The role of community in increasing the conversion rates for profit and nonprofit organizations: digital marketing and growth hacking methodology

Theoretical background: Digital impact has revolutionized marketing dynamics and strategies breaking down space and time constraints. This technology evolution allowed business to track all the consumer actions and to understand his behavior. New channels, strategies and methodologies have been implemented in recent years trying to find the best way to reach customers and increase the conversion rates. Growth Hacking is one of the new most efficient methodologies to validate, grow and scale new business thanks to its data-driven approach. Purpose: The thesis highlights differences and similarities of using digital marketing strategies for profit and nonprofit organizations. In the specific case it analyzes the impact of the community channel, which is a common asset between the two types of organizations, on the customers conversion rates. Improving conversion rate means to make the marketing action more efficient: increase the number of conversions (i.e. purchases, leads) on the same number of users. The objective is to empirically demonstrate the potential of a community in terms of increase in conversion ratio and to implement growth hacking strategies in a community-based nonprofit organization. Methodology: The analysis is carried out on multiple case studies. Each case study figures out a data analysis about the difference in conversion rates between the community channel and the other digital marketing channels. Based on these results a statistical analysis with confidence intervals is done in order to understand the significance of the analysis. Originality/value: Firstly the study contributes to understand and put in practice the growth hacking methodology which is still a subject little dealt with but with a high potential; then the research puts in evidence the contamination of marketing strategies between profit and nonprofit organizations. A statistical analysis demonstrates the strong influence of a community on conversion rates and how to exploit its unexpressed potential value for a nonprofit organization.