  Go to Google Ad Planner and type in a URL for an organization, like Doctors Without Borders.  I've done this for you.  Notice how it skews for heavily female in its audience, as well as with higher levels of education.  Now compare it to UNICEF.org by following this link.  (Disclosure: UNICEF USA is a client of my firm, Virilion)  Most of the demographics look very similar, until you notice the age breakouts.  UNICEF.org has a significant amount of traffic in the 0-17 year old demographic, whereas Doctors Without Borders has none.

While this may be simply be a problem of audience measurement with Google Ad Planner, it could also indicate that Doctors Without Borders is not developing the next generation of its donor base.  UNICEF has historically done very well in this area, with the Halloween Trick or Treat box and the new J-8 (Junior G-8) summit program targeting younger potential donors.

Remedying this hole should be a priority for Doctors Without Borders.

Find out what other websites a competitor's visitors spend time at

Another great piece of information is the "Sites Also Visited" section of an audience report.  Again, for UNICEF.org, it looks like this:

Notice the correlation of visitors to hrw.org (Human Rights Watch) is 130.0x.  That means that visitors to unicef.org are one hundred and thirty times more likely to visit hrw.org than non-unicef.org visitors.  If you're a competitor of UNICEF.org, you should be approaching Human Rights Watch for partnerships.  From something as simple as featuring non-competitive content in each other's email blasts, to joint projects.  Go where your competitor's customers are, and try and recruit them.

Find out where a specific audience hangs out

Let's say Doctors Without Borders wanted to start targeting 0-17 year olds in the United States by approaching relevant websites for non-monetary partnerships to promote their new "Socially Active High Schoolers" material.  (I'm making that program up, DWB has no such program)  You configure Google Ad Planner to find 0-17 year olds in the United States. 

Then, use the Google Ad Planner filter to select websites that fall into the category "Lifestyle -> Activism and Social Issues". 

What you've got below (I've only shown the top few) is a target list of websites.  You *could* buy advertising on them, but much more affordable (and non-profit-friendly) technique is to approach them to become corporate partners of Doctors Without Borders.  With such a partnership could come many benefits, including access to excess ad inventory or other in-kind donations.  Of course if they really love Doctors Without Borders, they might also run a donation match for their registered users.

And that's just three things...

I've just covered three things, but you can do a lot more with the free audience research of Google Ad Planner.  Don't miss out on an incredibly useful free tool.

On the other hand, why wouldn't I use Google Ad Planner?

Like many Google tools, it's the startup trying to steal market share from more entrenched players.  For anyone who's read The Innovator's Dilemna and the Innovator's Solution, this is a very dangerous competitor.  Most everyone who sells commercial analytics tools has a bigger list of features than the free Google Analytics, but nobody who makes a product in that space enjoys watching the Google Analytics team steal market share as they slowly develop their awesome and free tool from the bottom up.

Google is attacking the problem of advertising and audience research from the bottom.  So it's not going to compete head to head with more advanced services that have been around longer like comScore, but then not everybody needs comScore.  Others have weighed in on this, including famed digital media pundit and player John Batelle.  Wendy Hofstetter also did a piece explaining why they don't compete.

Ultimately, if you're going to drop a serious amount of money in advertising with the sites you find, you're going to migrate to comScore or Nielsen.  If you're not, Google Ad Planner is probably going to be fine, and get better every quarter.

How nonprofits should measure online advertising

Here are three key lessons every nonprofit should learn and when diving into online advertising. (Classic advertising image from flickr user "pinkponk")

Recently one of my clients purchased a small ad run from a major national newspaper in the Washington DC metro area.  It was roughly $2,000, and they threw in a little creative.  The decision to run the ads and the delivery of all inventory was complete before they let me know. 

This leads us to the first lesson:

Lesson #1: Paid online promotions are experiments.  Start small, with an amount that you feel comfortable testing with.  Make sure it's small enough that if it completely falls flat, you won't beat yourself up, or feel like jumping out the window. 

As we sat down to discuss their latest metrics, my contact turned to me and said "How do we know how it performed?"  One of the reasons I love this particular client is because even though we didn't talk about this particular ad run ahead of time, she used a dedicated campaign URL from Google URL Builder for all the incoming traffic for this campaign.

