If you’re a not-for-profit using canvassing techniques – whether it is traditional door-to-door tactics, presence at a community event, or some other form of human connection – it can be difficult to track your success if you don’t capture donations on the spot.
How do you know if the pitch you gave sunk in and if the person who said they were going to think about it, really did decide to follow through and donate? One of the easiest and most cost effective things you can do would be to create a vanity url to help you track the success of these face-to-face campaign efforts.
A vanity url can be either a memorable web address redirecting to a specific page on your company’s website, or an extension of the current domain (e.g 123.com/xyz).
You might already create vanity urls for your DRTV or direct mail pieces, but have you thought of taking them that one step further? What about creating vanity urls for your canvassers to use that are separated by region, province, city or even events?
If you could track which teams, areas or events ended up providing web traffic, you could begin to increase your response rates and cost per donor acquisition for these tactics.
By simply creating either a ‘calling’ card for each url (team) or by inserting the urls as part of the dynamic copy changes (i.e showing regional office contact information) for your brochures and leaflets, you might suddenly begin to know whether or not your public outreach campaigns are generating awareness, and better yet, donations. Many times canvassers simply leave information behind, or speak to someone who is busy, or in today’s society, simply untrusting. A vanity url provides you an opportunity to know which potential donors decided to check out your website on their own time and terms.
By having multiple vanity urls, you would be able to review your analytics data to not only see how many people visited your site by specific group (url), but what they did while there and how that behaviour compares to other website visitors (eg donors vs. online ads vs search engine visitors etc). Is there a specific page people from the vanity urls looked at? How does that compare across the urls? You could provide this information to your canvassers so they know what topics or types of information they might need to cover in certain areas – perhaps it’s different region by region. Is there one url that provides you with a high conversion rate? If so, this data then becomes a great way for you to connect with your teams on the ground and provide them positive feedback, or have them mentor those teams that seem to have lower conversion (close) rates.
Of course vanity urls are only good if people use them and this tends to be a highly controversial topic since recent studies show that more people may recall a vanity 800-number easier than a vanity url (if listening to or watching an ad). But considering how cost effective they are (especially if you use an extension of your site), why not take a chance? You may or may not get oodles of data, but you’ll definitely get more than you have now, and enough to get a better understanding of what’s happening after your canvassers have gone away.
New moms love a few things – receiving food they can stock in the freezer for easy reheats when they are too tired because baby kept them up all night, or busy all day and guest posters so they can continue providing their readers with valuable content. Or at least this new mom loves both these things equally. 
Rebecca Atkinson (Muller) is a freelance web marketing/analytics consultant with more than seven years of direct experience helping businesses create and implement online marketing and communications strategies. Her clients come from all industries including finance, technology and not-for-profit. She specializes in helping her clients determine how to improve their advertising programs, focusing on visitor behaviour – beyond the inital click-through. Full bio available