How to Gain a Digital Competitive Advantage Over your Peers

Your non-profit peers are all working hard to serve their community and fulfill their mission.   How can you know if you are gaining or losing ground against them?  And once you know where you stand, is there anything you can do about it?

While obvious metrics like the number of employees they have or their total budget will give you an overall sense of their scale, these metrics alone cannot tell you whether you are winning mindshare or gaining an edge in awareness, which can lead to better fundraising or an increase in your base of volunteers.  

Fortunately, there are ways to use online resources to find out how you compare to your peers.   By analyzing search keywords, organic search traffic, ad budgets and social media sites, you can get a good idea of where you stand and where you need to improve. 

Search Visibility

Keyword Visbility indicates how visible a website is in the organic search results when people enter search queries into the Google search engine.  In general, better keyword visibility will lead to better brand awareness and more free traffic to your website.  However, not all keywords are created equal. Some phrases receive more traffic than others, so it's crucial to research and identify the best keywords to focus on when updating website tags and creating content that search engines will notice. Key Metric:  Number of keywords visible on the first, second or third page. 

Search Traffic

If you know something about an organization's keyword visiblity, you can estimate overall organic search traffic, which is the number of "free" visits they are getting from search engines like Google.  If one of your peers is getting strong organic search traffic, it means that they are getting a boost from Google that may turn into donations or another type of engagement. Creating content around highly searched topics can be an effective way to get more organic search traffic.  Key Metric: Number of organic visits to the website per month for the last six months. 

Paid Advertising

Some of your peers may be using Paid Digital Ads to drive traffic to their website, and it's possible to get an estimate of what they are spending. While some organizations spend money building their brand, most organizations that are spending dollars on advertising are driving users to pages where they can donate, volunteer or get engaged. By learning how much they are spending and where they are driving their traffic, you can compare your engagement strategies and perhaps learn new ways to connect with your community. Key Metric: Google Ad spending by month for the last six months. 

Social Media

Most of your peers are posting on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, and you can learn a lot about them by analyzing the qualitative and quantitative data from these sites.  By understanding the frequency of the posts, the type of content they post, and the engagement they get from each post, you can learn a lot about how their community feels about them, and the type of content that you might want to post to engage your own community. Key Metric:  Followers, Engagement rate and types of content posted on the major social media sites of the past 3 months. 

By understanding these digital metrics, you'll get a comprehensive view of where you stand vs. your peers and what you need to do to be a leader. Please let us know if you'd like to schedule a call to talk about how we can help you with this analysis. 

by David Reske, CEO of Nowspeed, Inc.

Learn more about Nowspeed, Inc.