Lesson #2: If you expect to ever evaluate a promotional campaign of any sort, you need a way of uniquely identifying the traffic.  You often won't be able to segregate it after the fact.  If you use Google Analytics, making a unique URL for your ad campaign can be done with the Campaign URL builder, shown below.

The URL builder is really, really easy to use.  Simply put the URL of the landing page in the box labeled Step #1, fill in the boxes in Step #2 that correspond to your campaign's specifics, and then click the button labeled "Generate URL".  The tool will produce the URL shown in the area highlighted in green.  Copy and paste it into an email to your ad venue and they'll use it.

It's a long and ugly URL, but nobody will ever actually type it, they'll just just be sent to it when they click on your ad.  What's more, it will magically populate your Google Analytics data with all this information.  In fact you can generate as many URLs as you want, using slightly different ones for different banner ads or different campaigns altogether.

This client actually uses one set of URLs for their email list, so they can track the performance of people who click through from the email newsletter.  (It's easy to see why I love them!)

So this ad campaign ran, and after it was over we say down and looked at the performance of the traffic.  We went into Google Analytics and looked at the "Campaigns" section under "Traffic Sources", underlined in red.

When you go there, you get a report like this.  I've attached below a screenshot of a report from my own website (TruthyPR.com) measuring the effectiveness of some different campaign techniques.  Look at the ones I've underlined in red.

One of the big goals of my website is to get people to download my ebook. 

Campaign #10 on the list, simply labeled "Fundraising ebook" is actually a set of Facebook ads I'm paying $5 per day for.  During the time period I've identified it's sent 51 visits to my website, 7.8% of which have downloaded my ebook.  Now look at the Site Average for ebook conversions: 1.48%  That Facebook ad campaign is doing a lot better than average.

However compare it to #6, "How you can help survivors of domestic violence".  That's an email newsletter article I wrote trying to raise money for a domestic violence shelter here in San Francisco that's my personal charity for this holiday season.  Not only did I draw people in to hear my pitch about that, but 2 of those 20 visits also downloaded my ebook in that newsletter last week!

Here's another example out of the Traffic Sources->Search Engines report. 

My cpc ads at Facebook are listed, as are my results from organic google search.  The people that come to my site who happen to find me through google download my fundraising ebook 1.35% of the time.  The people that come to my site through my Facebook cost-per-click ads do it 7.84% of the time.  As the numbers grow I'll have to make a real conscious decision, should I put more money into working on my organic search position, or keep running ads?  These numbers will guide me.

And that brings us to final lesson...

Lesson #3: When evaluating your campaigns, always compare them to other efforts you're undertaking.  Never be fooled into thinking that 7.8% is "good" or "bad".  Focus on who it performs with regards to your other efforts, so you know if you're overspending in those channels.

In my client's case, they found that they got merely a handful of email subscribers from their ad run, and that the cost of the ad run didn't make it economical.  (Really, do you need to pay > $50 per email subscriber?  I doubt it)   More importantly, they found that their Google Grant search ad campaign, which we tweak every month, brings in a higher rate of subscribers and yet the only cost of that is some time to keep it tuned; there's no advertising outlay.

I encouraged them to go back to this media venue and ask them to consider taking on a "cost per action" ad run, that would allow my client only to pay a fixed fee per completed action.  Or, to experiment in another area altogether.  Please indulge me as I suggest one final lesson:

Always experiment.  If you learn something from a poor performing campaign, and do something different to test when you try again, it's worth it if you're using small budgets.  The only crime is in doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

There are a lot of media companies trying to sell a lot of inventory right now, and many of them are cutting their prices just to get nonprofits in the door as clients and clear some of their unsold inventory.  You're likely to hear from them soon.  You now have the tools to evaluate their results and decide if they're worth the money.

How are my efforts on facebook contributing to my organization's overall goals?

Photo from flickr user clappstar

Introduction

The amount of pressure on organizations to "get on Facebook" is tremendous.  It's driven partly by consultants who use social media expertise as a "guilt marketing tool".  You know what I mean, "You don't understand Facebook, I do, please pay attention to me long enough for me to convince you to hire me!"  I'm guilty of this.

But it's also partly due to the fact that facebook has over 300 million registered users, over 100 million of which use the site monthly.

Those are great numbers, but they aren't "pour money down a hole" numbers.  You need to answer a few simple questions:

1. How effective is the work I do on facebook in producing bottom line results?
2. How should I change my budgeting and resources for facebook to make my results better?
3. Should I take resources away from facebook and devote them to something else?

