Three practical methods to evaluate your nonprofit’s digital content — so you can make smarter editorial decisions.

Your small but mighty comms team is cranking out content week after week. They’re working with your organization’s technical experts to produce four blog articles per month, dozens of social media posts, fact sheets about your programs, and a monthly newsletter. They’re exhausted, often working nights and weekends to keep up with this ambitious pace. And yet, despite the impressive output, it’s not clear which pieces are making an impact and connecting with your audience. It feels like you’re spinning your wheels.

It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of constant production. You set ambitious comms output targets to make sure your audience knows about your great work. You assemble a team and systems that can hit your production targets.

But greater volume isn’t always the answer. You need a system to assess how well your content performs. Which topics drive traffic to your website? Which articles do people tend to spend the most time on? And which ones support your conversion goals, such as newsletter signups or donations?

This article shares three practical ways to assess the value of your communications content: 4 ACES to evaluate your messaging, analytics to leverage your data, and audience research to hear directly from the people you’re trying to reach. By looking at your content from these three angles, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of what’s working, what’s not, and why.

With the insights from this analysis, you’ll be able to make more informed editorial decisions, save staff time and money, and deliver valuable content to your audience that keeps them engaged.

Evaluate your messaging with 4 ACES

The first method applies the 4 ACES messaging framework to assess whether your messaging is likely to resonate and convey clear value to your audience. This qualitative analysis is based on tried and true messaging criteria and can typically be done in-house with minimal time investment.

4 quarters

The first part of the 4 ACES looks at how well your content favors big ideas instead of dozens of small ideas. The central concept is that people prefer “four quarters” (25 cent coins) over “100 pennies.” You do your audience a huge favor when you break down lots of detail into larger concepts. It’s easier for people to find information of interest — and to remember that info.

Some questions to assess how well your content delivers four quarters:

• Is the topic of your content immediately apparent by scanning it quickly?
• For webpage content, does the page contain clear headings to guide readers to find important information?
• How well is dense, technical content broken down into manageable chunks?

Audience-centered

This principle is at the heart of good communications: does it center on real needs and interests of the audience? Your audience is overwhelmed with information. Endless scrolling feeds, hundreds of emails to sift through, and no shortage of articles, videos, and podcasts clamoring for their attention. 

How well does your content:

• Align with your audience members’ values?
• Help them address their problems or achieve their goals?
• Place them at the center, rather than your organization?

Concrete

Nonprofits and other mission-driven organizations tackle complex problems — which often leads to overly complex messaging. We speak in abstract, academic terms. We hammer people over the head with acronyms. As a result, we leave our audience exhausted and ready to tune out.

Make your content more concrete by asking:

• What concrete, descriptive words can you use in place of abstract or technical terms?
• What specific, real-world examples will help demonstrate your impact more clearly?
• How well do we use data and numbers to support our storytelling?

Emotional

People react emotionally to your content before they process it rationally. Your content needs to make people feel something — concern, excitement, hope — before they will invest their precious time reading or watching.

To assess emotional connection, you might assess:

• Are there any stories, examples, or details about real people?
• Do you use vivid, sensory language?
• Do you incorporate challenges or aspirations the reader might relate to?

Simple

The final piece of the 4 ACES involves using simple language. Your audience doesn’t have the patience to read 50-word sentences. Make their life easier by using fewer words. Use the active voice. Break up long blocks of text.

Check how accessible your content is by asking:

• Does each sentence contain one main idea?
• Do you avoid long, multi-clause sentences?
• Are your paragraphs short and focused?

Analyze your website and social data

While the previous method uses qualitative data to assess whether your content is well crafted, the next method leverages quantitative data to help you uncover your best performing content. You could easily go deep into a rabbit hole exploring your web and social analytics. But looking at just a handful of basic metrics can give you a clear picture of what topics are grabbing your audience’s attention. 

With these insights, you can focus your efforts on high-value topics — reusing rather than reinventing content during every editorial planning cycle.

The process involves:

• Creating a basic dashboard
• Capturing data for a period of at least six months
• Identifying high-value content to repurpose, repackage, or refine

Create the basic dashboard

Rather than seeking a comprehensive assessment of your web and social analytics, this simple dashboard will give you actionable insights with minimal maintenance. Download my template below, or create your own with tabs for your website and social media channels.

