Over the winter of 2009, we focused our efforts on developing a high-level marketing plan that included OrangeGerbra and Devo in a Box, a fundraising toolkit designed specifically for small non-profit organizations. One of the first things we wanted to do was build a basic website that would at least describe who we are and what we do, and allow people to contact us for more information or to schedule an appointment. After a few weeks of development, the site launched last week. Please check it out and let me know what you think!
We designed and produced the site ourselves, but outsourced the code to an impressive group of development professionals based in India, who go by the name Webgrity. We found them via one of our new favorite resources, elance.com. If you have a need for skills that you don't have readily available, I highly recommend elance.com.
Being big believers in the power of Google Analytics (not to mention the free price tag!), we were sure to include the analytics tracking code in our site. This was a simple matter of our developer including a small piece of code from Google to each page. This allowed us to begin measuring the visits to our site right away.
As the site was to be our primary marketing vehicle, we wanted to start driving traffic as soon as possible, so a couple of days after launching the site we kicked off an initial pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign on Google.
Having extensive experience measuring the efficacy of marketing campaigns while at Catalysis, I knew that we wanted to start with something simple and establish a baseline for measurement. I built the initial campaign with only one generic ad, a handful of relevant keywords, a geographic filter limiting our ads to the local market, and a budget of only $20 per day. By keeping it simple at first, we not only have a solid baseline against which we can begin measuring the effects of future changes, but it's easier to see what works and what doesn't because there are fewer campaign elements to manipulate. Once we learn the combination of elements that results in the highest conversion of visitors to leads, we can think about adding more elements and attempting to increase our conversion of visitors to leads, and eventually to new clients.
Acknowledging that we were starting out small, we knew not to set our expectations too high. We decided that we would be happy receiving increased traffic to our site, and considered the possibility of someone contacting us so soon to be unlikely. Much to our surprise, however, we received two new business leads within four days of kicking off the campaign. Having spent less than $80 for paid clicks at that point, we were very pleased with the activity.
We're following up with the leads now and will report on our progress as things develop. If you're interested in the finer points of our PPC campaign, our small business marketing strategy, learning more about our experience working with outsourced developers halfway around the world, or want to discuss anything related to non-profit fundraising, please leave a comment.