You can measure the impact your efforts on facebook are having on your bottom line today, and get a good sense of exactly how much time you should be investing in maintaining your outpost there. 

Assumptions About Your Facebook Fan Page

Let's start with what we assume your facebook presence looks like.  I'm guessing it's some sort of fan page on which you post items on your wall, like this one from the Trust for Public Land.  These items lead back to your organization's website through a link.  Maybe, also, they lead to other places as well.  After all, you're not so self-centered as to only share items with your fans that you write.

 

The whole point of your strategy here is to insert your message in front of your fans, mixed in amongst the messages from their friends, so they'll pay attention to it.  In fact, what you really want is for people to click this link I've highlighted in green.

 

If you were to click on this link to the Trust for Public Land website, you'd be taken to this landing page with a little donate link and a description of the project you'd be supporting by clicking the donate link I've highlighted in green.  (For all you optimization folks, yes, that link is too small and doesn't stand out.  TPL is not a client of mine, they just do good conservation work and make for a good example.)

Measuring the impact of your Facebook fan page

While PR measurement experts like KD Paine (one of my heroes) can measure things like "message retention" of your social networking efforts, the easy way to measure the effectiveness of this work on facebook is to track how it hits your bottom line.  When your efforts results in an organization-wide goal (money, volunteers, sponsors) that is easy to understand even by people who don't understand the Internet, there's no debate about the benefit or budgeting of Facebook.

You can create a few metrics from a couple of basic data points:

1. the number of fans you have on a given day you make a fan page status post (gathered from your Fan Page Insights);
2. the number of fans that click on the link to your landing page; and
3. the number of conversions these visits from Facebook generate.

From these data points, you can then build and track the following actionable metrics:

1. clickthru rate of your facebook posts;
2. conversion rate of facebook traffic; and
3. conversion rate of all other "organic" traffic.

Once you have these metrics, you should be able to examine them and look to connect improvements or degradations in the results to specific actions. Do all my status updates without a photo perform worse than those with a photo of the land being conserved? Then we should always use a photo!

Objections to this measurement strategy

Your first reaction to seeing this might be "Hey, wait, I've got lots of people clicking 'Like' on my status updates, and 'Share' and playing my videos.  Doesn't that count for something?"

Well, to be concise about it, not really.

Yes, facebook is different. Yes you have to hold conversations with your fans, you can't just broadcast to them. I'm not advocating that you put a donate link up every day with no context. Your facebook presence needs to be more interactive than that, with you contributing to a larger conversation by highlighting other areas that are important to your audience, and bringing other things besides calls-to-action into the relationship.

And most importantly, listening to what people are saying (on your Facebook fan page and off) and then incorporating that into your work.

But in the absence of results, it doesn't matter how many people click 'Like' on your status update.  It doesn't matter how many people share your video.  It doesn't even matter how many fans you have. 

You don't have results.  Of course, once you have results, you have the luxury of measuring other things more subtle, like non-transactional interactions.  But since you don't know if you have results yet because you're reading this ebook to learn how to measure them, you don't have that luxury.

Start with measuring well-understood results like money and volunteers, and optimizing your status updates and landing pages to increase those results.  I'll talk about measuring non-transactional interactions in future writing.

Pulling it all together

For this example we're assuming the top goal of your website is fundraising, but you could apply this equally well to advocacy efforts where you want your visitors to write letters to Congress, e-commerce efforts where you want to sell products, etc. 

I'll explain more about how to collect this data in a future post, but suffice to say, you'll need to pull it from two sources: your analytics product on your website and Facebook's Fan Page Insights.

Here's an example spreadsheet of the data you should create around your status messages:

Once you've done that, you can aggregate it up for weekly summaries and compare the results to the rest of your site traffic.  I suggest that you focus on weekly batches of data.  I find that weekly meetings with my clients creates a good rhythm that allows us enough data to see the results of our experiments, and gives us enough time to put in changes for new experiments. Here's a spreadsheet where I've done that with more imaginary data I made up just as an example.

Where to go from here?

Once you've got a trove of data from at least 50 updates and 4 weeks, you'll need to start optimizing your facebook updates.  Some common areas for optimization are:

1. COPY: Are there common elements in the title or copy that cause more people to click?  
2. URGENCY: How much higher is my clickrate when I incorporate a sense of urgency into the call to action?
3. DAYPARTING: Does the day of the week or time of day matter?  (You can look at Facebook Fan Insights to get a sense of the timezone your fans are in, and even use their targeting tools to show status updates only to certain timezone's of people.)

