Track How Effective Your Project Updates Are

October 9th, 2015

Part of running a successful fundraising campaign is staying in contact with your supporters. One of the tools PodPledge provides to do this is its Project Update system, where project owners can publish a project update, include a video, and even email the update to their supporters.

But another part of running a successful fundraising campaign is knowing what kind of communication is working, and who it’s reaching. And that’s where PodPledge’s update statistics become invaluable. Let’s take a look at the information that’s available to project owners every time they email a project update to their supporters.

First off, to publish a project update, use the Post An Update option in your project area. On this page, you can enter the text of your update, link a YouTube or Vimeo video to it, and optionally select to email a copy of the update to each of your project’s supporters.

After you have published your first update, an additional link will appear in your project area. This new link, titled Previous Project Updates will link to a page that will display general statistics about each update you have published for that project.

That’s nice enough, but wait, it doesn’t stop there.

If the option to email the project’s supporters was selected, then statistics about the update’s email readership will be displayed. This is an estimate of the percentage of emails that have been viewed by their recipients. Clicking this link will open a page with detailed information about your email’s readership. Let’s take a look at an example.

The email readership statistics will list the timespan over which the project update’s email was delivered to your supporters, the total number of recipients the email was sent to, the number that have been viewed by your recipients, the number of any that were undeliverable, the number of unique links your email contained, the number of links in your email that have been clicked, and the number of different supporters who have clicked on a link in the email.

The page also lists a nifty dandy pie chart showing the break down of what percentage of the delivered emails have been read, interacted with, and remain unviewed.

A list of all the links (if any) that the email included are also listed, with indications of when the link was most recently clicked, the total number of times it has been clicked, and what percentage of all email clicks are associated with it.

Now, knowing what percentage of your email updates are reaching your supporters is useful information. But, even more useful would be knowing exactly who is being reached, and what links they are following. Well, this information is available too.

Clicking the Number Of Opened Emails link will display a list of the supporters who have viewed the email, when, how many times, and the number of links they have clicked on.

The Number Of Links Clicked link will display information on exactly which links in the email have been clicked, when, how often, and by whom.

And, the Number Of Clicks link in the Email Link Performance section will show the clickthrough stats for just that specific link.

All together, PodPledge’s tracking system for project update emails give project owners access to multi-layered usage statistics, informing them as to how users are interacting with the communications they send out. It’s information that can help project owners to see what’s working, and what can be improved. All of which hopefully encourages project owners to Stay Inspired.