BI and Content Increase Donations; Tsunami Victims BenefitBI and Content Increase Donations; Tsunami Victims Benefit

World Vision, an international humanitarian organization, is relying on the convergence of BI and content to help it optimize donations for relief efforts in the tsunami-stricken areas of South Asia.

To increase conversion rates on its Web site, World Vision is working with integrator CGK, content management system (CMS) vendor Hot Banana and Web analytics provider WebTrends to improve navigation of the site's 3,000 pages.

"Analytics are crucial to understanding how people browse our site when looking to donate to relief efforts," says Adam Hadley, e-marketing manager for World Vision.

As a nonprofit organization, World Vision wants to drive as many donors as possible to its Web site. "Just like a for-profit business, we know it's less expensive to manage a Web site than a call center," says Hadley. "To improve our conversion rates, we have to reduce the time necessary to search the site."

Using WebTrends' SmartSource analytics technology, World Vision can track how readily people find what they need and can then change content accordingly. "Some people want to go right into a donation form and then search two or three pages of the site, while others search first and then donate," Hadley says.

Hot Banana has partnered with WebTrends to integrate SmartSource with its Web CMS in order to automate tagging and testing of Web pages, thereby minimizing hand-coding errors. "Once we collect data, we tag it and send it to the WebTrends' server," says Hot Banana product manager Chris Adams. "Users can then log into WebTrends' Web-based software and run reports about how many people came in, from which search engines, and where they went in the Web site."