You should always be either setting up an experiment or collecting data from one to figure out whether your hypotheses are working.  Good luck, and may the results set you free.

Kiva reveals they don't fund loans as described, begins altering website to be more transparent

The biggest story this week has to be the revelation that Kiva, the darling of international microfinance, is not what it seems.  For years Kiva's website and all of its marketing has been designed to convince you that you were actually funding a loan to an individual entrepreneur in a third world country, managed and overseen by an in-country partner.  You looked at photos of the grantees, read their stories, and chose among them which ones would receive your dollars.

In short, Kiva had brought accountability and measurement to charity fundraising that people desperately craved.  How else to explain the US$100million total raised that Kiva recently announced? 

Look at how this loan is described a little lower down on this grantee's Kiva.org page.

It seems pretty clear that the loan is being made from you to her, and that's where your money is going.  (I have given several times to Kiva, and never once caught what "Date disbursed" really meant.)

A blog post by microfinance researcher David Roodman, and a New York Times article ("Confusion over where money lent on Kiva goes") have revealed that this is not how it works.  Some of the revelations:

• It turns out the grantees on the website are examples of real projects by in-country partners, but that your money does not go directly to the grantee, but instead funds the work of the in-country partner.
• The grantees you see probably already have their loans, as in-country microfinance charities fund their loans, and then put the grantees up on Kiva.org to backfill their loans.
• And the worst part: an in-country microfinance charity may not reveal that a borrower has defaulted on their loan in order to keep their Kiva.org listed "repayment ratio" looking good.

This is an enormous PR problem for Kiva, as it goes directly to their bottom line brand integrity.  The Twitter chatter agrees, which means Kiva has a long way to go to fix this mess.  The hardest part about all of this is that it's clear that Kiva has helped fund microfinance organizations that have done a lot of good work in developing nations.

To his credit, Kiva co-founder and CEO Matt Flannery responded on Roodman's blog.  The summary of his response was not "You are incorrect, our money goes straight to the grantee".  It was more like:

• Most people don't understand microfinance;
• Pre-disbursements are necessary in microfinance; and
• We don't do a very good job of disclosing that.

To the accusation that most people don't understand microfinance, this Kiva-authored 2008 version of Kiva's About webpage of how their service works is part of the reason we don't understand: Kiva was instrumental in establishing that misunderstanding.  That copy is taken from the Internet archive, and the page is much different now.

Generous mea culpas and making changes to the website to increase disclosure and transparency will allow Kiva to ride out this controversy without long-term impact.  However Kiva's real loss is the marketing "point of connection to the grantee" feature.  That connection is why I and many give to Kiva.  It is connection to the grantee that is the emotional hook that brings in dollars.  Without it, Kiva isn't as compelling an ask.

Free ebook: "3 Fundraising Metrics For Your Nonprofit Website"

"Free Ebook: 3 Fundraising Metrics For Your Nonprofit Website" The e-book is free! (The ebook will be emailed to you, so don't give me a fake e-mail address!)
First name	Last name
Organization	Your e-mail
Your telephone

I am very proud to announce my first (and hopefully not my last) free e-book, "3 Fundraising Metrics For Your Nonprofit Website".

Analytics tools can be very confusing, and you may wonder, what should I be looking at?  Visits?  Conversions?  How do I compare the donations I get during busy weeks to the donations I get during slow ones?  When should I be concerned?  How can I improve my website's performance?

This book will help.  It is by no means the last word on how to measure the performance of the fundraising website, but if you're glossing over it, or feel like your analytics efforts aren't providing you with enough clear information about how you're doing, then this book will show you how to pay attention to the most important elements of your site first. 

Indices like "Time spent per visit" and "Pages consumed per visit" are helpful, but they are not the first item you should be looking at.  Focus first on the fundraising function of the website, and know those numbers backwards and forwards, after that you can branch out.

