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1 T aylor Community Consulting
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T aylor Community
Consulting
2MEET OU R T EAMWashington University in St. Louis Catholic Charities Archdiocese of St. Louis
Taylor Community Consulting Team
Masters in Science in
Customer Analytics
Fall 2018
Y a r o n g X uD a t a B e n c h m a r k i n g
S y s t e m D e v e l o p e r
Masters in Science in
Customer Analytics
Fall 2018
C l a i r e X uD a t a S t r a t e g i s t
Masters in Science in
Customer Analytics
Fall 2018
C h u y i Z h a n gD a t a S t r a t e g i s t
BS in Systems Engineering
BSBA in Economics & Strategy
Spring 2018
L u k e W a s y n c z u kP r o j e c t L e a d
Master of Business
Administration
Master of Social Work
Fall 2018
A b i g a i l M a c D o n a l dS u r v e y A r c h i t e c t
Masters in Science in
Customer Analytics
Fall 2018
Y i r a n Z h iB e n c h m a r k i n g R e p o r t
D e s i g n e r
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Organizations
1. St. Patrick Center
2. Saint Martha’s Hall
3. St. Francis Community Services
4. Queen of Peace Center
5. Marygrove
6. Good Shepherd Children & Family Services
7. Cardinal Ritter Senior Services
8. Catholic Family Services
136,000 People Helped Annually
Catholic Charities in St. Louis ass ists 136,000 people annually through more
than 69 programs at 61 sites
MissionTo serve people in need, especially those who are poor and vulnerable, work to
improve social conditions for all people in the community, and to call members
of the Church and community to do the same ”
CAT HOLIC CHARIT IES ARCHDIOCESE OF ST . LOU IS
8 Organizations. 1 Cause. A Stronger Community
“
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1. Collect and analyze Catholic Charities communication
data
2. Identify areas of improvement and brainstorm
recommendations for more efficient communication
3. Produce a communications benchmarking report
Optimizing
Communication
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AGENDAHere’s what we have planned for the day…
Brief overview of our benchmarking analysis
1. Recommendations
Communication analysis methodology
2. Data Collection and Synthesis
Insights from the most effective communication strategy
4. St. Patrick Center Case Study
Overview of our benchmarking analysis
3. Benchmarking Report
Summary and questions
5. Discussion
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IMPROVE INTERNAL COMMUNICATION
REVAMP SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY
TRACK COMMUNICATION EFFECTIVENESS
DEVELOP KEY-STAKEHOLDER MARKETING STRATEGIES
Recommendations
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Key QuestionsIn considering client deliverables, certain key questions must be answered
V a r y i n g C o m m u n i c a t i o n
How do different organizations
communicate?
B e s t P r a c t i c e
Which Catholic Charities practice
the most effective
communication policies?
M e a s u r i n g S u c c e s s
How do we measure a successful
communication plan?
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Data Collection
I n t e rn a l
C o m m u n i c a t i o n
Ex t e rn a l
C o m m u n i c a t i o n
SURVEY STRATEGY
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External CommunicationWhat did we survey?
S o c i a l M e d i a N e w s l e t t e r A n n u a l R e p o r tE m a i l M a r k e t i n g
O f f i c i a l W e b s i t e L o c a l M e d i aI n - P e r s o n E n g a g e m e n t
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Internal Communication
N e w s l e t t e rE m a i l I n - P e r s o n E n g a g e m e n tP h o n e C a l l
What did we survey?
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Provides quantitative measurement for comparing the usage and
effectiveness of communication channels among the Catholic Charities
SCORING SYSTEM
SCORING CRITERIA
Primary Focus: Internal and external communication
Methodology: Points are awarded for number of
communication channels and measurements
Point Weight: Assigned based on importance or effectiveness
of communication channel or measurement according to
survey
Data SynthesisHow do we measure communication?
Scoring System
Segments PointsStrategyType
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Data AnalysisBest, median, and least effective communication strategies of all 25 Catholic Charities surveyed
Website traffic represents one of the
most direct and informative methods
of external communication
Website
Extremely effective in raising
organizational awareness to public
Social Media
Efficient internal communication
increases operational performance
Internal Communication
13Catholic Charities in St. Louis Federation
Google, Facebook, and twitter analyticsClick-through rate | response rate | followers
Track Online Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Adopt Online Analytical tools
Recommendations
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St. Patrick Center Case StudyWhy did St. Patrick Center score higher than other Catholic
Charities?