There are endless possibilities for digging deeper into your website analytics, here are a few tried-and-true metrics:

• Views: The total number of times visitors viewed a given page. This is the most basic popularity signal.
• Average engagement time: How long users actually spent on the page, providing a strong proxy for whether they read it.
• Event count: Tracks various kinds of engagement on the page, such as clicks on a call-to-action, newsletter signups, or downloads triggered from the page. Note that you can configure this metric in Google Analytics to track specific types of events — by default it counts all events, whether it’s a click, scroll, etc.

For your social media analytics, every platform has its own set of metrics, but each offers some variation of the following:

• Reach/impressions: How many people saw the post (reach = unique accounts; impressions = total views including repeats)
• Engagement rate: Likes, comments, shares, saves divided by reach. This offers the best signal of how well the post resonates with your audience.
• Link clicks: How many people clicked through to the article — creating the bridge between social and web performance.

Track your content over time

Once you have your tracker configured, it’s time to populate the data. If your site didn’t already have Google Analytics installed and configured, you’ll have to wait a while before you’ve got any meaningful data — at least a few months. Set yourself a monthly task to update your data.

However, if you have access to the historical data for each channel, that’s great, you’re ready to dig into the analysis. Carve out a couple of hours and update each tab with at least the top 20 pages, articles, and social posts. 

As you review your data, you’ll start to see some patterns emerge. Which topics tend to get the most interest? Which topics seem to be falling flat? What events and actions are tied to spikes in interest and engagement? 

Repurpose, repackage, or refine

Once you have started to see which of your pieces stand out, you can identify topics that are ripe for replication. None of us have time to create brand new content every single day — nor should we. Instead, we use the data from this analysis to find ways to repurpose, repackage, and reuse valuable content.

The Summary tab of the downloadable workbook below includes your rolled up analytics data from the year-to-date. It also includes an approach to conducting a content audit, with four columns:

• Keep: Check this column for any content that you can simply leave as it is. It’s performing moderately well, the content is still up-to-date, but doesn’t merit further work at the moment.
• Update: Use this for any content that is performing well but could use some updated information, such as current statistics or new insights.
• Repurpose: This column is for your highest performing content, with high-value topics. This is where the magic happens — remixing and reusing the messages, methods, and insights from these posts in a variety of formats.
• Remove: Sometimes you’ll find content that is no longer relevant or otherwise doesn’t represent the kind of information you want to share. It’s best to cut this content from your site.

If you commit to this process, the upkeep gets even easier and the insights will jump off the screen.

Listen to your audience

The 4 ACES audit tells you whether your content is well crafted. Analytics show you what people clicked. But neither can tell you whether your content actually changed anything for the reader. The only way to find that out is to ask them directly, through one-on-one or small group interviews.

In a recent article on conducting audience interviews, I shared a framework for interviews to generate audience personas. The same approach applies here, adapting it to focus on your editorial content rather than your audience’s broader characteristics — what information sources, platforms, formats, lengths, topics, are they interested in?

Here are some examples of topics and questions you might use:

What have they read?

• Which of our newsletters, articles, or social posts do you remember reading in the past few months?
• How do you typically come across our content — email, social media, the website, word of mouth?
• Are there topics we cover that you tend to seek out, versus ones you scroll past?

What do they remember?

• If you had to summarize what [your organization] stands for based on the content you’ve seen, what would you say?
• Is there a specific piece — an article, a story, a post — that stuck with you? What made it memorable?
• What words or phrases from our communications come to mind?

What have they used and what helps them?

• Have you ever shared something we published? What prompted you to share it?
• Has any of our content led you to take an action — donate, sign up, attend an event, change how you think about an issue?
• Is there information you’ve gone back to look for on our website?

What are their preferred channels?

• What communications from other organizations do you find most useful or engaging?
• What are your favorite sources of information, e.g. podcasts, blogs, YouTube channels, etc?

You don’t need to interview dozens of people. Talking to even four or five members of your audience about these topics will generate valuable data about their interests and preferences. Ideally you can have one person interviewing and someone else taking notes. An AI notetaker is fine if the participants allow — but it’s also extremely useful for members of your team to hear directly from the audience. 

Putting it into practice

By applying these three approaches, you gain a treasure trove of practical qualitative and quantitative insights about your comms content. Rather than blindly continuing to produce article after article without any sense of whether it will resonate with your audience, you can make informed decisions. 

You’ll have less chaos and better content. Your comms team will be empowered to improve your existing and new content, prioritize topics and formats, and save time through repurposing valuable content. And hopefully they can save their nights and weekends for some downtime, rather than catch-up time. 

Download the spreadsheet below, and repurpose it to suit your context. Over time, you’ll have a powerful suite of data to make editorial decisions with confidence.