Here's the table of contents so you can see what's inside:

Introduction    3
Step 1: Gather Your Data Every Week (Measure)    4

• Prospecting Rate    4
• Donation Abandonment Rate    5
• Donation Rate    6
• Recording Your Data    7
• How much data do I need to collect?    7
• Seasonal effects on nonprofit fundraising    8

Step 2: Optimize the weak parts of your online presence (Change)    8

• Increasing your prospect rate    9
• Increasing your close rate (and reducing your abandonment rate)    9

Step 3: Did that work?  (Evaluate)    10

• Watching your prospecting rate    10
• Watching your abandonment rate    10
• Watching your donation rate    11
• Putting it all together - your weekly analytics meeting    11

Other Topics    12

• Measuring third party donation and action forms    12
• Can I use these analytics to evaluate promotional programs with outside partners?    16
• Additional resources on measurement    16
• About Shabbir J. Imber Safdar and Virilion    17

Is social media going to make email go away? Plan your 2010-2011 email budget

As you think about planning your activities and budgets for the 2010-2011 time frame, you probably are either looking at a budget allocation to support email marketing and communications activities, or you're wondering if you need to add one. 

MarketingSherpa.com recently surveyed nearly 1,500 commercial online marketers about what they've been seeing as effective and what they're planning for next year.  You can read an excerpt from the report for free, or you can buy the entire report from MarketingSherpa.com for $397 for the PDF.  I've bought several of their reports before, and I've never regretted a single purchase. 

There are a couple of key takeaways from the excerpt I want to draw your attention to:

Is social media going to kill email?

No.  Data from both the Pew Internet and American Life Project and Marketing Sherpa's own research confirm that you may safely invest in your email communications in the coming year without worrying that it will become obsolete.  Pew's research says 45% of American adults use email daily.  MarketingSherpa's survey asked people "When you want to share something from the Internet with your friends and family, such as a video, link, or article, what methods do you use?"

Answer #1?  Email them the link: 78%.  Answer #2?  Share through social media: 22%.

As more people join social networks, those two numbers may shift, but it won't happen radically in the next 24 months as to make email investments a waste.

What things should I be doing with my email list that will pay off?

The MarketingSherpa survey of over 1,500 marketers cited "emailing to house lists" and "delivering relevant content to a segment" to be the two chief activities with the best payback.  This means that in 2010-2011, you should budget for projects to:

1. Grow your house email list; and
2. Create relevant content for the different segments on that list.

What challenges to email marketing do you need to pay attention to in 2010?

The survey of marketers reveals that the top three challenges they think will increase in importance in 2010 are:

1. Delivering highly relevant email content to recipients;
2. Competing with social media for recipients time and attention; and
3. Measuring and proving the ROI of email marketing programs.

It's all about the content

Since this showed up twice in the responses, it's crucial to call it out.  Marketers in 2010 are saying that producing relevant content is going to be the number one challenge to their success.  If you don't spend a ton of time on creating content that you use to engage your email readers, then odds are good this is a weak point of your strategy.  

Virilion has an excellent editorial department that can assist you in creating repeatable content vehicles that engage your readers.  If you'd like to take us for a spin, please let me know.

Measurement is king

It's no surprise that with less money than before, online marketing departments are having to prove the value of every dollar spent.  You should already have in place a measurement program and be able to cite, for the last several weeks, the open, click, and conversion rate of your emails.   As I mention above, I can help you with that.

Good luck in your planning for 2010.

For nonprofits: measuring third party donation and action forms

[This is a section from my upcoming ebook, "3 Fundraising Metrics For Your Nonprofit and Charity  Website".  -Shabbir]

Measurement of prospective online donors in the process of giving is critical to optimizing your website.  However many nonprofits use third party donation forms that they cannot tag with an analytics product, such as network4good's DonateNow product, Amazon's SimplePay, or Paypal.  If this is your situation, you lack key visibility.  You merely know how many people were surfing your website, not how many started the giving process, or even which pages motivated them to consider donating. 

All you have is some number of visitors to the site, what pages they liked, and then some number of donations that you received.  How the heck are you supposed to optimize that?  It's worse than flying a plane purely on instruments.  It's like flying a plane on half the instruments in fog.

Today I'm going to show you a trick in Google Analytics to help you track links to third party pages that, for whatever reason, you don't have the ability to put a Google Analytics tag on and measure. 

What are we aiming for?

