The whole whale strategy

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.

Who we work with

We don’t run down the aisle with just anyone. Before taking on any project or retainer client the entire team considers the following questions and votes.

• Is this a cause we believe in?
• Is this a ‘good’ well-run organization?
• Is this the type of work we are the best at doing?
• Do the timing and budget work?
• Would the team be fun to work with?

Project & Retainer Services

We can work with you for either a short project or ongoing retainer to best suit your digital needs. Projects typically last from 3-12 months, though we do have a number of amazing partners we’ve supported over many years! Our team moves through 4 major phases of work that start with setting up digital goals, measuring impact, building traffic, and finally optimizing major calls-to-action through A/B testing. With every step of our process, we aim to both augment and build your digital capacity while setting you up for future success.

Digital Impact & Web Analytics

If your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) 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. We can also make sure you legacy Universal Analytics get saved based the deletion date of July 2024.

Spotlight Case Study: Malala Fund

Google Ad Grant 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!

Spotlight Case Study: Crisis Text Line

SEO & 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).

Spotlight Case Study: Donate Life America

Conversion Optimization & A/B Testing

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 Crazy Egg, Optimizely, and other testing leaders we test different copy, page layouts, content, pop-ups, buttons and more to let the data guide us towards optimization and greater goal achievements.

Spotlight Case Study: Cancer Research Institute

Custom Data Analysis

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.

Spotlight Case Study: Planned Parenthood

Paid Ad Management

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).

Spotlight Case Study: Greater Than Aids

AI Capacity & Digital Training

We can help your team responsibly adopt AI into workflows to increase the efficiency and impact of your team. This can also include a Chat-First Search Traffic Risk Audit to determine how much of your organization’s traffic may be in jeopardy. In addition to this, we your team 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.

Spotlight Case Study: Donorschoose.org

Karaoke Crashing

Yes, this is a joke because we know less than 50% of website visitors make it this far down a page. However, we do love karaoke (especially with our friends at our favorite nonprofit and digital marketing conferences!) and will happily crash your party. Before you go, discover the many other special talents of our team.

Digital Support

We’re passionate about using the whole digital whale to achieve your goals and help you make progress on your mission! In addition to the tentpole services listed above, Whole Whale strives to support our clients in many different ways to make the best use of your digital marketing capabilities. Often this also includes providing technical recommendations and implementation support, leveraging social media, creating visual content and templates, building effective user experiences, developing web pages, designing and implementing SMS strategies, and so much more.

Interested in our services? Send us a message.

Digital Service Packages

Impact Accelerator

This focused project will help your organization go from 0-60mph for digital impact and typically takes 3-4 months.

  • Digital Impact Assessment + Engagement Funnel
  • Google Analytics goal setup + Google Tag Manager configuration
  • Google Ad Grant optimization + management
  • SEO Audit + Content Marketing plan
  • Digital Insight Report on focused topic
  • Digital Training on focused topic

AI Accelerator

If you feel like NOW is the time for your team to adopt AI into internal workflows responsibly, we’re ready to help.

  • Workflow audit
  • Custom-built AI tools on modern models on your data and use-cases
  • Internal trainings on prompt architecture that ensures brand alignment
  • Integrate workflow tools to bring AI into spreadsheets and content creation
  • AI media creation training
  • Support on external/internal AI policies

Ready Set Launch

There is a lot to pay attention to when relaunching a website, we check your blindspots. The goal is to maintain traffic and performance through this chaotic time.

  • Pre-launch
    • Google Analytics prep + Google Tag Manager configuration
    • Content mapping to build a plan for every URL
  • Launch
    • 404 audits and triage plans
    • Site speed audit
  • Post-launch
    • Google Ad Grant optimization + management
    • SEO Audit + Content Marketing plan

Fundraising Accelerator

This 6 month project helps you create a digital fundraising plan to better understand, reach, and engage your donors to increase fundraising ROI.

  • Digital Impact Assessment + Donor Engagement Funnel
  • Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager configuration for donors
  • Audience Map / Donor Insight Report
  • Google Ad Grant configuration for donor acquisition
  • Donation page optimization + A/B Testing
  • Donor communications / email audit + recommendations
  • Paid Advertising management for Lead-Gen + donations

We have experience with a suite of fundraising platforms.

Here are just a few:

Fundraising tools Google Analytics integration

Have a marketing or fundraising RFP?

Send it our way:  [email protected]