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Kingston Rotary's ClubRunner website has astonishing first year of growth

Discussion in 'Best Practices & Showcase' started by John Borst on Mar 23, 2023.

  1. John Borst

    By:John Borst-  Mar 23, 2023
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    How do you know if your ClubRunner Rotary club website is a success? What for-that-matter are the goals for your site in the first place?

    As my club has now completed one year with ClubRunner, I wanted to provide them with some idea of its success.

    However, since I have never had a discussion about their goals for the site, I used my own goals to choose what metrics I would share.

    My personal goals for the site were:
    1. To see a steady increase in the growth of the site month to month throughout the year, year over year. To do this I chose the number of page views and users.
    2. To grow a site with as large a local audience as possible.
    Of course this is but a microcosm of the data one should monitor for a site but my time was limited to a 5 minute “Rotary Moment”. Besides, sharing data is rarely a welcome topic for an audience many of whom couldn’t care less about a website’s reach.

    The truth is, unless your club can afford Search Engine Optimization (SEO) software few Rotary clubs have any idea how their site’s numbers are doing compared to other sites. There is little evidence that the topic is of much importance among the ClubRunnerCommunity.com members either.

    My reason for choosing those two goals is to prepare for the day when it becomes feasible to introduce ClubRunner’s Membership Success Module to the club for without a fairly large local user group who return often the success of such an endeavour is limited.

    The presentation which follows is in PowerPoint form, using a recorded and video insert sound-track, exported to an MP4 format and then uploaded to the Club’s YouTube channel.

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  2. Mickey

    By:Mickey-  Mar 23, 2023
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    Hi John,

    What a wonderful presentation you gave, thank you for sharing! I know from past discussions this is all a labour of love for you, you've done a great job of organizing and presenting this valuable information.

    I really appreciated how you had so many breakdowns like exactly which pages got the most views, country breakdowns, etc. Was all this information gathered from Google Analytics or did you use other tools?

    Also, I know the "Membership Success" module in CR may be new to some of our users, so here is our online guide for any of them:
    https://www.clubrunnersupport.com/guides/membership-success

    Thank you for posting John!
     
  3. John Borst

    By:John Borst-  Mar 23, 2023
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    Hello Mickey,

    I am pleased that you found the presentation of value. Yes all of the information was from Google Analytics. I do have similar analytics from Statcounter some of it in a better graphic format, however, I decided to keep it simple by only using one source. They do back each other up.

    Having now done two different club websites, I can't emphasis enough the need to have a fundraiser which involves bringing local patrons to the site on a weekly or daily basis. The Cash Calendar is such a vehicle. A weekly or daily find the Ace 50/50 draw could provide the same kind of advantage.

    I have not yet begun selling ads on the site because I am insisting that any revenue from ads go to support the site and not into fund raising revenue.

    As I said building the site is the easy part, growing the site is the harder part. Knowing and using data is an essential part of that process. SEO is expensive. There is a cost to using many analytic programs, especially if you want to track how a user navigates a page.

    We have produced nearly 100 stories in the past year. More stories means more organic search results leading to the Kingston site. The next top 10 stories will mean many more page views ....it is like compound interest. If you stop the video or go to the website and look at the headlines you will notice they are all about the same length and I hope each has a hook to grab your attention. That is because I use, at my cost, Coshedules Headline analyzer. It gives me a people score and a search engine score (Google score). Sometimes it can take over an hour to reach a green score (70 and higher in each category). It is tools like that, plus Grammarly that I want to spend money on to improve the site. There is also a way to use ChatGPT. Write a draft of a paragraph quickly and then tell ChatCPT to "work on it" and watch what happens.

    Bye-the-way since many of us now use hybrid meetings we have the potential to have a video record of each meeting and the speaker. I extract the speakers speech, make a title page, copyright logo, and end page and using Adobe PremierPro edit a video which I insert into the shorter website story. Some stories have multiple videos; one has 10. The result is a club YouTube channel with over 100 videos Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google?

    My hope is to have the Membership Success module up and operational by this time next year.

    John
     
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