T r a c k s W e b - T r a f f i c
Tracks social media and website KPIs
M e a s u r e s I n t e r n a l
C o m m u n i c a t i o n
Internal communication employee
surveys
C o m p r e h e n s i v e S t r a t e g y
Most channels of
communication
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C o n d u c t E m p l o y e e S u r v e y s
Improving
Internal Communication
Better know employees’ demands and needs and
measure the operational effectiveness
Implement a more dynamic and effective
communication platform – free for non-profits – so
employees can stay informed everywhere at any time
A d o p t S l a c k A p p l i c a t i o n
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C a r o l J o h a n e k
T here are two essential components to
successful external communication. One,
the organization’s value proposition must
resonate with the target audience. And
two, how you communicate combined
with where you communicate.”B r a n d S t r a t e g i s t C o n s u l t a n t
Effective External CommunicationWe spoke with a brand strategist and Olin marketing professor Carol Johanek
A r e a s o f E x p e r t i s e
A d v e r t i s i n g | C o n s u m e r B e h a v i o r a n d D e c i s i o n M a k i n g | M a r k e t i n g M a n a g e m e n t a n d S t r a t e g y | M a r k e t i n g R e s e a r c h
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Social Media Leverag ing the best strategies
Understand Communication Target
Tailor Social MediaStrategy
Key-Stakeholders The Public Clients Employees
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Implement slack, employee surveys, and build Catholic
Charities social media community
Tailor social media platform portfolio to target demographic
St. Patrick Center serves as a great example of effectively
tracking communication on social media, website, and
internally
Conduct donor surveys
T hank You!
IMPROVE INTERNAL COMMUNICATION
REVAMP SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY
TRACK COMMUNICATION EFFECTIVENESS
DEVELOP KEY-STAKEHOLDER MARKETING STRATEGIES
Recommendations
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A P P E N D I X
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T imeline and Implementation
S l a c k I m p l e m e n t a t i o n
P r o c e s s
M a y
B u i l d i n t e r n a l
E m p l o y e e S u r v e y
J u n e
K e y - S t a k e h o l d e r
M a r k e t i n g S t r a t e g i e s
J u n e
R e v a m p S o c i a l
M e d i a S t r a t e g y
J u l y - A u g u s t
T r a c k C o m m u n i c a t i o n
E f f e c t i v e n e s s
S e p t e m b e r
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Slack Tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivn5jfKE_5M
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T ailoring Social Media Strategy
Targeted
Audienc
e
Strengths of different social media platforms
Instagram twitter Facebook LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s audience is
well-educated and
often comes from
higher income
households, according
to Pew Research.
Instagram is quickly
growing in popularity
among teens and
young adults, so think
about how to cultivate
your Millennial
audience.
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Social Media Strategy Resources
Harness the full potential of social media marketing
https://www.salsalabs.com/blog/nonprofit-social-media-marketing
https://www.classy.org/blog/social-media-success-nonprofits/
Learn from the bestHave communications director follow some of the top ranked non-profits on social media
to see how they market effectively
https://topnonprofits.com/lists/top-nonprofits-on-social-media/
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Sample Key-Stakeholder
Survey Questions
1. What was the primary reason for donating to catholic charities
2. How would you differentiate catholic charities from other similar charities
3. Where do you most often hear information about non-profit agencies
4. What's most important to you in a charity that you would donate to
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Carol Johanek Audio Conversation
*insert audio clip here*
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Instagram Marketing example 1
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Benchmarking Report
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Benchmark Report
Internal Communication (20%): Measures internal communication via in-person, phone calls, email, newsletter.
Social Media (14%): The most common external communication method, indicating usage of Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram,
etc. and is used to target donors, the public, the clients, and employees, etc.
Website (13%): The second common external communication method, where measurement includes traffic as number of
visitors, time spent for each visitor, bounce rate, and click-through-rate, etc.
