The short answer is the classic consultant’s cop-out: it depends.
To state the obvious, every organization is different, and so the “reasonable” amount of traffic for your website is unique. I once built a website for the United Way chapter of a very small town in Iowa and I would never expect them to receive the same amount of traffic as United Way of King County in Seattle, much less the national United Way website! So in some ways, this may be a research question for you: What are other similar organizations seeing in terms of traffic and traffic trends.
Website “traffic” in its purest form is what you might call a “vanity metric”. It only has meaning when it’s given context and viewed over time. To turn a vanity metric like “traffic” into something useful, set a goal for why you want to see more traffic on your website. What’s your theory of change for why more traffic will help you achieve your mission? Will more traffic result in more volunteers? Does more traffic indicate a greater interest that leads to more individual donors? Stats are most useful when you can ask questions of them.
Website traffic vs. social media vs. email
There’s also a second question you may wonder about. What is the value of posting to your website vs. on social media vs. in an email newsletter. And for that, I have a much stronger answer!
Social media networks will come and go but you have the power to keep your website alive and in one place indefinitely. In the WordPress and open source world that I work in, we call this “owning your content”.
My primary recommendation is to use your website as the central “hub” of all your information (both brochure-type information as well as news and events) and then use social networks and newsletters as distribution channels. It’s much easier to change where you share links to your website than it is to change where you post your new information (much less to archive or migrate the history of your posting on another company’s website).
Here are two articles I’ve written with more details about that idea:
If you can increase the amount of content you post to your website, you’ll tend to see the positive effects for site traffic accumulate over time. By driving more traffic to your site, you’re exposing more people to your donate button, volunteer page, events calendar, etc.
There are so many benefits to this strategy. Posting engaging, bite-size news and announcements makes it easier for other people to share those links with others via email and social on their own.
Building up a larger history of consistent information about your work and the people it impacts will also help your search traffic increase as search engines see your site as a better and better result for people interested in the type of work you do.
It’s always about the people
Websites are just a tool to help your organization achieve it’s mission. So what matters is how it increases the impact of your nonprofit.
Remember, that 10% engagement for 100 people is the just as useful as 1% engagement of 1000 people. So before you get too worried about how many people are coming to your site, make sure you know exactly what you want them to do and make your site as compelling as possible. Trust the process and normally good things will eventually happen.