Overview
Communications efforts in the month of June began with a shift of focus back to recruitment, rebranding and website projects. Public Affairs Associate Nathan McIvor joined the staff team at the beginning of the month through the Margaret Chase Smith Government Internship Program. Nathan, a rising senior at the University of Maine at Farmington who studies English, has been supporting the efforts of the Communication Officer, Bryan Roche, and the Communications Task Force through content creation and media relations strategy. McIvor will also assist in efforts related to Volunteer Maine's website merger.
Midway through June, the Volunteer Maine resource website, or the .Org website, crashed, which led to a swift shift in focus. Efforts to reach the website developer were unsuccessful as the developer took a leave of absence from their business and did not have enough support to help solve our problem. Roche, McIvor and Office Associate Beverly Ludden split up duties to archive and migrate content to the MaineServiceCommission.Gov website and quickly prop up a content structure for the newly-migrated pages. If users now navigate to VolunteerMaine.Org, the page redirects to an info page on the .Gov website, which explains the situation and also provides a directory for users to find the info they may have been looking for on the .Org website. Roche would like to note his gratitude to Ludden and McIvor for their dedication and attention to detail to this unexpected website emergency.
AmeriCorps recruitment
The first-ever Maine AmeriCorps virtual recruitment fair took place June 4, 2020 via Zoom and five AmeriCorps programs participated. The fair was sparsely attended due to a limited outreach window, but efforts have been made to fortify our direct outreach email contact list in order to inform organizations of the opportunity in a timely manner. On the positive side, the structure of the fair received praise from all programs involved. The State Service Commissions in Mississippi and Utah observed and asked to utilize our model for their virtual fairs. A second fair will be held later this year, with date and time to be determined. Please access the following link to view the virtual fair archive and resource page -- access here.
In an effort to constantly improve reporting, please see the following attachment which visualizes the data utilized below. This page serves as an accessible version of the same information presented visually. Access the visual report here.
Please note: All metrics are compared to the previous month.
Media Coverage
All press release statistics sourced from Constant Contact montly data.
June 2020 AmeriCorps Formula Grant Press Release
- Open rate: 34%
- Clicks: 13
- Click-through rate: 8%
Press placements
- Kennebec Journal/Morning Sentinel -- view coverage here
- The Courier-Gazette -- view coverage here
- The Republican Journal -- view coverage here
June 2020 Rolls of Honor Recipient Announcement Press Release
- Open rate: 39%
- Clicks: 3
- Click-through rate: 20%
Press placements
- Kennebec Journal/Morning Sentinel -- view coverage here
- The Republican Journal -- view coverage here
- The Courier-Gazette -- view coverage here
- The Courier-Gazette (story two) -- view coverage here
- Machias Valley News Observer -- view coverage here
MaineServiceCommission.Gov Website
Traffic
- Views: 6,616 (+45.9%)
- Unique views: 5.304 (+35.1%)
- Bounce rate: 63.33% (2.1% decrease) (please note: for bounce rate, decrease is positive and increase is negative)
Search results
- Clicks to site: 434 (+26.5%)
- Impressions: 21.1k (-0.3%)
Frequent search terms (by impressions)
- "americorps" 734 (-11.6%)
- "goodwill maine" 674 (+165.4%)
- "southern maine agency on aging" 381 (+19.1%)
- "volunteer maine" 352 (20.1%)
- "eastern area agency on aging" 334 (30.5%)
Device breakdown
- Desktop: 71.96% (-8.83%)
- Mobile: 26.13% (+39.51%)
- Tablet: 1.91% (-18.38%)
VolunteerMaine.Org Website
Please note: Website crash took place mid-way through the month. This will be the final report on the VolunteerMaine.Org website.