Ideally you want to have a marketing funnel that let's you associate visitors to the site (uniques), people who started the donation process (prospects), and people who finished (donors).  That marketing funnel should look something like this:

But what you have right now is probably this amount of information:

Did 95,000 people start giving and only 1,000 of them (roughly 1%) finished?  If so then you should be immediately reworking your donate form.  Did 5,000 people start giving and then 1,000 (20%) finish?  Then you may also want to look at how you call people to donate, it may not be eye catching or persuasive enough.

If you don't have data about how many people started the process, you don't know where you should be focusing your efforts.

If you're using Network4Good's DonateNow product, you can't put a Google Analytics javascript tag on the donate page to find out.  So how do you get this data?

Using phantom page tags

The answer is to instruct Google analytics to record a "click" on your donate link as if it was a page visit.  Since we assume that clicking on Donate is almost the same as arriving at and viewing the donate page, we can fill in the missing data.  And, it turns out, it's really easy.

Let's say your existing donate button has a link that looks like this:

 <a href="https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=XXXXXXX">

Typically XXXXXXXX is your Network4Good DonateNow account number.  If you want to fool Google Analytics into thinking that clicking on that link took you to a page named "/outbound/network4good", just add an "onClick" Javascript tag to the link

 <a href="https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=XXXXXXX" 

 onclick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/network4good'); ">

In fact you can add the onClick text to your website exactly as I've done it here. Now check it the next day to make sure it's recording in google analytics correctly.  You should find that over time it registers pageviews and unique visitors in the Content tab of Analytics, which means that over time you can see the prospecting trend:

Note that the rise and fall of the people clicking to donate must be normalized with the level of unique visitors for the week to get a prospect rate.  (More on that in my upcoming ebook)

You can also use the Navigation summary report to display what pages are most important for driving traffic to your donation page, and focus on their optimization first.

 

In this example the homepage was the source of half the donate clicks.  If you're looking to see where to start optimizing this site, I would start there. 

Is this just a trick for donations?

No!  If you're using Constant Contact for email lists and you haven't programmed to their API, your subscription form is not hosted by you either.  No problem, just give it a link (as I've circled above) and you're on your way to tracking that as well.

What about the completed donations, how should I measure them?

You could try and measure the thank you page, which depending on the flexibility of your tool you might have some control over.  However I recommend looking at the actual donation report you receive from the tool and use that number.  There's nothing more final and comforting than "money in the bank" (or at least "money marked for settlement" if you're a credit card payment processing geek).

If you try this yourself, let me know how it goes. There's more information on how link tagging at Google's excellent "How do I manually track clicks on outbound links?" page.  I'm always interested in how people measure their sites, and look for my upcoming ebook in the next few weeks, we're just doing the final design and layout now.

Online crisis communications: IHOP vs The Humane Society

This article first appeared in PRNewsOnline.com

Overview

On September 16, 2009, the Humane Society of America released a hidden camera video of cruel conditions inside an egg-supplier to the IHOP chain, and urged viewers to send letters to the CEO of IHOP to implement cage-free egg supplier policies.  We wanted to measure the impact this campaign had online.  Did it catch fire?  Did it create a groundswell of support?  Did it create activity and excitement in others?

Launching the campaign

The Humane Society's campaign was launched on September 16th with a video taken by a smaller nonprofit, Compassion Over Killing.  The launch elements included:

• posting the video on YouTube;
• posting a campaign call to action to their website (a letter to IHOP CEO Julie Stewart asking IHOP to start using cage free eggs);
• posting links on both their Twitter and Facebook presences;
• posting a note on their President's blog;
• emailing their membership; and
• finding and posting comments on individual blog postings that mention IHOP, even if they were unrelated to the egg controversy (such as ones that mention excitement about a new IHOP opening).

Response from IHOP

On September 16 the Humane Society said that IHOP responded to them with a new section of its website, "Social Responsibility" that contains a new section entitled "Cruelty-Free Food" with the claim "It’s important to state clearly that we are against the cruel treatment of animals used in the production of food for our restaurants." 

Josh Balk at the Humane Society insisted that this page was created after they launched their cage-free campaign, but was not able to produce evidence of that.  Jennifer Morrisson of IHOP said that she could not put a firm date on when this page was created.  If accurate, this would be the only outward response IHOP executed in reaction to the Humane Society's claims.

Results

Internally, Humane Society staff probably grade this effort by three measures:

1. Can they force IHOP to change its egg-supplier's practices?
2. How effective is it at attracting new members and donations?
3. How much attention does it garner online?

Without access to HSUS' data, we can only answer #1 and #3.