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Benchmark Report
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Scoring System
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Benchmark Report
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Benchmark Report
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Benchmark Report
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Benchmark Report
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Benchmark Report
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Point System
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Data Synthesis
Scoring System
● To compare the usage and effectiveness of communication channels among the Catholic Charities Federations
Criteria:
1. Internal + External Communication with a total of 100 points2. Point weight: Based on the importance or effectiveness according to survey
38Internal Communication
39External Communication
40External Communication
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Survey Questions
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Survey
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44
45
46
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48
49
50
51
52
53
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Catholic Charities Benchmarking Report
Prepared by Olin Taylor Community Consulting Team:
Abigail MacDonald, Claire Xu, Yiran Zhi,
Yarong Xu, Chuyi Zhang, Luke Wasynczuk
Olin Business School at
Washington University in St. Louis
Spring 2018
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Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 2
Introduction to Survey Scoring System ................................................................................................... 2
Recommendations for Catholic Charities of St. Louis Communications Strategy .............................. 4
Improve Internal Communication ............................................................................................................ 4
Revamp Social Media Strategies .............................................................................................................. 5
Track Communication Effectiveness ....................................................................................................... 5
Develop Key Stakeholder Marketing Strategies ....................................................................................... 5
Recommendations for a More Cohesive Communication Strategy for all Catholic Charities ........... 6
Data Analysis Benchmark ........................................................................................................................ 6
Recommendations for most Catholic Charity Organizations ................................................................... 7
Internal Communication .......................................................................................................................... 7
Website Improvement ..................................................................................................................... 8
Social Media ................................................................................................................................... 9
Communications Benchmarking Report for Catholic Charities of St. Louis ..................................... 10
Recommended Communications Benchmarking Methodology for the Future ................................. 12
Create a More In-depth Analysis ........................................................................................................... 12
Analytics and KPI Recommendations .................................................................................................. 12
Thank you:
We would like to express much thanks to our partner agency, Catholic Charities of St. Louis, and
our client lead Gayle Shank for allowing us to be a part of this exciting project. Gayle and her
colleagues in St. Louis and across the country were extremely helpful in this data collection and
analysis process.
We would also like to thank Beth Doores, Mark Soczek and everyone who helps with the Taylor
Community Consulting Program for all their guidance and support throughout this process.
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Catholic Charities Communications Benchmarking Report Spring 2018
In the spring of 2018, Catholic Charities of St. Louis engaged with the Taylor
Community Consulting Program (TCCP) at the Olin Business School at Washington University
in St. Louis. For 8 weeks, a group of 6 graduate and undergraduate students at Olin worked with
Catholic Charities of St. Louis to assess and develop a strategy for internal and external
communication plans. The following are the results of the engagement.
The TCCP team created a survey which was sent to 35 Catholic Charity organizations
across the U.S. We received 25 responses to the survey and below is our assessment and
recommendations for communications strategies based on the responses to the survey.
Introduction to Survey Scoring System
Based on the results of our survey, a scoring system was created to compare the usage
and effectiveness of the communication channels used among all the participated Catholic
Charities, so we could better understand the communication strategy that each organization is
using at this time. Additionally, we determined what method of communication they consider to
be the most effective to develop the benchmark in the area.
Based on our survey, there are two types of the communication that we focus on. The
first is internal and the second is external communication. Internal communication accounts for
20 points whereas external communication accounts for 80 points; making the total possible
points an organization can receive 100 points. For each type of communication, there are
different platforms and measurements, and points are assigned for each of them. The criteria that
we used to assign point weights is based on the initial survey results, which means that points are
allocated based on how important and effective participating catholic charity organizations
believe each item is.
For example, email is considered as the most effective platform for internal
communication, thus it has the highest score (8) among all the 4 internal communication
platforms. Because most of the participants do not measure their internal communication and
those who do have varying measurements of internal communication, whichever organizations
have a measure for internal communication scores 10 points, no matter what measure that
measurement may be.
