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Google Grants, AdWords, and Nonprofits

By Shabbir Safdar On April 19, 2012 · Add Comment
I have spent countless hours studying the analytics around conversions for various nonprofits use of Google AdWords grants in several different sectors of service, and several sizes of nonprofit.  Through the data I have come to a conclusion you’ll probably slap your head and realize: Google AdWords topic/expertise ads are not a good technique for [...]
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Is Gmail sending your opt-in emails to the spam box because people aren’t opening them enough?

By Shabbir Safdar On April 6, 2012 · Add Comment
Recently two different clients forwarded me this story from Chronicle of Philanthropy: He [the speaker] said e-mail providers like Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo monitor how people interact with an organization’s e-mail communication, and if not enough supporters open the messages, the providers will stop delivering the messages to subscribers’ inboxes. “If nobody in the first wave [...]
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Hunting for Joomla support

By Shabbir Safdar On March 26, 2012 · Add Comment
Two nonprofit colleagues have recently contacted me about Joomla support.  They didn’t want me to provide it, they wanted to know if I knew anyone who did.  Here’s the summary of the responses I got from my linkedin, Facebook, and the progressive-exchange network queries. Apparently there’s an Idealware report that includes some consultant listings.  I [...]
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The Apple/This American Life/Mike Daisey controversy can teach you a lot about social media measurement

By Shabbir Safdar On March 16, 2012 · Add Comment
[On March 25, 2012, Mike Daisey issued another, more succinct apology.] Recently, radio program This American Life broadcast Mike Daisey’s piece about going to the Foxconn factory in China where Apple’s products are made, meeting the workers, and learning of their horrific working conditions.  Sadly, it appears to have been embellished and This American Life just retracted the [...]
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Email segmentation: people who never open, never click, and never give

By Shabbir Safdar On March 2, 2012 · Add Comment
Email segmentation is hard for two reasons: one, pulling the data and aggregating it requires an expertise in Excel, R, or some other statistical program.  And that’s if your email tool doesn’t thwart your attempts at getting the data out. Second, though, once you’ve got an email segment pulled out of your list, you now [...]
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Why you should ignore all those “industry benchmarks”

By Shabbir Safdar On February 3, 2012 · 2 Comments
A favorite marketing technique of non-profit consultants involves surveying a set of their clients to see what their metric is (like email open rate) and then publishing a study showing a “benchmark” average.   Everyone eats up this kind of  ”drive by analytics”, because if you are performing better than the benchmark, you look awesome, [...]
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“Press releases with videos get 50% more search engine traffic that those without” Do I phracking care?

By Shabbir Safdar On January 27, 2012 · Add Comment
This question was recently asked on a list I’m on: The big boss shared today that a consultant casually mentioned (in a situation he couldn’t get clarification on), ’search engine traffic to press releases with a video included get 50 times the traffic.  What’s this mean? It took me about a minute to google the “study” [...]
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3 Things You Don’t Want To Hear From a Potential Technology Product Vendor

By Shabbir Safdar On January 20, 2012 · Add Comment
Devotees of the concept of change, and in particular how markets and products evolve, would not be surprised to see Blackbaud buy Convio, or any of the other transactions in the past few years.  In technology the only constant is change. If the work you do for a nonprofit depends on technology tools, then let [...]
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What might Blackbaud do with Convio?

By Shabbir Safdar On January 18, 2012 · 1 Comment
They won’t shut it down and migrate their customers to Raiser’s Edge One of the most expensive ways a company can acquire another competing product is to buy the competitor and then try and migrate all the customers off of it. What you end up with is a very big set of unhappy customers, an [...]
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Tips for producing good infographics

By Shabbir Safdar On January 13, 2012 · Add Comment
I was doing some 2012 planning for a client the other day and thought to myself, “I need to budget for infographics this year”… I then spent a long dinner conversation with a colleague who works at 1 Block Off The Grid. She said that their infographics are some of their best performing content, but [...]
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  • What do you do?

    We create and run digital public education and awareness campaigns incorporating web-based video, creation of custom editorial and social media content, web and mobile applications, and relentless quantities of person-to-person outreach to help build your base of supporters. We have an obsessive relationship with and a strong expertise in metrics and measurement.
  • Contact Us

    You can reach The Safdar Group at 415-683-7526 or shabbir -at- safdaranalytics.com.
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