Impact On IHOP's Business Practices

Apart from this one statement, IHOP has made no announcements about its egg supplier's practices.   Josh Balk at the Humane Society said HSUS was in discussions with IHOP before they launched their campaign, so presumably they will be in discussions again.

However, addressing the Humane Society directly and publicly would direct more attention to a conflict that IHOP would probably prefer stay not newsworthy.  This strategy appears to be working to date, and has avoided fueling the Humane Society's campaign.  In fact there is remarkably little press coverage given the graphic nature of the video.  Apparently secretly-filmed footage no longer carries the publicity impact it used to.

Attention Garnered Online

Online, the reaction was stronger, but still not as large as anyone probably expected.  There are a number of ways to measure impact and popularity of such a campaign online.  Popular campaigns will be shared, echoed, and forwarded through social media.  Here are a few ways in which campaigns that build excitement create measurable data trails that we measured.

YouTube views

A hidden camera video of poor living conditions for chickens ought to be the most popular asset of the campaign.  A five minute version was posted on September 16th

A shorter two and a half minute piece was posted on September 21

Both videos together only have less than 11,000 views and never broke into popular viral territory.  As you can see from these graphs, both stopped getting significant views within ten days of their posting.

Digg votes

Digg.com is a well-known conduit for popular word-of-mouth topics.  Hot topics such as Kanye's interruption at a music awards show easily garners thousands of digg votes as users pass around the links or videos in question, and then create additional follow-on pages.  As you can see from this graph, the campaign was submitted the week after launch, and then only received one digg vote.  This is a poor result.

Google search pollution

Invading a brand's top ten google results for their Google vanity search (a search on their name) is another way to measure if your campaign has broken into the public consciousness.  A search on the phrase "IHOP" shows the Humane Society campaign linked at #12 for the Google Search Results.  This is pretty good.  With an SEO campaign, they are likely to be able to break into the top 10, which should get the attention of IHOP's management.

Breaking into the top 10 of a brand that cares is a surefire way to resolve an issue.  There are legions of stories of people that had an unsatisfying experience with a company, blogged about it, broke into the top 10, and then had their issues resolved quickly.  This strategy should work for the Humane Society.
As an aside, note how IHOP's search traffic works:

See those spikes?  Those are Saturdays and Sundays, every single one of them, and the trend goes back this way for months, possibly forever.  People search for IHOP in extremely predictable ways.

Wikipedia entry pollution

Wikipedia is one of the most authoritative sites online.  If you have a Wikipedia page, it will show up in the top 10 search results for your name, and be difficult to dislodge.  Beginning on October 1, an 11 day Wikipedia edit war began over a new section labeled "Controversies", with various editors and contributors arguing over the adequate sourcing of the claims on the page.  Early versions of the page read like bragging from animal-rights advocates, citing entirely unsubstantiated claims that "Tens of thousands of consumers called and emailed IHOP to urge the company to switch some of its eggs to cage-free" without any independent source to verify it.

On October 6th a user deleted the entire Controversies section, which was rewritten 5 days later on October 11th with only verifiable information, as it remains available today.   A longer examination of the Wikipedia edit war over IHOP's entry is available at, "The battle over IHOP's Wikipedia entry, and how you can protect your own"

Facebook page

The largest IHOP Facebook fan page has 47,000 fans and a wall for users to post comments.  It has a strong showing of complaints of people asking IHOP to use cage-free eggs.  During the Wikipedia edit war there were accusations that IHOP was deleting complaints from their wall, but this was deleted because the claim could not be verified. The default page users are directed to when they come to the IHOP fan page is not the wall, however, it's an NFL promotion, and viewers of the Wall only see IHOP announcements unless they click 'Just Fans', in which case they see this:


In addition a new IHOP fan page is slowly growing, with just under 5,000 fans.  This page appears to be populated by people who don't think much of the animal cruelty accusations and love IHOP's food.

Online petition

The Humane Society announced their web-based petition to IHOP reached 10,000 members on October 8th, about three weeks from the start of the campaign.  A smaller Twitter-based petition has 138 signatories as of today, and is unlikely to grow significantly more.   While that number isn't likely to cause IHOP's management or franchisees to rush back to the negotiating table, it's probably enough to get their attention.

