We multiply the digital impact of great organizations.
We’re a digital agency that leverages web data and technology to increase impact. We help nonprofits and for-good companies make the best use of your website, analytics, digital content, advertising, social media, email, and more to achieve your goals. We take a holistic approach and tailor our services to the unique needs of our clients. Helping you get the most from online marketing while building your own digital capabilities.
Description
Whole Whale is a digital agency that helps nonprofits and other socially conscious organizations leverage their data and technology to maximize impact. In the 10+ years since its founding, Whole Whale has worked with over 100 organizations to improve their website strategy, amplify their digital marketing, understand their analytics, nurture supporters and donors, and move the needle on their organizational mission and vision. Over this time, we have managed over $15 million in social good advertising through online platforms, including the Google Ad Grant, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Whole Whale aims to look at each organization’s resources in a unique way. Much in the same way that arctic communities use the whole whale, our philosophy is to leverage every available resource to maximize impact and reduce waste. We focus on digital marketing to make the biggest impact, and we’re passionate about data-informed strategy and design.
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Services
Digital Impact Assessment + Mapping
If your Google Analytics (GA) account isn’t configured properly, you are basically driving blindly down the digital highway. We help you measure ROI by codifying your digital goals in GA and Google Tag Manager (GTM) and helping you understand and track your audience’s interactions on your website. You’ll stay better connected to your data with custom dashboards and insights on how to maximize your conversions and impact over time.
GA4/Universal Analytics + Measurement
We help you better understand your audience, their behaviors, and how they interact with your organization online. We do deep analyses of your web analytics, donor databases, email CRMs, social platforms, and more to find useful insights, such as understanding the path to becoming a donor. This can be invaluable in setting organizational benchmarks, determining target audience profiles, and developing new digital strategies to help you achieve your goals.
Google Ad Grant Strategy + Management
The Google Ad Grant gives nonprofits an unrivaled way to reach your audience by providing $10,000 a month in free search advertising. We use keyword optimization to help nonprofits leverage grant budgets to drive quality traffic and achieve your digital goals. As one of 30 orgs in the Ad Grant Certified Professionals Community, we specialize in helping orgs get the most from their spend and avoid grant suspension. To date, Whole Whale has spent over $5 million dollars in Google Ads. We also help orgs DIY with our top-rated online Google Ad Grant course!
Search Engine Optimization + Content Marketing
We help you drive quality organic search traffic to your website and provide relevant resources to your target audience. We’ll work with you to optimize your content (e.g. email, blogs, etc.) and recommend new high value content opportunities using data from tools like Google Search Console, MOZ, and Google Analytics. We also train and support your team to write in a way that appeals to both humans (your audience) and robots (search engines).
Paid Digital Advertising
We love all things free and in-kind, but sometimes you have to pay-to-play to have the greatest impact with digital marketing. We work with you to map out a digital advertising strategy and budget to reach your specific target audience and achieve your advertising goals (e.g. donations, video views, email sign-ups, etc) on popular platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and more. We then manage and test your campaigns to optimize your ad spend for conversions — not just vanity metrics like impressions or likes — and maximize your ROAS (return on ad spend).
Digital Fundraising
Our approach to raising money online is rooted in our Aware to Care Cycle framework; we believe the foundation for a sustainable digital fundraising strategy is grounded in cultivating donors along every stage of the donor marketing journey - from Aware to Interested, Interested to Engaged, and Engaged to Committed. We’ll work with your team to develop fundraising strategies leveraging digital channels to acquire supporters and nurture meaningful donor relationships over time. We’ll help identify areas of opportunity or growth to attract and convert new digital donors based on the size of your email list, staff capacity, current online fundraising activities, tools, and contextual goals.
Email Marketing + Lead Nurture
Email provides a direct connection to supporters, focusing on moving interested audiences to engaged and engaged audiences to committed. Email or permission marketing — when users express interest by giving you explicit permission to communicate with them further — remains highly valuable. Email subscribers have opted to hear about your organization, programs, and resources. Because of this advantage, email can have a return on investment of 122% — 4 times the average ROI of social media, direct mail, and paid search. This means you can expect more conversions and higher quality engagement through strategic email marketing. In turn, conversions can mean greater resource downloads, clicks to your site, and/or donations.
Conversion Optimization
A little change can make a big difference in how people see and interact with your content. We use A/B testing to help orgs get more people to take important calls to action like donate, register, or sign-up. We aren’t afraid to challenge assumptions and ask the question, “How can we make this better?” Using tools like Google Optimize, we test different copy, page layouts, content, pop-ups, buttons and more to let the data guide us towards optimization and greater goal achievements.
Digital Training
We build data culture at your org, training staff to ask “What do the data say?” and then understand how to analyze the right data to find the answer. We embed training into every aspect of our services, growing your internal team’s capacity for maximizing digital impact with custom trainings on topics like Google Analytics, SEO, Google Ad Grant, email marketing, digital advertising, and more. All of our retainer clients are also granted a free subscription to our top-rated online courses at Whole Whale University for anyone on your team.
Resources
Testimonials
PRX
The Google Podcasts creator program (GPcp) is a partnership between Google and PRX that trains, mentors, and provides resources to underrepresented voices in podcasting around the world. After a successful initial project with PRX for GPcp Year 2 in 2020, Whole Whale had the pleasure of working with PRX again in 2022 to help grow their engaged community of podcasters around the world through digital advertising, email and their newly launched Training Hub, training.prx.org. For the GPcp Year 3, we developed an omni-channel marketing campaign to reach mid-stage podcasters.
Working with Whole Whale felt like a true partnership from the very beginning. We had big goals to reach diverse podcasters through our GPcp program, and they exceeded every one! Their work was always quality, always reliable, and always very impressive. Plus, it’s been so much fun to work with their team—so communicative and creative! We hope to work with them again very soon, and until we do, we’ve been trained by the best to do more data-driven marketing ourselves - Donna Hardwick, CMO
Swing Left
Swing Left is an innovative progressive PAC that formed after the 2016 election to help Democrats win up and down the ballot. Ahead of the critical 2020 elections, Swing Left tapped Whole Whale to execute their first ever large-scale digital advertising campaign to gain donors and volunteers in one of the most important elections of our lifetime.
The Whole Whale team helped Swing Left effectively reach potential volunteers and donors in one of the most important election cycles of our lifetimes. The WW team provided strategic, creative, and editorial insights that helped push our content further—both in terms of quality and impressions! The proof of Whole Whale’s work is in the outcome—we won, thanks to thousands of new Swing Left volunteers and millions of dollars raised for Democratic candidates to help protect our democracy. David Miller, Head of Marketing
National Center for Science Education
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is an organization that promotes and defends accurate and effective science education, working with educators, parents, scientists, and concerned citizens to ensure that topics such as evolution and climate change are taught accurately, honestly, and confidently. NCSE needed our help to improve the tracking and reporting of its marketing efforts, refine its strategic approach to digital fundraising and donor conversion, and build a sustainable digital fundraising strategy. Over five months, we worked with NCSE to improve their digital marketing strategies using analytics, SEO, content marketing, advertising, and fundraising.
We've learned so much. The team has appreciated your patient guidance, and ability to keep things organized, and moving forward with a positive attitude. I've honestly enjoyed working with everyone on your team. I feel very lucky that NCSE found Whole Whale! - Paul Oh, Director of Communications
