Development organisation case study: Plan International

Plan International is an independent development and humanitarian organisation that advances children’s rights and equality for girls.

Website relaunch: May 2021 – April 2022

In early 2022, Plan International launched a new global website platform.

Keen to ensure full web analytics capability from day one, the organisation commissioned me to provide a comprehensive analytics setup, custom dashboards to surface key reports, plus training, documentation, and support for website stakeholders.

We began working together from the outset of the website project in 2021, scoping the analytics solution and offering expert analytics consultancy from website conception through to build and release.

With a keen interest in international development and education, and being familiar with Plan International’s work, I was excited to be involved with this bold new phase for their online presence. I was able to bring comprehensive analytics experience from similar projects, including complex multi-site setups and training for other major international organisations.  

What did we do?

  • Requirement gathering questionnaire & interviews with international stakeholders.
  • Solution design & detailed configuration checklist for analytics.
  • Training sessions on Google Universal Analytics (UA) & Google Tag Manager (GTM). 
  • Interactive Google Data Studio dashboards for essential website reporting.
  • Full setup and testing of UA custom events & goals to track rich website interactions.
  • Consulting on cookie consent and privacy policy.
  • Full integration of user consent options with analytics.
  • Analytics usage notes & a complete walkthrough guide for GTM.
  • Introduction to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). 

What was the outcome?

  • Plan International have had high-quality, global reporting in place from website launch, giving them continued access to key insights with no interruption.
  • The Data Studio dashboards provide a website performance overview across a few concise report pages. This reduces the need for stakeholders to log in and navigate GA’s interface for basic insights.
  • The GTM solution is highly flexible and scalable. This allows Plan International to manage all their analytics and marketing tags across the entire global web platform, or by each country’s individual sub-site as desired.
  • We have strong analytics foundations in place following best practice and extensive first-hand experience of analytics for large websites. This gives us a clear path to implement GA4, and make ongoing enhancements and additions to the analytics setup.  

In our transition to a new website, Daniel’s experience and insight in Google Analytics has helped us anticipate issues, resolve unexpected roadblocks and quickly understand technical challenges.

Daniel’s expert knowledge also meant he was able to deliver a flexible solution – ready for our transition to Google Analytics 4.

Danny Plunkett

Requirement gathering & training

For a large global organisation like Plan International, it was essential to consider the perspectives and needs of different country teams as well as the central support function. Plan International kindly facilitated our analytics discovery questionnaire and arranged targeted interviews with key stakeholders.

Even with what appeared to be relatively simple analytics requirements, talking these through with different teams was invaluable to validate our design decisions, clarify what was in scope, and keep people informed about what they could ultimately expect on the new web platform.   

We also laid some early groundwork by running brief, interactive training sessions in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for Plan International’s global support team.

Data Studio dashboard

In large organisations, there are many types of analytics users. Some have detailed expertise and are comfortable with advanced analysis, while others use analytics infrequently, perhaps for annual performance reporting or a snapshot of a big campaign. For users less familiar with the tool, Google Analytics can be daunting. The interface has many different reports and settings: great for expert analysts, but it presents challenges for basic ongoing reporting.

To address this, we decided to create a summary reporting dashboard in Google Data Studio, a free – but powerful – data visualisation tool. Our dashboard pulls in select data from the global web platform, allowing users a quick - almost at-a-glance – summary of website performance. The dashboard can be filtered easily to show data for specific sub-sites or groups of sites, as well as common reporting dimensions like device type, traffic source, and user country. There are further dynamic filters for users wishing to interrogate the data without fully diving into the GA interface.

We produced a dashboard template which we were able to replicate for both the new web platform and the previous platform, giving Plan International the additional option of straightforward historical reporting alongside the new solution.

Tracking setup

We identified the key features for website analytics and mapped these to a comprehensive solution design. This included a measurement framework of top-level KPIs - mapped to goals in GA - and supporting KPIs, which could be reported as either custom events or pageviews.

We designed a clear, scalable system of GTM containers to allow us to manage all analytics and marketing tags across the website, at either the global level or per sub-site.

In collaboration with Plan International’s developers, we were able to integrate GTM cleanly with the content management system and provide a CMS field to add additional containers. We also implemented a basic data layer in the website backend to help delineate individual sub-sites in reporting where this was not apparent from the URLs.

With this solid infrastructure in place, we set up all our analytics tracking tags in GTM. These could be updated and tested with ease ahead of the website launch. The tagging setup included custom work to ensure that interactions with all elements of interest are picked up and mapped neatly to GA data.

Cookies & user privacy

Cookies, consent, and user privacy are core considerations for any modern website. Against a backdrop of increasing regulation and public scrutiny on cookies and trackers, Plan International recognised that they needed to implement a fully compliant cookie notice across the website.

Together, we worked with developers to understand the cookie notice technology, test out its features, provide feedback, and ultimately integrate the cookie notice with all analytics tags. This ensures that users are only ever tracked when they actively opt in.

Part of the data privacy work is clear explanation of trackers in the website’s cookie and privacy policies, as well as supporting stakeholders in understanding the rules and logic. We were able to provide analytics guidance for the website policies, along with step-by-step instructions to ensure that Plan International remain compliant as they extend their analytics tracking in future.

Global website launch

Our careful process and clear strategy ensured that we had no major issues come website launch. The analytics tagging was tested thoroughly in pre-live environments, and again several times on the live environment. Once real user data began to flow, we arranged a demo of reports with key Plan International stakeholders, to ensure they could find what they needed and understood the nuances of the setup.

Shortly after the launch, Google announced that Google Analytics 4 would be fully replacing Universal Analytics in July 2023. Our use of GTM, clean, future-proof analytics tagging setup, and clear documentation mean that we can now go ahead and implement GA4 with relative ease compared to many organisations.

Plan International’s work and values align very closely with my own areas of interest: they are exactly the type of organisation I want to help get better insights from their data.

Our analytics work over the last year provides a strong foundation for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead as Plan International renew and expand their global web presence. I’m thrilled to be part of that journey and relish any opportunity to help make a positive impact in the world, however small my own contribution may be.

If you'd like to discuss how I can help your organisation with data analytics, you can find me on LinkedIn, or email me at [email protected]