Case Study: Non-Profit Site Analytics

Client

Women’s Directory, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in Colorado. Their goal is to help women get access to the help they need.

Project Description

Monetary grants that provide funding for non-profits often have applications which require data on visitor volume and behavior to demonstrate the impact and reach of an organization. Our client, a 501(c)3 non-profit, needed to aggregate data on visitors to their website for use in their future grant applications, while respecting the privacy of their visitors and their data.

Given the sensitive nature of their work in providing assistance to women in need, Women’s Directory was primarily concerned that this data could be misused to identify individual visitors if improperly captured or not properly anonymized. The organization had already built an existing analytics solution to capture visitor data in the Rails app, store it in their own application database, and anonymize data points on ingestion, rather than sending the data to a third-party service like Google Analytics. However, they didn’t yet have a way to aggregate the data into summarized reports on visitor traffic.

Women’s Directory wanted Monstera to come up with a solution to help them understand their visitors’ behavior without compromising their data privacy.

Solution

• Ruby on Rails: To avoid adding more operational cost and complexity, we used the existing app as a foundation for our solution rather than exporting this data to an outside database.
• On-Demand Report Generation: We built a simple interface to allow administrators to generate analytics reports for specific date ranges as needed. This empowered admins to extract relevant insights as needed, while minimizing the amount of load this feature puts on site resources (e.g. database load).
• In-House Storage: All generated reports are stored within the Women’s Directory application database, ensuring that this feature adds no additional surface area for data exposure.
• Frontend Visualization: Since Women’s Directory used Vue.js elsewhere in the site, we used it to visualize report data. The interactive frontend made it easy for admins to review analytics reports with their peers.

Results

The implementation of this comprehensive solution yielded significant results for Women’s Directory:

• Supports Grant Applications: The reports generated using visitor data serve as a robust foundation for Women’s Directory to gather crucial insights into who’s using their service. This helps the organization apply for grants with confidence.
• Ongoing Improvement: As the non-profit continues to apply for grants and their needs for granular data analysis develop, Monstera continues to work with Women’s Directory to expand this reporting capability.
• Empowered Site Admins: Women’s Directory staff gained the ability to generate reports and extract valuable insights into key metrics such as daily visit counts and relative popularity of assistance categories.

Conclusion

The solution we built for Women’s Directory addressed the unique challenges posed by their commitment to user privacy, while also allowing the non-profit to gather the data critical to their grant applications. Monstera integrated this feature into the existing site infrastructure, making it easy for admins to generate reports as needed and review this data with their peers.

This case study exemplifies our commitment to delivering effective, privacy-conscious solutions for non-profit organizations with a focus on social impact. We look forward to working with Women’s Directory as their needs evolve in the future.