The Badger Brewing Association’s foundation spans across multiple Google Doc pages spanning form General meetings in 2012 all the way to our club constitution. Empowered with a grant from the Associated Students of Madison the Association pursued hosting a website on WordPress.com.

While a friend of the club with coding experience handled the initial set-up I was pushed into the position of creating the content, and using it effectively to expand the club’s reach. The Word Press site allowed us to connect our Twitter and Facebook accounts to already build a cult following. Word Press made me aware of analytical tools beyond my previous experience with managing a Facebook page or Twitter account. Through my time in Digital Marketing with Professor Krueger I soon learned that Facebook is just as powerful analytically, and much like Word Press had tools to increase our reach. Originally, I had just posted info about local breweries coming in to give talks about the club, or the Semester Group Brew. By analyzing Word Press’s statistics page I found a trend that our monthly views decreased after the kickoff meeting in September. In the second semester I started to apply using organic content and social media to increase interaction with the site. We started announcing events such as brewery tours and Keggeerator building demos on social media, and directing visitors to sign-up on the website. Additionally, we moved our sign-up for group brews from email Google Docs to the website as well.

Analytics started to show upward trends towards site visitors. Although we still had the drop-off from our Kickoff meeting in February there has been an upward trend across March and April. This increase in search volume, and increasing posts has helped raise the websites ranking during organic searches as it currently sits at the third link behind two University of Wisconsin org pages for the club.

Armed with the knowledge of the power of organic content next semester we have started building a page of the website highlighting Brewing in Science. We are hoping to post monthly articles on Tuesday’s summarizing current discoveries in Academia and Industry geared toward brewing. The reason for our Tuesday posts is due to analytical insights through Word Press’s insight page showing 22% of our views occur on Tuesday and 14% of those occurring at 6:00PM. These insights match our monthly meetings, which occur at 6:30 PM on Tuesdays. Furthermore by analyzing post reach through Word Press and Facebook the club can monitor member commitment levels, and help increase engagement by adding socials during down months.

Through analytics we can test the structure of our club by using the website as a measurement device. If next year our member’s would be more responsive to bi-weekly instead of monthly meetings we can pursue this by measuring the site traffic between years demonstrating the power of A/B testing and analytics. Many of us are unaware of the power that sites like Word Press and Facebook have for analyzing site visitors. I have learned before I pursue paid metric sites such as Sprinklr, or Sprout Social to investigate the ability of Facebook or Word Press because they are far more powerful tools than we realize. Through Facebook I can create profiles of our users, and use their information to find more like-minded individuals who are interested in joining the Badger Brewing Association. Additionally, Word Press has shown me that the Badger Brewing Association has had visitors ranging from Brazil all the way to Australia showing that the site is showing up under certain organic searches.

Brandon Lucari a student at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and former Social Media Chair of the Badger Brewing Association. Check out our club’s website at: https://badgerbrewingassociation.wordpress.com/