Foundation
As a charity, you’re constantly searching for methods to have a greater influence. These days, building relationships with volunteers and donors requires more than just enthusiasm; it also requires audience analysis and the use of data to guide decisions.
Having a presence online is key to connecting with your supporters and spreading your message. But just having a website and social media accounts isn’t enough anymore – to truly engage with your audience, you first need to understand how they interact with your online platforms.
How GA4 can help your charity
That’s where Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can help. GA4 offers you the ability to gain deep insights into your audience’s behaviour that may help you maximise your fundraising efforts.
For example, you can see which pages of your website are the most popular or what content is driving the most engagement. This information is vital because it tells you what your supporters are interested in and where there might be barriers to engagement.
With this knowledge, you can make informed decisions about where you need to focus your efforts.
Insights you may discover:
- A certain blog post is driving a lot of traffic, meaning that you should create more content on the same topic
- Users are leaving your site from a specific page, showing that it needs design improvement to keep people engaged
- Users are clicking your ‘donate’ button, but then not completing the action
These types of insights are the quintessential results of a data-driven digital strategy, making sure that all your charity’s efforts are aligned with what your audience needs.
Why GA4?
First off, it’s free! There is also a wealth of training content available online for GA4, including tutorials, webinars and documentation. This makes it easier for you to train your team and maximise the tool’s usability across the charity.
Additionally, GA4 has ready-made integrations with other Google tools such as Google Ads, Google Search Console, and BigQuery. This allows you to analyse the impact of your charity’s campaigns across different platforms and consolidate all your data.
Using GA4 to help increase fundraising and engagement
Fundraising is key to any charity, and understanding what drives donations is crucial to a charity’s consistent success. GA4 provides detailed insights into your supporters’ behaviour, helping you identify the most successful fundraising campaigns or channels and where potential donors might be dropping off before completing a donation.
For example, GA4 can display the performance of several campaign components if you are managing a multi-channel fundraising campaign.
Questions it could answer:
- Do more people donate through social media, or do they do so after receiving an email?
- Do they interact with your donation page or are they abandoning it?
- Does a particular day or time perform better than another?
By understanding these patterns, you can adjust your campaigns to be more effective, focusing on the channels and strategies that give you the best results.
In addition, GA4 allows you to segment your audience based on their behaviour and engagement habits. This means that you can design tailored outreach campaigns, focusing on particular audiences with messaging that speaks to their interests and previous engagements with your charity.
Some ideas could be:
- Users that have read previous blog posts, are engaged and could be served content about donating
- Users who have already shown interest in fundraising content when launching new fundraising campaigns
- Using geographical data to pin point certain areas of the country with information and events that could be of interest to them
Top Tip: Personalised communication has been proven to increase engagement and brand loyalty, helping you build stronger and longer-lasting relationships with your supporters.
Maximising your charity’s impact with limited resources
One of the biggest challenges charities face is making the most of limited resources. Time and money can be limited meaning that every resource must be used efficiently to achieve your goals. GA4 can play an important role by providing the data you need to make smarter and more informed decisions.
For example, GA4’s ‘key event’ (formerly ‘conversion’) tracking features allow you to monitor specific actions that are critical to your mission.
These may be:
- Newsletter sign-ups
- Event registrations
- Volunteer interest requests
By setting up key events in GA4, you can track how well your website and campaigns are performing against these objectives, giving you clear indicators of what’s working and what isn’t.
This kind of data-driven approach allows you to focus your efforts on the strategies that deliver the most impact rather than spreading your resources thinly across multiple initiatives.
Privacy and trust
GA4 has many different features that help you manage user data in a responsible way. As a charity, maintaining the trust of your supporters is essential and being transparent about how you collect and use their data is a key part of this.
GA4 allows you to customise your data collection practices, aligning with legal requirements and best practices.
For example, you can:
- Control how long you retain user data
- Anonymise IP addresses to protect individual privacy
- Implement user consent prompts to ensure that your supporters are aware of and agree to your data practices
Via Consent Mode within Google Tag Manager (GTM), you can also adjust your collection of data to exclude anyone who does not consent to their data being collected – through the rejection of performance cookies.
In addition to obtaining access to powerful analytics tools, implementing GA4 shows your dedication to using data in an ethical manner. This is becoming increasingly crucial since supporters and contributors are now more conscious than ever of privacy concerns and will want organisations to handle their data carefully. By showing consideration for users’ privacy, you can build trust with your audience, which is essential to maintain their engagement and support.
Conclusion
By using analytics to help with your charity’s online strategy, you are keeping pace with your competitors while also maximising your influence. GA4 offers the tools for you to gain the insights you need to better understand your audience and optimise your fundraising efforts.
Other useful resources relating to data & analytics:
Audit your GA4 set up with our tool
Using analytics to boost website conversions for your charity
