In one of my last posts, Starting A New Position, I spoke about my new position with the American Institute of Constructors.  Well it has been a fast few weeks as I have been working to get up to speed on a number of items as well as helping to put together a report to present to the Board at the annual Mid-Year Meeting.  I think this works out to be a good time to share some insight on what I did with my portion of the report.  

Since I have limited time with the organization I have focused my efforts towards the new website the organization launched 6 months ago.   My first thought is what can I share in my report that not only captures what the new website is doing, what it will be doing, and everything else that is going on with the organization?  I also wanted to make sure I was not just throwing website stats out without some good explanations of them.  This last thought surprised me a bit, the previous association I worked with was very technology savvy, I could speak on website stats without having to simplify them or at times they would simplify them for me.

I started my report off by doing a bit of brainstorming, getting a list of what is going on with the organization and how they tie into the website.  The site is 6 months old so we are able to get a baseline read on our normal site traffic and also to be able to identify any trends such as unique visitors, repeat visitors and high traffic times.  After getting a read on the site traffic I was able to lay that out against what has been going on with the organization. 

The first thing I saw was a large spike in site traffic during the middle of September, both in new visitors and returning visitors.  So what caused that?  The answer was an announcement of some very important information about the organizations next certification exam.  So how do I present this to the Board and also present an actionable item for how we can take advantage of this type of spike in site traffic?  My first idea is that since we are coming up towards our annual renewal cycle is that we need to take advantage and make sure we have some type of reminder on the site about the renewal coming up.  While we will emailing out renewal information only a month after that spike in site traffic, being able to get that information up on the site is another point of contact with the membership.

Another section of my report I presented some ideas of how the board and the membership can better take advantage of the new website.  In any website project it is important to make sure your members know what the site can do and how they can use it.  I presented some ideas of holding some webinar’s and training sessions for members to highlight some of the sites features and how they can use them.  Along with that I presented some other stats that can help the Board understand what people are looking at on the site and what areas are getting more attention.  This is one of the most important bits of information you can get from website analytics.  You can get a snap shot of what pages are getting long stay times and what are not.

So if I were to boil this all down into one piece of advice for someone who has a website report for their Board it would be to make sure you simplify what you are presenting and what your actionable items are.  Assume that the board is not going to draw the same conclusions you may have.  Make sure you spell out what you are seeing and how you are going to act with that information.

Anyone out there have any similar experiences or advice?

Tagged as: AIC, non profit boards, Web Development