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Below is the scoring system described above:
Internal Communication
Points
Internal Communication Communication Channel Email 5
In-Person Meeting 2
Employee Survey 2
Newsletter 1
Measure Measure? 10
Total Points 20
External Communication
Social Media Social Media Platform Facebook 3
Twitter 2
Instagram 1
KPI of social media Followers 2
Like/Comment/Share 1
Click through rate 1
Impression 1
Tools Analytics Tools? 3
Total Points 14
Email Platform Email Platform? 5
KPI of email marketing Open rate 3
Click through rate 2
Response rate 1
Total Points 11
Newsletter Distribution of newsletter electronic 2
paper 1
both 3
KPI of Newsletter Open rate 3
Response rate 1
Click through rate 1
Frequency of newsletter weekly 3
monthly 2
quarterly 2
not scheduled 1
Total Points 11
Annual Report Distribution of annual report eletronic 2
paper 1
both 3
Measure Measure? 5
Total Points 8
Website Website Analytics Tools Google Analytics 5
Word Analytics 3
KPI of website Traffic 2
Time spent 1
Call to action 1
Bounce rate 1
Total Points 13
Local Media Distribution of local media News release 2
Pitches 1
Purchasing paid media 1
Local media platforms Print earned 2
TV earned 1
Radio earned 1
Measure Measure? 3
Total Points 11
Other In-Person Engagement Measure? 3
Nomination Apply or seek? 4
Crisis Communication Plan? Have? 5
Total External Communication 80
Total Communication 100
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Recommendations for Catholic Charities of St. Louis Communications Strategy
Upon reviewing the results of the survey, it was found that the St. Patrick Center had the
highest score of any organization that completed the survey. St. Patrick Center is a good model
for the St. Louis Catholic Charity organizations to look towards as a goal. The St. Patrick Center
received all the points for internal communication, website, email, annual report, local media, in-
person, and community awards. They also scored very high in social media. What made them
stick out from other organizations is the fact that they track their web-traffic. The St. Patrick
Center used analytics tools to track their social medial and website key performance indicators
(KPIs). Additionally, they utilize almost all channels of communication. Finally, the St. Patrick
Center measures their internal communications with employee surveys. All of these things help
the St. Patrick Center to have a fairly comprehensive internal and external communication
strategy.
It is recommended that Catholic Charities of St. Louis consider the following four
recommendations for improving the communications strategy for each organization and across
the federation: improve internal communications, revamp social media, track communication
effectiveness, and develop key stakeholder marketing strategies. Below each strategy is outlined
in more detail.
Improve Internal Communications
Ways that Catholic Charities of St. Louis and its federation members can improve
internal communication are to:
1. Conduct employee surveys: find out what modes of communication are working for each
organization
2. Adopt an internal communication application: a good alternative to strictly email
communication within each organization and across the Catholic Charities of St. Louis
Federation is an application called Slack.
• Slack: a communication platform that connects users with others in their
organization quickly and in one location.
• Slack uses channels for people to work collaboratively with teams, the entire
organization, or in the case of Catholic Charities across the federation. A new
channel can be created for each project or group that is necessary and others who
are not invited to that group cannot see the communication. It is like having
multiple group texts in a phone, but all located in one place and created
specifically for businesses to share information with colleagues and work on
projects.
• Slack has three pricing options for small to medium sized companies.
• Free
• Standard: $6.67 per active user, per month, billed annually. $8
billed monthly
• Plus: $12.50 per active user, per month, billed annually. $15 billed
monthly
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• Slack for Nonprofits has additional services offered to
organizations of differing sizes for free or a reduced rate if
organizations apply. This may be useful for Catholic Charities of
St. Louis. Information for that can be found at
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204368833
Introducing an application like Slack, will help organizations to have better internal
communications and to begin tracking communication effectiveness more often.
Revamp Social Media Strategies
Social media is becoming an increasingly important part of communication and
marketing strategies for all organizations. Catholic Charities of St. Louis can utilize social media
in a more effective way. Identifying the target market for each form of social media is important,
this makes sure that the messages being put out by the organization are tailored for the right
people. Our research found that Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the most popular social
media platforms that non-profits use. Research should be done as to what social media networks
are most effective for engaging those target populations so that energy can be spent in the most
effective forms of social media. Determine what the KPIs for each social media network will be
for your organization and use those as benchmarks for success in social media.
Track Communication Effectiveness
Catholic Charities of St. Louis and the federation organizations could improve web-based
communications through tracking the KPIs for each site. These KPIs should be determined by
the organizations internally, based on their target populations and overarching strategy around
web-based communication; some examples of important KPIs are:
• Click-through rates
• Response rates
• Number of followers
• Shares
• Website traffic
To track those KPIs it is recommended that organizations adopt online analytics tools such as
google analytics, WordPress analytics, Facebook analytics and twitter analytics. We realize this
may not be a feasible option for some smaller organizations that do not have budgets for these
types of tools, but those organizations can still benefit from creating KPIs and watching them
across their web-based communication channels.
Develop Key Stakeholder Marketing Strategies
For non-profit organizations it is important to know who key stakeholders are and why
they provide their time, treasure, and talent to a particular organization. It is recommended that
Catholic Charities of St. Louis utilize these key stakeholders for marketing purposes. This can be
done by requesting a short phone call or meeting with them to discuss why they support Catholic
Charities of St. Louis or even the specific federation organization they are involved in. This can
give new insights as to why people get involved with the organization and marketing to future
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key stakeholders can be built around the insights gained from those meetings/calls.
