We’re 11 days into 2012 – how are those resolutions coming? Personally, I’m not a huge fan of making big, sweeping life changes at the start of every year. I prefer to set weekly or monthly goals that are measurable and realistic.

Happy Friday to all! Who has big plans for the first (full) weekend of 2012?

There have been so many awesome association blog posts in the community this week! We’re loving the energy everyone has been bringing to 2012 so far, and we’re excited to see where the rest of the year takes us. With that said, below is a quick round-up of five of our fave posts from the community.

1. Jeff Hurt succinctly sums up four macrotrends that will affect your organization this year: volatility, multiplicity, versatility and mobility. I think the final two are key, as business practices become both more versatile and mobile. How has this affected your organization?

2. Are outcomes truly defined by an association’s leader? Cindy Butts writes that, if a leader says a task should take two days, it will take two days. If a leader says it will take a year, the task will take a year. How much time should you allocate for tasks and projects?

3. Many people use the new year as a time to improve their productivity and habits. Elizabeth Engel shares several great articles with ideas and tips for increasing productivity and focus at the office. What’s your favorite tip?

4. At the Acronym blog, Mark Athitakis shares some unconventional words of wisdom for the new year: embrace your messes. Resolutions and goals are great but unless they have a clear focus, they likely won’t be accomplished. Watch the video and definitely check out the comments here.

5. Aaron Wolowiec shares how he’s going to change his world this year by shifting gears and consulting. He (rightly) points out that, at the end of the day, what really matters at a conference is learning and Aaron shares his dedication to his consulting practice in this great post.

From everyone at MemberClicks, have a wonderful weekend!

Before the new year, Maddie Grant published a great blog post asking association bloggers – and staffers – how they will change the world in the coming year. She wasn’t asking for resolutions, per se, but asking how you can make the world better for others in your life – whether your coworkers, friends and family or even strangers.

As for me and MemberClicks? We want to continue to engage with small staff association staffers on a daily basis. We want to learn what problems you face in your everyday lives so we can help make them easier. We want to help you understand how and why social media is so important. We want to speak to small staff associations each and every day. We want to be your partner, not just your technology vendor. We want to help your small staff association provide its members with the best possible tools they need to succeed.

Our “world” is the world of small staff associations and those unique issues that they face.

And personally? I like to test my limits both professionally and physically, and this year, I’m going to run the ING New York City Marathon (my first 26.2!). I view the marathon as a metaphor for life – trust your training, slow and steady “wins” the race, plan ahead. The discipline it takes to train for a marathon – or any race you deem “long-distance” – can be applied to my professional life as well.

TALK TO US: How will your small staff association change its world this year? And tell us – what can MemberClicks do to help your small staff association?

I’m currently debating a few big athletic decisions for 2012. I’ve always been active but so far I’ve stuck to athletic pursuits that don’t take up too much time to train for (10Ks, a sprint triathlon and a few half-marathons to see how far I can push it). But the events I’m considering for next year would involve much more training time and dedication. Do I really want to commit my time and finances?

Similarly, it’s getting to be that time of year when many associations start looking at their own goals for the coming year. For any potential decision and goal, it’s crucial to consider all aspects – budget, time commitment involved and of course, how realistic it is that the goal will be met. Most of us (if not all of us) have heard of the SMART acronym – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. You know – making sure all of the who, what, where, when questions are answered.

How do you know when it’s time to recalibrate your goals? If you’re completely over budget with no way of cutting back, perhaps it’s best to abandon a certain project. Being pragmatic and admitting a goal isn’t realistic is much smarter than barreling through and completing something just for the sake of completion – even if its quality is compromised.

You may not know what 2012 will bring for your association. But, if you’re “smart” (pun intended), your goals will be easily measured and you’ll know when you’re succeeded – and don’t take small victories for granted!

By Adam Kearney, MemberClicks Creative Director

Goals – What Are They?

Put simply, a goal is an action a user can take on your website that leads to a positive result for your organization. This could be a sale of a product, a registration for an event, or a new signup for a membership. Or it could be something much more intangible, such as filling out a survey or answering a poll question. Maybe you have written an article that you want your membership to read – in that case, the goal is as simple as getting them to the page. You will likely have several goals on your website, and they may change over time.

Whatever the goal is, setting up and monitoring the metrics for a goal in your analytics solution will save you time by providing a quick snapshot of the success or failure of an initiative. Instead of digging down through your analytics reports and manually looking to see how many hits you’ve gotten over time, if you have set up a goal, you can instantly see if it has been successful or not.

The most common way to set up a goal is to have a page act solely as the end point for a goal. That way, whenever that page receives a hit, you know that the goal has been accomplished. Some examples of this sort of goal include:

• A ‘thank you’ page after a user has submitted information through a form. You would use this type of goal to track newsletter signups, email list subscriptions, application forms, contact forms and many other similar forms.
• A purchase confirmation page or receipt page
• An ‘About us’ page
• A particular news article

Once you have decided what you want to measure, you should think about what type of goal will best help you determine success.

Types Of Goals

The most common type of goal is a URL Destination. The examples given above are all URL destinations. These are easy to measure as each hit the destination receives counts as a positive result. In this way, you can establish realistic, tangible metrics for how many hits each goal should be receiving. If you have a membership of 500 individuals, and you want at least half of them to read a particular “members-only” article, in this case, you’d be looking for 250 hits for that article.

One thing to keep in mind about URL Destination goals is that you need to specify the correct page as your goal. You might think that you should target the first page of a form as your goal, but this will only tell you how many people reached the front page. That number will include people who go to the page and leave or who start to fill out the form but quit halfway through. Since you wouldn’t count those as succesful objectives, you want to set the “thank you” or “confirmation” page that appears only after someone has successfully completed the form as your goal. The only people who will get to that page are the ones who have filled out the form successfully.

A second type of goal is Time Spent On Site. Let’s say you have lots of content on your site – news, articles, updates or any kind of content you want your visitors to see – and you want to know how engaged your visitors are with new content versus old content. Time Spent On Site goals will show you how much time visitors spend on specified pages. You can compare these numbers across different types of content to see which sections of your site are most engaging.
While Time Spent On Site goals are useful for comparing large amounts of data to one another or relatively measuring how engaging some types of content are in comparison to others, these types of goals are not good for very precise metrics. The biggest problem with measuring the amount of time a user spends on a particular page is that it may not accurately reflect how much time that user spent actively interacting with a page. After all, with tabbed browsers and computers that can easily perform several actions at once, many users will leave sites up on their screens or on a hidden tab without engaging with the site.
The third type of goal is Pages Per Visit. This measures how many pages each unique visitor navigates to on average when they visit your site. This type of goal is useful if your site contains a great amount of content or you want your visitors to go to many different parts of your site for some reason. A large Pages Per Visit number will tell you that a visitor is very engaged with your site, while a small number will tell you that they aren’t as involved.

What Comes Next?

Once you’ve determined how you want to use goals, setting them up should be an easy process. Google Analytics makes it easy to define goals and then view those goals in customized reports. But whatever analytics solution you’re using, it should provide you
the tools to easily define your goals. And once those goals are defined, you’ll be able to concretely measure how successful your website is in your own terms.

Image source