Traffic
- Views: 3,427 (+34%)
- Unique views: 2,211 (+6.6%)
- Bounce rate: 62.15% (8.8% decrease)
Search results
- Clicks to site: 103 (+58.5%)
- Impressions: 3.1k (-18.4%)
Frequent search terms (by impressions)
- "volunteer maine" 105 (not listed last month)
- “Event email“ 100 (-15.3%)
- “Volunteer email template“ 79 (+43.6%)
- “volunteer management“ 68 (not listed last month)
- "skill based volunteering" 41 (-19.6%)
Device breakdown
- Desktop: 67.9% (+1.91%)
- Mobile: 30.5% (-3.88%)
- Tablet: 1.6% (-1.84%)
Social Media engagement
Facebook (Volunteer Maine)
- New fans: 9 (+125%)
- Post likes: 79 (-26.9%)
- Post comments: 5 (-85.3%)
- Post shares: 35 (-39.7%)
- Video views: 334 (-87.2%)
- Engagement rate: 5% (+-27.6%)
- Total page reach: 7,731 (+2.3%)
- New followers: -1 (+50%)
- Retweets: 27 (-35.71%)
- Likes: 66 (-27.27%)
- Replies: 2 (-60%)
- Link clicks: 38 (+/- 0)
- Engagement rate: 1.2% (+20%)
- New followers: 2 (-33.33%)
- Likes: 76 (+/-0)
- Comments: 0 (+/-0)
- Shares: 44 (+/-0)
- Total followers: 153 (+2)
- Impressions: 509 (-26.3%)
- Reach: 400 (-19.0%)
- Post likes: 48 (-20%)
- Video views: 18 (-35.71)
- Comments: 1 (+1)
YouTube
- Views: 134 (-55.3%)
- Minutes watched: 250 (+-58.3%)
- Average viewer duration: 112 seconds (-5.9%)
Email marketing
Overall
- Open rate: 16% (-36%)
- Click-through: 62 (+24%)
- Click-through rate: 5% (-28.57%)
Campaign: May Newsletter
- Open rate: 19%
- Click-through: 24
- Click-through rate: 7%
Campaign: Recruitment Fair Email: Day-of last call
- Open rate: 42%
- Click-through: 0
- Click-through rate: 0%
Campaign: Statement on justice and equality
- Open rate: 17%
- Click-through: 4
- Click-through rate: 0.9%
Campaign: Conference Content Survey of Volunteer Leaders
- Open rate: 22%
- Click-through: 63
- Click-through rate: 11%
Glossary of terms
- Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. This helps us determine how many engaged/interested visitors visit the site in a given period.
- Clicks to site/link clicks: The physical action of clicking a link. This helps us measure the effectiveness of our messaging and ability to create calls to action.
- Click-through number: The number of unique individuals who clicked a link inside of an email. This helps us measure the effectiveness of our calls to action.
- Click-through rate: This is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. This helps us measure the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website as well as the effectiveness of email campaigns. For 2020, the average open rate is 2.6%, according to digital marketing platform Campaign Monitor.
- Cost-per-click (CPC): CPC refers to the actual price you pay for each click in your pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaigns. This helps us measure ROI on advertising, gain a better understanding of our target audiences, and the effectiveness of our messaging.
- Engagement rate: A metric that measures the level of engagement that a piece of created content is receiving from an audience. This helps us determine how many individuals interact with the content, and gain a better understanding of our target audiences. Industry standards state the following: (courtesy of Scrunch.com)
- Less than 1% = low engagement rate
- Between 1% and 3.5% = average/good engagement rate
- Between 3.5% and 6% = high engagement rate
- Above 6% = very high engagement rate
- Frequent search terms: The most utilized search terms that individuals use on Google to access the website. This gives us a better idea of how people get to our website and what topics matter most to them.
- Impressions: When an advertisement or any other form of digital media appears on a user's screen. This is not an action-based statistic, but gives us an idea of how many users potentially saw the piece of content. This metric helps us track brand awareness efforts.
- New fans/followers: The number of new individuals that choose to follow a social media profile, such as Facebook and Twitter. This helps us measure brand awareness and the effectiveness of our messaging.
- Open rate: This is an indication of how many people "view" or "open" the email. This helps us measure the effectiveness of our messaging and email content. For 2020, the average open rate is 17.8%, according to Campaign Monitor.
- Reach: The total number of different people or households exposed, at least once, to a given piece of content or webpage during a given period. Much like impression, this is a number that informs us how many people have been exposed to the piece of content. This metric helps us track brand awareness efforts and the effectiveness of our content.
- Post comments/replies: The number of individuals who take action by commenting or replying on a piece of content. This helps us measure the strength of our content and get a better idea of the number of followers who are engaged/interested in our message.
- Post likes: The number of individuals who take action by liking or reacting to a post. This helps us measure the strength of our content and the effectiveness of our messaging.
- Post shares/retweets: The number of individuals who take action by sharing a post with their personal network. This helps us measure the strength of our content and get a better idea of the number of followers who are engaged/interested in our message.
- Unique views: How many different people visited a given webpage. Slightly different than views, this helps us track the number of individual users (or sessions) that visited the website/webpage in a given period.
- Video views: The number of individuals who viewed one of our videos. When talking about Facebook, the statistic is based on three-second views, which gives us an idea of how successful we are at capturing a user's attention. This stat also helps us measure the strength of the video both from a production and messaging standpoint.
- Views: How many times a given webpage has been visited. This helps us track the effectiveness of our search visibility and the impact of our content.