Recommendations for a More Cohesive Communication Strategy for all Catholic Charities
To better understand the data we collected and how each agency is doing in terms of their
communication strategy, we have made a benchmark report to compare the communication
performance under each segment.
Data Analysis Benchmark
Based on the scoring system, we picked the agencies that are scored the highest, the
median, and the lowest in total so that we could easily see what factors drive the success of
communication strategy. The three agencies that represent the three segments are St. Patrick
Center, Catholic Charities West Virginia, and Vermont Catholic Charities, Inc., and the scores
are 89, 67, and 14, respectively. Catholic Charities of St. Louis is listed in the table as well as a
comparison.
In the table above, color green represents the highest score for each component, and red
represents the lowest.
In the comparison of the three organizations above we can easily see that St. Patrick
Center is scores highest for a couple of reasons. First, it has a comprehensive communication
strategy. St. Patrick not only implements almost all the communication methods but also
measures most of them, which is very positive way in contribution to effective communication
strategy. Second, one obvious advantage that St. Patrick has is a much better performance in the
website and social media components. Taking a deep looking at the reason, we found out that St.
Patrick has a thorough tracking system in their website visits, including traffic (number of
visitors), time spent on page, call to-action response rate (donate, sign up, etc.), and bounce rate.
St. Patrick also measures its social media platforms use by tracking followers,
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likes/comments/shares, click through rate, and impressions/reach. Third, St. Patrick Center has
the best performance in internal communication methods. It not only has different methods to
communicate internally based on the needs but also measures these methods to make sure that
they work effectively.
Recommendations for most Catholic Charity Organizations
Therefore, based on our analysis on all agencies that completed the survey comparing
them vertically, we consider three components that are essential to Catholic Charities agencies in
general - internal communication, social media, and website. We believe that efficient internal
communication increases operational performance and benefits from inside the organization to
the public. In nowadays, social media is the most commonly used communication methods not
only by young people but also the general public. It is extremely effective in raising organization
awareness to the public and in engaging more people to the organization. As for the website,
official website is the first thing that people will go to learn about the organization. It represents
one of the most direct and informative methods of external communication. Most of these
recommendations are similar to the recommendations for St. Louis Catholic Charities. We will
make recommendations based on these three components in the following section.
Internal Communication
For internal communication, we believe that measurements play the most role. However,
as shown in the chart below, out of 25 agencies, only 9 of them have measurements towards
internal communication. Not only various ways of communicating but also choosing the most
efficient one is the key to success.
Some of the agencies have an
Intranet to share information and
tools to the employees. We believe
that it is a good idea to develop
adopt an internal communication
system such as Slack to give
everyone a shared workspace
where conversations are organized
and accessible. This can help
streamline the workflow and
employees can stay informed
everywhere at any time. As mentioned above, Slack offers workspaces with 250 or fewer
members a free upgrade in the standard plan, and an 85% discount for workspaces above that
size. This free service for small-sized workspaces would be beneficial to the agencies.
For those 16 agencies that do not develop a system to track the performance of internal
communication, they can track the open rate, response rate of emails by using email marketing
platforms and they can also conduct an employee survey and utilize that to measure the
operational effectiveness and satisfaction rate of employees.
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Website Improvement
For external communication, website is one of the important roles that influences the
effectiveness of communication to the public. The average score for website communication
performance is 7.44. We believe that the agencies that score below 7 should improve their
website communication. As shown below, 8 agencies score below 7 and 5 of them even have 0
points in this section. The primary reason is that these agencies do not measure KPI for their
website. Some of them have Google Analytics but do not utilize the tool to track performance.
The graph below shows the main metrics that other agencies track and traffic, time spent
on the webpage, call-to-action and bounce rate are the most frequent indicators. Therefore, for
those who score below 7, we recommend that they establish a Google Analytics account and
track the performance including the metrics mentioned above.
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Social Media
Among all the agencies, 4 of them have a score that is lower than 10. Even though all of the
agencies use social media to some extent, not all of them use effectively.
These 4 agencies do not use the platform-based analytical tools such as Facebook Analytics and
Twitter Analytics. Since they have already developed an official account to share news and
information to the public and stakeholders, we recommend that they should use the analytical
tools to assess whether their post is effective in terms of how widely spread and how responsive.
