How Nonprofits Can Benefit from the Google/Salesforce Partnership

The potential benefits to nonprofits of the Google/Salesforce merger are a little beyond my ken, since I’ve never used Salesforce as a constituent-relations-management tool, but fortunately others in the community are more on the ball on this one. Riche Zamor from CITI has this to say:

I see the strongest use coming out of this integration for NPO’s is the ability to track your donation campaigns through Salesforce. If you have attempted to run a cost-per-click campaign to increase your donations, to this point you needed to use AdWords standard tracking to measure the ads performance, then look at your fundraising stats and try to do some type of comparison. With this integration you can do much better analysis of your fundraising campaign to better target your keyword ads.

Currently, there is an integration between AdWords and Analytics that will give you some pretty good reporting on action campaigns, allowing you to analyze which keywords yielded the best return on investment (most times measured by conversion rate). With your donation campaigns, you can analyze which ads performed best and which gave yielded the highest about of donations, but can’t do much tracking on the individual donor level. I may be making a premature judgment on this, but it looks like you will be able to track which specific keyword search by an individual yielded a donation. It is the ad that drew them in, not the keyword, but you now know a bit of information about what that person’s interest may be. Why would that person search for that word at that time? Are they relatively interested in content related to that keyword or phrase? These are the types of questions we may now be able to answer.

I am looking forward to the potential this has for nonprofits looking to move into the area of behavior targeting, which I personally think in underutilized as a method to target constituents. Being able to target people by interests and not just your standard demographic or geographic segments can potentially yield better results for NPO’s. Of course, the effectiveness of this would need to be tested.

Thanks Riche — good to have people around to make up for my woeful ignorance.

cpd

Written by
Colin Delany
View all articles