Every Single Page At Your Website Needs A Goal

Conversion goals are one of those odd things every arts marketer seems to know they need but for whatever reason, most groups have too many webpages with zero goals.

For those on the outside of marketing-jargon, conversion goals are the thing you want a visitor to do at your website. For the most part, they can be broken down into three basic types:

  1. Revenue generation: purchasing a ticket or making a donation.
  2. Lead generation: a visitor adds their contact information to your database (name, email, address, phone, etc.).
  3. Social engagement: a visitor shares an event or page and/or begins following your social feed.

By and large, most groups do a great job with revenue generation: adding purchase links/buttons for events, subscriptions, and donations.

Lead gen and social engagement tend to fall into distant second and third place positions but that doesn’t mean they are less important. Pages missing goals tend to be ubiquitous static content such as mission statements, about pages, directions, etc.

What’s really surprising are how often content like donor lists and board members pages don’t have a single conversion trigger.

For board member pages, focus on lead gen by including a “contact the board” form. Messages don’t have to go directly to board members but providing the point of contact means the organization can collect visitor information (just be sure to include the necessary disclosure in the form).

Donor lists should absolutely include a goal driving visitors to leave a gift at levels high enough to see their name on those lists.

On something like a mission statement page, include a specific social engagement action to follow one of the organization’s social media profiles. “See how we put our mission statement into action by following us on Facebook and leave questions for us about our mission driven activity.”

If you have the ability to include something like a click-to-tweet function, that’s a great way to highlight a key point from the mission.

[easy-tweet tweet=”Change can be difficult. Change can be turbulent. Change can be painful. – Change brings success. Change brings order. Change brings comfort. – Most importantly, change is necessary for survival.” usehashtags=”no” url=”https://adaptistration.com/about/” template=”qlite”]

In the end, there’s no reason why any page should be devoid of one or more goals. Give it a little thought then be sure to measure that impact; after all, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. I’m willing to bet the results will make for a fantastic report your executive and board committee will be grateful to see not to mention better mailing lists and beefier social engagement.

About Drew McManus

"I hear that every time you show up to work with an orchestra, people get fired." Those were the first words out of an executive's mouth after her board chair introduced us. That executive is now a dear colleague and friend but the day that consulting contract began with her orchestra, she was convinced I was a hatchet-man brought in by the board to clean house.

I understand where the trepidation comes from as a great deal of my consulting and technology provider work for arts organizations involves due diligence, separating fact from fiction, interpreting spin, as well as performance review and oversight. So yes, sometimes that work results in one or two individuals "aggressively embracing career change" but far more often than not, it reinforces and clarifies exactly what works and why.

In short, it doesn't matter if you know where all the bodies are buried if you can't keep your own clients out of the ground, and I'm fortunate enough to say that for more than 15 years, I've done exactly that for groups of all budget size from Qatar to Kathmandu.

For fun, I write a daily blog about the orchestra business, provide a platform for arts insiders to speak their mind, keep track of what people in this business get paid, help write a satirical cartoon about orchestra life, hack the arts, and love a good coffee drink.

Related Posts

Leave a Comment