For those who have already scored high in the range of 10 to 13, they can track more KPI
and open more accounts in different platforms so that different segments of people can be
reached
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Communications Benchmarking Report for Catholic Charities of St. Louis
Based on the scoring system, we used a business intelligence interface called tableau to
visualize the finding. Below are the KPI score and analytical tools score comparison of agencies
within the Catholic charities of St. Louis federation.
To the right is the KPI score for each
agency within the federation. It’s
obvious that St. Patrick Center did well
in their KPI score. They use many
measurements to keep track of the
effectiveness of their communication,
such as email and newsletter click
through rate, response rate, and website
bounce rate. By improving their KPI
score, each agency could get more
useful feedback on their communication
strategy thus make communications
more effective. We strongly recommend
all agencies adopt more measurement on
their social media, email, newsletter,
and website tracking.
To the left is the analytical tools score comparisons. If
an organization uses analytical tools such as google
analytics and WordPress analytics, they received
points. St. Patrick Center also did well in this area.
Using analytical tools is a very effective way to analyze
data and extract actionable relevant information that
you can use to increase results or performance. We also
suggest each agency use more analytics tool for better
decision making.
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Below are comparisons of the Catholic Charities of St. Louis federation as a group to the
other top five agencies. The first one is Catholic Charity of St. Louis federation’s average KPI
score compare to other agencies, and the second one is the analytical tools score comparison.
The Catholic Charity of St. Louis federation did moderately well when compared to the
other top organizations. There are still room to improve, so we firmly believe acquiring more
analytical tools and measurement could efficiently help the federation to improve
communication strategy.
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Recommend Communications Benchmarking Methodology for the Future
Create a More In-depth Analysis
In this scoring system, we measure whether the agency uses the platform and whether
they track KPI. For example, if they use Google Analytics for the website, they score 5 points.
Therefore, this analysis does not consider quality or success of communications content, it
merely tracks if a communication strategy is deployed. With the constraints of this project
timeline and access limitation to data, we are unable to quantify the effectiveness in terms of the
actual communication performance for each channel at this time.
We recommend that in the future, to benchmark the performance of individual
organizations with other agencies, specific metrics should be taken into consideration such as the
month to month increase rate of number of people reached for each channel. For the
recommended analytical tools or KPI mentioned below, the incremental measure would be an
effective indicator for the communication efforts. In this way, by comparing actual KPI
performance and the increase rate for communication channel efforts, it would produce more
accurate data to figure out specifically which part has better performance and which part still
needs improvement.
Analytics and KPI Recommendations
Below is an outline of how analytics tools and KPIs can be used for benchmarking.
Internal Communication: there is no universal measure for internal communication due to the
difference of structure across all of the Catholic Charity organizations, it is recommended that
each of them uses the measure that is the most suitable for the organization (e.g. annual
employee evaluation, open rates of email etc.). It should be measured on a quarterly basis.
External Communication
• Social Media: it is recommended that Facebook Analytics is used to track the number of
followers, the number of likes/comments/shares, click-through rate and impressions on a
weekly basis, thus each of the agency would have an idea of their level of engagement.
• Email: it is recommended to use Mailchimp and Constant Contact to track the open rate,
click-through rate and response rates on weekly basis.
• Newsletter: it is recommended to distribute newsletters both electronically and via paper
on a weekly, monthly or regular basis according to the strategies of each specific
organization, and each agency is recommended to track open rate, response rate and
click-through rate.
• Annual Report: it is recommended to distribute both electronically and via paper at the
end of each year/beginning of the next year. Each agency should track the response rate.
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• Website: it is recommended that Google Analytics is used to track the traffic on the
website, time spent on the website, call to action response rate, and bounce rate on a
weekly basis.
• Local Media: it is recommended to distribute local media via news releases, pitches and
purchasing paid media. It is also recommended to use earned media in all forms (print,
TV, radio). Traditional publicity mentions are very important. Call to action response rate
should be measured on a monthly basis.
• In-Person Engagement: each agency should find a measure for in-person engagement that
is the most suitable for the organization (e.g. volunteer acquisition, conversion rate etc.).
It should be measured on a monthly basis.
• Apply or Seek Nomination of Community Awards/Recognition: each agency is
recommended to apply or seek nomination for community or other external awards by
recognizing volunteers or staff for the organization on a yearly basis.
• Crisis Communication Plan: each agency is recommended to have a comprehensive crisis
communication plan.
