We work with many clients in the non-profit sector and have gathered together our tips, tricks and advice for making the most of the platform in this industry. We will talk you through some common use cases in the sector including brand and campaign tracking, as well as some guidance on monitoring particular audiences that are key to non-profit such as policy makers. Also, don't forget you can always reach out to your Customer Success Lead to provide more guidance to get the most out of Pulsar.

What's included within this article:

We know it's a bit odd to call them competitor's in the charity sector, as they are all trying to do good, but in some way charities still compete for donations or share of voice within their non-profit categories ie. children's charities or health related charities etc. It can be really beneficial to monitor how you and your competitors are talked about online, to understand your non-profit category better and how you might want to diversify or indeed take learnings from those dominating the space. The way to do this is through a TRAC Topic search.

Step 1: Select topic search and name it “Your Brand Name + Competitors”. Select the data sources you are looking to track content on; X, Facebook, Instagram, Forums and Online News are the most used sources in this sector. Select between Wizard or Boolean for your keyword entry method.

Step 2: Enter the keywords for your search:

For Facebook, as you are limited to 20 entries of keywords, ensure they are spread evenly across you and your competitors, prioritising brand names and hashtags.

Step 3: Continue with the search set up, selecting analysis modules (general image analysis and emotional analysis are standard for this sector). Then preview your search results at the summary stage, do the results look right and relevant? Once happy, click to create your search and load in your data on the status page.

Step 4: Once you've got data loaded in to your search and populating the charts, the final step is to create saved filters so you can filter the conversation to your organisation and your competitors.

How to create saved filters:

Now you will have a brand and competitor search set up with saved filters, which you can access and apply at any time by clicking into the filter and then the tab Saved Filters.

Off the back of the search we've just guided you through, a super common custom chart that non-profit clients like to create is a competitor share of voice. Follow these easy steps:

Step 1: Head to Reports on the left hand side of your search, then Create dashboards and then Create insights report from scratch.

Step 2: When you press on Add Chart you will be given the option for 'standard charts' or 'custom charts', select custom.

Step 3: Then select Create from Scratch. A pie chart is an ideal chart to show share of voice, so select it as your custom chart template from the options available:

Step 4: Add and name a segment for your brand and each of your competitors so it looks a bit like this:

Step 5: Then for each brand, press on the blue add filter button to the right, and if you have saved your filters as we walked through above, head to Saved Filters and select the filter relevant to the segment.

Finally, once this is done you can head to the next step of naming the graph and adding a description if needed. Once you press save, you will have a share of voice chart comparing you and your competitors. Hurray!

There are three stages to a campaign that Pulsar can provide insight for: pre, during, and post.

If you know what the campaign will be about, or are yet to decide that and need to do some research, a topic search into the category you are about to release the campaign into will better help you to understand the landscape of the conversation. For example, if your new campaign is aimed at tackling a new subject matter, you will want to know how that subject is currently talked about online, so you can learn who is currently leading the conversation, what language is most prevalent as well as what style of content is working best. Here is a link to an article walking you through a category search set up:

Also, if you have an Audiense subscription, you can run an Audiense insights report to better understand the key audiences behind the category and how best to target them. More detail on running an Audiense insights report found further down this article.

Use this stage to best plan your campaign strategy and make data driven decisions.

Once your campaign is decided, you've got your hashtag and key language ready to go, you will need to set up a campaign tracker within TRAC (you could chose to set this up as a separate fresh search or add it to your brand search).

Once the campaign has kicked off, we recommend setting up some email digests and KPI alerts to keep a finger on the pulse of the campaign. More on setting those up here:

After the campaign has drawn to a close, you will no doubt need to report on its success and take learnings from this campaign to be able to apply to the next one.

Taking a glance through the snapshot view of your campaign tracker search will give you a great overview of the campaign performance, however custom dashboards will really help you to curate the perfect report to demonstrate the insights from your online campaign. Here is an article walking you through custom dashboards in depth:

If you have an Audiense subscription we recommend you launch an insights report based on those who interacted with your campaign. This will allow you to analyse who your campaign reached and whether it was the audience you set out to target. More on how to do this below.

Using Pulsar in conjunction with Audiense allows you to understand more about the audience behind the conversation captured in TRAC. The insight Audiense provides helps you to improve your current targeting methods to known audiences and uncover new audience segments you might have been missing out on!

You can use either of the searches we have walked through in this article so far as a starting point. Use the brand tracking and competitor search to understand the audience behind your non-profit category. Or, use the campaign tracker to understand more about the audience who engaged with your campaign.

The first step to launch the report is to go to the Audience Insights tab on the left of the platform, and then into Communities, this will take you to where the Audiense integration sits within TRAC. As long as the number of unique authors is more than 100 and less than 100,000, click the 'Segment Xk Authors' button. As soon as you do this, it will begin to create an Audiense report. Access this report in your Audiense domain.

Once the report in Audience has been created, we can go take a deeper look into the findings. You can focus on the 'full audience' analysis or Audiense will identify audience segments for you to explore.

When you dive into the report, the first 4 tabs of analysis (Demographics, Socioeconomics, Influencers & Brands and Interests) help you to understand who the users in this segment are. How old they are, which influencers do they interact with, what are they interested in, where in the world are they etc. This will give you great insights to identify what the segment is, and ideally showing you new groups of people you did not know existed within your wider audience.

The next 5 tabs in Audiense (Media Affinity, Content, Personality, Buying Mindset and Online Habits) will help you to target this particular segment, developing a content strategy that is specific to this group of users. Make sure to click into Media Affinity and then Social & Display Ads, as this will show you how to translate this group of users onto other social channels such as Instagram and Facebook for ad targeting. Personality is the next tab to really pay attention to, from looking at the pentagon image at the top of the tab, identify which of the 5 major personality traits represents this segment of users. Then use the 'How to create effective messaging' document download to interpret the personality analysis into a content strategy. Different segments will have behavioural and personality traits unique to them, so tailoring your approach is key to successfully resonating with different audiences.

A very common use case amongst non-profit clients is to track a list of notable individuals or MPs X handles through a panels search on TRAC. This allows them to see if policy makers are talking about and pushing their agendas on their public platforms. In hand with the alerts functionality on the platform, this could allow you to jump in and engage in real time. To set this up, follow these steps:

Step 1: Click New Search, chose Panel and name your search, select X as a data source.

Step 2: If you only wanted to monitor a few individual's accounts you can simply enter their X handles and then Analyse User.

Or if you wish to track a large group of individuals (like every MP) you can select the Import Users option for a CSV upload.

If you already have a Excel file of the X handles of the accounts you'd like to monitor, you can upload them through the Choose file button, or if is is easier, click on the file at the bottom of this article to download a list of UK MPs in the correct format ready to upload!

Step 3: Once you have uploaded this list or input your chosen accounts to monitor, within the keywords section of the search set up, you can define what content to pull in from these users. For example, this could be your organisation's name, your competitors' names, the area you work in, or maybe something simple like 'charity' or 'fundraising'.

Step 4: Follow the final steps to complete your search set up and launch your data on the status page, starting data capture in real time or loading in historical data.

Step 5: To set up those KPI Alerts we mentioned to stay totally on top of the real time conversation in your Panels search, go to this article:

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