Google Search Insights

Another great way to judge whether a PR effort has influenced the nation's zeitgeist is whether it drives people online to search for the topic using Google.  I examined Google searches for "cage free eggs" and found two interesting things: 1. The searches are all primarily from California.  2. There is no discernible spike in search relevance during the time of the campaign.  There's a small increase at best and its effect has already dissipated. 

There are no sizable numbers of people searching for the topics of "ihop animal cruelty".

How should you grade the campaign and the PR responses within?

For the Humane Society, the campaign seems to be popular with their members, but it has not achieved the breakout status that would allow it to grow legs and storm the Internet, angering and recruiting tens of thousands of new donors to the Humane Society's cause.  And still, HSUS may be happy that the added pressure the campaign has created may bring IHOP back to the negotiating table to discuss enacting a voluntary cage-free egg policy.

IHOP's PR team has done an excellent job of not feeding the publicity around the Humane Society's campaign.  Their silence indicates they don't feel comfortable defending this policy and have no ability to commit to change it anytime soon.  If they did, they could announce a change with a timetable, but no such action has come to date.

They've neither tried to take the videos down, which would create a Streisand Effect of added attention, nor have they acknowledged the campaign publicly, which would be all that's necessary for the he-said she-said writing tendencies of journalists to let their stories write themselves as the conflict created its own coverage. 

To use a poker analogy, given the cards IHOP was dealt, they played their hand to the best possible outcome.

Is your charity e-mail newsletter 'a waste of time'?

Recently a consultant associated with one of the Obama Presidential Campaign vendors made the blanket statement, "Charity newsletters are a waste of time."  All over the Internet, you could hear the sounds of keyboards as non-profits e-mailed their consultants asking, "Have you seen this?  Do you think there's any merit to it?" This is a blanket generalization about something that is easily and distinctly measurable, so I found it particularly obnoxious.  When my client, EarthShare, asked me this question, I went immediately to our Google Analytics data to see what the numbers were for the last few weeks.

Campaign Email Subscribes Workplace Leads Google Grant (Generic) 0.20% 0.00% E-mail Newsletter 0.50% 0.54% GreenTeams AdWords 1.00% 0.50%

I have implemented the free package, Google Analytics, to track three goals on their website: donations (not shown here), e-mail subscribes, and leads for new workplaces that are interested in running payroll contribution campaigns. As you can see, we have two different Google Adwords campaigns running, one generic campaign that is not yet performing very well and one targeted towards people looking for Green Teams resources that is delivering us leads We've also setup the links in the e-mail newsletter to track recipients who go to our website to accomplish one of these goals after reading the newsletter.  The numbers pretty clearly show that the newsletter is delivering on what we need.  The quality of the rate of conversion could be discussed, but to say it's a waste of time would be incorrect. Most of what you do on your website is measurable, and one of the best tools to do this (Google Analytics) is free.  If you'd like to make your website (and your work) more measurable, please contact me at ssafdar@virilion.com or 415-683-7526.  I'd be happy to help you get this sort of visibility into the efficacy of your work.

Two great lessons for managing your organization's blog and community

The professional blog you run?  Oh yeah, the spammers found it too.

As corporations, advocacy groups, and non-profits have discovered that blogging and other frequent informal writing techniques are a great way to draw closer their relationship to their supporters, they're also realizing that managing their community takes a little bit of effort when the community talks back.  So here are two key tips of advice for your own blog:


Establish commenting and community guidelines first
When Easter Seals started their Autism blog (see Disclosure), they established a set of community guidelines for their blog comments that are written in clear language, not lawyer language.  The guidelines set out some examples of what is and isn't appropriate behavior.

The last thing you want to do is discover a troublemaker in your midst and then be making up rules to try and steer the community in the midst of a crisis.


Make the community someone's responsibility
The Google Public Policy team publishes their own blog, but doesn't seem to keep up with the comments.  For example on this posting from May 2008 about how HIPAA doesn't apply to their Google Health product (sadly), there was a small trickle of comments for two weeks.  Then the spammers showed up, advertising things like World of Warcraft virtual items and medical history cards.

Here we are in mid-July and nobody from Google appears to be watching or moderating these comments.  Go into older posts and you can find more wildly off-topic and/or commercial postings like those above.

It's a small task, one doable by an intern, but moderating your comments is a key part of maintaining your community and your reputation.

Disclosure: Easter Seals is a client of Virilion, and we participated in the work around the creation of the Autism blog.