American Cancer Society of California does great work on one of the most vital issues of our day. To fund this critical effort, they run a network of 40 Discovery Shops that help support the fight against cancer through the sale of high quality, gently used, donated merchandise for men, women and children.

When they came to us asking if we could help create an individual home on the internet for each and every one of these Discovery Shops, we had just one question:

When do we start?

By leveraging the power of Non-Profit Soapbox and crafting a common template for consistent branding across the network, we built 40 sites to promote each individual shop - all efficiently and easily for not much more than the cost of a single site.

No fuss. No muss. Just a high quality network of easy to manage sites to further an important mission. But don't take our word for it. Hear it straight from Steven Wirt, Director of Online and Internal Communications for the American Cancer Society of California:

"I’ve been very impressed and pleased with Non-Profit Soapbox. Wrangling 40 web sites has been a seamless, pain-free experience."

You've got your website. It's your organization's virtual front door. You work hard to lay out the welcome mat, tend the flower boxes, wash the windows, and offer enough content to get people inside for a heart-to-heart coffee table chat about you and your mission.

So you've got curb appeal. You've got substance. But how do you get folks into your neighborhood and knocking on your door in the first place?

Great question. Boosting traffic and attracting eyeballs to your site is key to online success. If people aren't coming and viewing your site, it isn't doing its job to move your mission forward.

Tracking site traffic: Knowing who's coming to your site

The first part of improving is knowing how your site performs now. The easiest and cheapest way for assessing that is a handy tool called Google Analytics. This is free and tracks website traffic. Got some question you want to know about who and how people are visiting your site? How long the average person spends poking around? What search term they typed into Google to come across your little home away from home on the interwebs? How many people living in Burkina Faso visited your site on a Tuesday at 10:23 pm? The Google knows. It knows it all. And it will tell you - provided you've signed up for a free account and had us install the tracking code it provides.

No Google Analytics yet? Interested? Check out our Tips and Tricks post about tracking traffic.  You can also view an informative Google-created video there giving an overview of Analytics.