Hi friends 👋🏻

Happy New Year!! Despite a super-busy end of year sprint of work, I got some relaxing and restorative downtime with family over the holidays, and I hope you all did too. Now let's make 2026 a better year than 2025.

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First, a reminder 👇🏻

Fundraising Breakthrough Summit (Free registration & happening now!) Join me and 24 other speakers for this free online learning event, January 5-18, 2026. Start the new year with expert insights to grow donations, deepen supporter relationships, and create lasting financial stability in 2026. Join Now!

What does success look like on your org's website?

Defining and measuring success in a nonprofit organization's communications efforts is difficult.

At some point, you'll ask yourself (or be asked), how do we know all this effort is worth it?

The hours spent writing email campaigns, scheduling social posts, building partnerships, running ad campaigns, writing content ... and the $$ spent on a website refresh project.

• If you're in executive leadership or serving on an organization's Board, you might see all the outputs and ask your comms people how they're measuring success.
• If you're a finance director or fundraiser, you probably want to know that those dollars are being well spent.
• And if you're in the comms director or manager role, you're asking yourself these questions AND trying to field the questions from everyone listed above.

I know because I used to be there 😅

I'm not going to try and tackle metrics and measurement across an entire marketing communications strategy today.

But if these questions feel overwhelming and you're not sure where to start, I want to encourage you to pick ONE success metric to start paying attention to in 2026.

And I think it should be an action people take on your website.

Why?

Because your organization's website should be the hub of your digital communications and marketing efforts.

Much of your other efforts – email, social, partnerships, earned media – are designed to bring visitors to your website to get engaged with your organization's work.

Once you have your finger on the pulse of one important action on your website, you can start thinking about what other changes you can make across the rest of your comms and marketing efforts to move that number in the right direction.

Examples:

• Completed online donations
• Resource file downloads
• Volunteer form submissions
• Video views

As you can see from these examples, these metrics aren't just number of page views or sessions. You could get tens of thousands of page views per month and your organization could still fail.

These metrics should be conversion events – actions that move visitors deeper into engagement with your organization and its work. Actions that align with your organization's overall strategic plan.

(And your organization's strategic plan is a great place to look when you're trying to identify that first metric to start tracking.)

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I also have a selfish reason for encouraging you to start tracking that one, important website metric.

It makes my job easier, if I have the opportunity to work with you on your website.

When a client comes to me ready to work on a website project, we'll have a conversation about what the most important success metrics are, because I want us to know whether a website project will really move the needle.

And while we can almost always talk about those important website actions that we want more of, they're not always being measured so we don't have a baseline number to start from.

So block off some time in the next week or two to start measuring one metric on your website. It doesn't have to be a fancy, complicated system. Open up a spreadsheet and set a reminder to record the number of _____s that happened every week.

Before long, you'll see the trendline. Is it flat, trending down, or trending up?

Now you have visibility into what's happening, and that's the first step to making concrete improvements that you can report to you team as we head into 2026!

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