About

In the days before New York Cares, volunteering was unnecessarily complicated. The organization’s founders believed that individuals can make a real difference in improving NYC provided they have the necessary tools, which are the same ones that enable the most successful businesses to achieve scale and impact: planning, logistics, measurement, quality control, and customer relationship management.

New York Cares has infused volunteerism with business acumen to enable anyone who volunteers through their programs to have a disproportionate impact on New York City.

The Challenge

New York Cares had tons of data on volunteering and training patterns in their system, but didn’t have the time to do deeper analysis to find actionable insights. Likewise, the website was incredible at serving opportunities and recruiting volunteers, but the Google Analytics configuration did not provide clear conversion information about the user journey.

What we did

In 2014, Whole Whale worked to analyze volunteer data dating from Hurricane Sandy until present, identifying potential areas of volunteer drop-off and attrition.

Google Analytics + Impact Mapping

Whole Whale configured Google Analytics goal funnels to measure the exact steps volunteers went through on the site. These goals were then customized into dashboards for the team to use to analyze areas of the site to be optimized to garner more engagement from potential volunteers.

Custom Data Insights

Whole Whale worked closely with the communications department to improve analytics transparency and reporting, encompassing both Salesforce and Google Analytics data to better understand volunteer behavior. The report also created recommendations for improving volunteer conversion from online registration to offline volunteering.