making campaigning count Health Check and Benchmarking Advocacy Online Community Conference 22 September 2010 By Duane Raymond

Session Overview Community health check and benchmarking “It is important to keep an eye of the ‘health’ of an online community, which is often mistakenly evaluated as the size of the list alone. But a list that grows by 10% each year and generates less activity needs some immediate medical attention. We look at some key benchmarks for evaluating the health of your online community: list churn, engagement level, response rates, overall growth, etc. This session will also look at the tools in the Advocacy Online platform to help get some of the critical benchmark data.” making campaigning count2

3 What ‘health checks’ do you do?

Six community health indicators 1.Participation rate from 2.Activity levels 3.Organic growth rate 4.Hurdle rate 5. open rates 6.Spontaneous social media activity making campaigning count4

Measure the indicators Indicators 1.Participation rate from 2.Activity levels 3.Organic growth rate 4.Churn rate 5. open rates 6.Spontaneous social media activity Measures # completed (of ed) / # ed % 0/1/2/3+ actions #new/(total# - new#) # lost / total # Compare with recent e.g. Blog, Facebook, Twitter and Delicious posts making campaigning count5

Putting it into Practice Using eActivist 3.0

Now let’s try it in e-activist making campaigning count7 Indicators 1.Participation rate from 2.Activity levels 3.Organic growth rate 4.Churn rate 5. open rates 6.Spontaneous social media activity Measures # completed (of ed) / # ed % 0/1/2/3+ actions #new/(total# - new#) # lost / total # Compare with recent e.g. Blog, Facebook, Twitter and Delicious posts

Act on your findings 1.Record what you initially find. This is the ‘baseline’ 2.Compare the baseline to the eCampaigning Review 3.Try something new/different, ideally as a split-test 4.Record and compare the new results 5.Adopt / reject / re-try the new / different approach 6.Repeat with other new / different approaches making campaigning count8

Improving community health making campaigning count9 If these are too low 1.Participation rate from 2.Activity levels 3.Organic growth rate 4.Churn rate 5. open rates 6.Spontaneous social media activity Try this More compelling s and actions Re-activation s Ask to tell others Prevent poor data Optimised s Find out what and how people like sharing and provide more

making campaigning count10 Best practice levels It depends on your objectives. If your objectives are to mobilise and recruit then: Key IndicatorsBest Practice Level Participation rate (of received)25% (35% with chaser) Attraction Rate (of actions)33% Opt-in rate (of new)55% Recruitment rate (of actions)17% Cost / recruit (variable costs)£2-£3 Avg. donation value£16 Conversion to donors0.5%

Open Rates (from ECR 2009) making campaigning count11

making campaigning count12 What else to look for? Patterns: consistent or inconsistent Unexpected results: good, bad, strange Opportunities for analysis in the data e.g. political, allies, targets Do multiple indicators support the same conclusion?

making campaigning count13 What do you see?

making campaigning count14 What do you see?

making campaigning count15 What do you see?

making campaigning count16 What do you see?

making campaigning count17 What do you see?

making campaigning count18 What do you see?