5 Things You Should Think About for Your Nonprofit Website
Where people transact can be different from where they interact.
The value of the a nonprofit website is that it offers you the ability to interact and engage with donors on a more powerful and frequent basis than ever before. And that’s in addition to a cheaper, easier way for donors to transact and give to you. If you are viewing your website as a revenue source or channel and evaluate its success based on dollars raised you are woefully missing the power and point of what the web and digital has to offer.
And if you’re interested in making more of your website other than a “brochure” site (static and boring) and want to incorporate more of a strategy than a page and spam approach (mission, vision, values DONATE, board members, DONATE, annual report DONATE…) then here are…
5 Things You Should Think About for Your Nonprofit Website
1. Discovery
How do your donors find out about your impact and how their donation helps, stories about the work you do and opportunities to give and get involved (Tip: those are the three things donors want from you)? Your website should be created in such a way that your visitors can quickly and easily find those areas and do the things they want to do.
This means a clean home page that orients a visitor to your organization and provides some clear next steps along the path of discovery (without shouting or telling them everything all at once). This means good navigation with identifiable titles on your navigation bar (don’t be cute here, call it what it is and is most commonly called). And it means not having so much content on a page, or your entire site for that matter, so what you really want to say, and donors want to hear, is buried in a bunch of crap that nobody cares about or cares to read.
Discovery is about making your site easy to navigate to help lead visitors to the information that are wanting and a things they are interested in doing.
2. Conversion
You know what makes nonprofit websites not convert well? Nonprofit websites that were created without thinking about conversion. I realize how silly that may sound but there are unfortunately way too many designers and developers that can create a slick-looking website but they can’t set your organizational priorities for you and way too many of them are interested in building something that looks nice but accomplishes little.
You need to understand what it is donors are wanting (see discovery above) and identify what it is you want them to do and then build pages that are optimized to do that.
Donation conversion is the most obvious thing that you would want someone to do (and there’s some pretty basic things you can do to help conversion there) but that’s a more involved action from a visitor and not something they would most likely do from a mission, vision, values page or your Board of Directors page. So what is it, beyond donate, that you are asking people to do?
For my money, if you had to focus your website around ONE conversion goal it would be form fill outs or email sign ups looking for more information. Your nonprofit website should compel and intrigue people so that they are interested and engaged. From there you can start talking more directly to that person and when you want them to make a donation you can point them to a page built for converting into donations.
Conversion is about knowing what you want out of user who reaches your page/site and creating in a way that makes it easy for them to do it.
3. Subscription
You got a visitor to your website (nice work — not as easy as you may think) and now they are looking around your nicely laid out site that makes it easy for them to take an action: but what brings them back? That’s essentially what subscription is about and why you should seriously consider a blog if you don’t have one or think more seriously about it if you do.
Email subscriptions are great as well as you can then deliver curated content to people that can point them back at your site (which is where the key actions are remember?). The more that subscriptions can offer choice to the donor in terms of content types, frequency and even style the better.
Subscription is about getting people back to your site and deepening the relationship with the user which can increase the chances of conversion and action as well as sharing and word of mouth advocacy.
4. Activation
At this point, your focus on discovery, conversion and subscription is really setting up your website to get new donors or make it easy for people to keep giving. But what about that dedicated base that opens your emails, follows you on social media and has memorized your Board of Directors names? What does your website and web strategy offer them?
Do you offer ways for people to feel more like insiders with exclusive content, see things before others or increased access to information? Do you provide opportunities for them to advocate for you and your cause with a toolkit, some training and one on one support? Can they fundraise for your cause and get their friends, family and networks involved as well?
You should not build your website for and around the hardcore supporters who have already bought in, but way too many sites and strategies are leaving them out in the cold so they often spend that extra energy with organizations, like a charity: water, that is ready and willing to provide it for them.
Activation is about empowering people who are dedicated to your cause and interested in doing more and finding ways to encourage and support them in doing more.
5. Experience
And the grand daddy of them all: experience. This sums up the other four and is the common thread between them. Thinking about discovery, conversion, subscription and activation is thinking about the overall experience of the visitors to and users of your site. You may track and test conversion but not nearly enough organizations are tracking and testing their user experiences with something like UserTesting.com (more great tools from Mashable here).
If you had a 1,000 walk into your office every month I’m sure you would tidy up a bit and have a plan for when someone walks in? If you took in 500 phone calls a day, I’m betting you would invest in systems and processes to make sure you could handle and make the most of it. But because websites can be viewed as a luxury or something your nephew can make, there’s no human looking you in the eye or actual voice on the phone it can be easy for you to not think about the hundreds and thousands of people who visit your site in a week, month or year who have a bad experience.
Experience is about thinking about your website as offering an experience with an understanding that it is your job to give your visitors a great one.
So…
One of the reasons I stepped into a more business development role with Peer Giving Solutions back in the fall was because I believe our product has baked in a lot of great things around discovery, conversion, subscription, activation and experience. This makes it easier for organizations who may not have the time, money and expertise to offer a better experience to their visitors and donors.
Regardless of the product you use or platform your own or agency you hired, I hope that these 5 things can help boost your online interactions in the coming weeks and months which, oh by the way, helps boost your online transactions in the end.
