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Case Study 
The Morris Animal Foundation –www.morrisanimalfoundation.org 
Client since May 2008.
Background
: The Morris Animal Foundation had been working with their traditional advertisingagency that had launched their website two years ago. Unfortunately, this agency did not havemuch knowledge of online marketing. The Morris Animal Foundation was not seeing the kind of online donations they expected and needed a solid digital strategy to drive donations. Morris hadbeen awarded a Google Grant of $10,000 a month of free advertising, but the grant was not beingmanaged well by the agency with a click-through rate of only .03% and Morris was in jeopardy of losing the grant.
Morris’ major goals were:
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To increase web-based donations
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To spread brand awareness with those who had never heard of Morris
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To spread brand awareness with a younger audience
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To have the ability to easily update the siteTo reach those goals, Fusionbox used a combination of search engine marketing, social mediamarketing, and design and usability improvements. We have outlined those tactics below:
Search Engine Marketing
One of the most effective ways to spread brand awareness is by reaching new eyeballs on theweb. Fusionbox began an initiative to bring more donors to the site by making sure that the sitecame up when users searched for phrases like: “cure canine cancer”, “research to cure animals”,and “animal health studies”. In order to get high organic rank, Fusionbox made some majorchanges to the structural technology of the site:
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The content management system did not allow us to create unique titles, metadata, anddescriptions for each individual page. We reprogrammed the content management systemso that we could implement the unique titles and page descriptions that are so importantto achieving high organic rank.
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The content management system also created URLs that were not search engine-friendlyand that contained query strings. We reprogrammed so that the content managementsystem creates dynamic pages without query strings and containing keywords with dashesin between keywords.
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The site suffered from code bloat because the previous developers used an open sourcethird party content management system that added unnecessary code to HTML pages. Thesite also used tables and inline style sheets and JavaScript. We re-programmed the HTMLusing structural CSS and XHTML Strict and put all JavaScript in external files. Code bloatadversely affects SEO.
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We added an XML sitemap to the site so Google could easily spider all content.
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We created redirects for page names that had changed.The site’s content had not been optimized properly. Fusionbox did the following:
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We optimized all existing content with keywords and placed keywords strategicallyincluding toward the top of the page, as internal links, and as bulleted and bolded items.
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We added keywords into H1 header tags, bullets, and internal links.
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Keywords were placed in all titles, descriptions and tags.
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We optimized digital asset names to include keywords for videos, images, and documents.Our goals with the re-launch were to increase traffic, donations, and organic search engine rankby 20% in 3 months.
All three goals were met one month after re-launch.
Paid Search Advertising:
The Morris Animal Foundation had procured a Google Grant with a budget of $10k a month tospend on paid search advertising. Unfortunately, the grant was not performing well at all, andMorris was at risk of losing it completely. Morris’ advertising agency was only able to spend about$2,000 of the $10,000 budget because it was not created or managed correctly. When GoogleGrants are not used to their fullest potential, the non-profit is at risk of losing $10k a month of free advertising. The click-through rate for the campaign was only .03% which is well under thenational standard of 2%. Further, Morris had chosen keywords that included obscure animaldiseases instead keywords meant to drive donations. Fusionbox immediately revised the keywordlist, and rewrote all of the Adwords copy in order to compel users to click through and donate.These initiatives brought major results including a click-through rate of 3.62% and since we hadmanaged the grant so well, Google has awarded the Morris Animal Foundation a Grant of 
$40k infree advertising a month.Online PR 
Fusionbox took Morris’ rich content and distributed across the web by posting online pressreleases, articles and studies. This content has since spread across the web by users everywhere.We also asked influential bloggers to report on Morris’ work, created a Morris presence on forumsand sites that serve their target audiences, and formed partnerships with other complimentarysites and organizations likewww.dogster.com.
Social Media Marketing
One of Morris’ goals was to reach a younger audience. In order to do this, Fusionbox created aYouTube Channel, a Facebook page and a Facebook cause, a MySpace page, and developed aTwitter feed. While these efforts do not drive many donations, they are very easy to manage byMorris’ internal marketing staff, and they work very effectively to raise awareness among ayounger audience.Fusionbox is now working with Morris to develop a fundraising campaign on Twitter that will reachout to pet owners to help save shelter cats. We will add an easy option for donors to pay by textmessage, so they can easily send Morris $5.Links to each initiative are here:Facebook Pages:
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Morris Animal Foundation:
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http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Morris-Animal-FoundationMAF/17651977393?ref=ts
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Cure Canine Cancer:http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?sid=e1e28482ef55f38255f65f396993a325&gid=11555318403&ref=search
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Facebook Cause:
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http://apps.facebook.com/causes/14664/15141263?m=e5767d02YouTube Channel:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6w1BPnP8dAMySpace Page:http://www.myspace.com/morris_animal_foundationTwitter Feed:http://twitter.com/Morris_Animal
Usability Improvements:
The Morris site has a wealth of information, but according to analytics, users were not accessinginformation. Fusionbox worked to reorganize the structure of the Morris website so that it wasmuch easier to navigate. We also made the following improvements:
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Streamlined the donation checkout process resulting in a decrease in shopping cartabandonment of 12%
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Added revenue-generating content to homepage and calls-to-action throughout the site
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Added a very visible call-to-action to donate in the header area of the site so it would beavailable on every page
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Added a left hand navigation to the internal pages of the site
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Included an inter-linking structure throughout the site.
Results – 2007 over 2008:
 
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An increase in web-based donations of 26% over 2007 despite worsening economicconditions where most non-profits are seeing decreases of at least 30%
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An increase in traffic of 179% over 2007
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75% of online donors are first-time donors to Morris
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80% of visitors are first-time visitors
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A reduction in shopping cart abandonment of 12%
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Traffic that initiates with a search term has increased by 500%
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Increased the click-through rate for the Google Grant from .3% to 3.62% which is wellabove the 2% average
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Procured a $40k a month Google Grant to spend with Adwords
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