Non-Profit Case Study: Short-Term Reporting Project Paves Way for Long-Term Gains
All companies need marketing reporting tools that provide a measurable formula to benchmark efforts. However, not all marketing teams understand how to generate relevant marketing reporting across multiple systems, channels, and touchpoints. This is where a short-term senior marketing advisor can help fine tune an organization’s efforts to maximize current resources, uncover new opportunities, and build a framework to support future growth.
We recently worked with the Cancer Wellness Center (CWC) — a nonprofit serving those impacted by cancer with free wellness services. CWC engaged PMP to develop a centralized marketing dashboard to better gauge how marketing activities were contributing to fundraising and program participation goals.
Typically, these types of engagements result in more than just a dashboard or reporting tool. As we build a framework for evaluating marketing activities, we are also able to audit existing marketing activities and identify opportunity areas for the marketing practice overall.
The Impact of PMP’s Strategic Marketing Advisory Efforts
Leveraging our experience helping organizations build and scale marketing programs of all shapes and sizes, we were able to set up a starter marketing dashboard for the team at CWC that established metrics for success and enabled ongoing updates for key internal and external stakeholders.
In this specific situation, we started by jumping in to support CWC’s marketing needs during an especially busy season for the organization — the Annual Stepping Up to Wellness Run/Walk. While we helped the team with the reporting build, we also filled a temporary execution gap which allowed us to get a grass roots understanding of every marketing touchpoint, assisting with improvements along the way.
The combination of reporting improvements alongside channel, campaign and messaging improvements allowed the marketing team to realize short-term gains whilst building for the future. In addition, as new resources joined the organization, they were better set up for success and accountability with a clear understanding of performance expectations.
Ultimately, our efforts together with the CWC team allowed the organization to exceed its fundraising goals for key events, better attribute specific activities to revenue contribution and realize marketing department efficiencies. To conclude the engagement, we also provided a performance audit that demonstrated the organization’s overall marketing health with recommendations for growth.
By developing a centralized, cumulative view of results tracking while providing an execution assist and audit, we set the tone for tracking short and long-term marketing goals, and a system to ensure the team was continually able to properly benchmark for success.
The Power of Outside Expertise: Addressing Common Gaps
This is not a unique situation. We’ve had many clients approach us to address similar marketing reporting needs. Reflecting on these recent engagements and client frustration points, we wanted to highlight a few common gaps we see across marketing organizations with respect to performance reporting:
- Lack of understanding of Google Analytics and its proper configuration for generating useful reporting (e.g., understanding the power of UTMs)
- Failure to connect disparate platforms or systems to generate a more integrated, holistic perspective about all activities and results
- Inefficiency in the martech configuration – lack of platform-to-platform integrations, homegrown workaround solutions and/or duplicative or unnecessary tool purchases
- Analysis paralysis across the multitude of metrics and channels including social, email, PPC, SEM/SEO, online/offline, etc.
In many cases, it comes down to strengthening the technology foundation. And, in some cases it comes down to focusing on the most important metrics for success. In all cases, we’re finding that a light assist from a more experienced marketer can help shed light on a better way. If you’re interested in improving your marketing reporting or benefiting from a mix of audit, reporting and/or execution support, reach out today to learn more.
