Disabled Motoring UK provides a mobility information service to the general public. Their members receive access to information Officers who can help with more complex questions and provide in depth knowledge of the sector.

Back in October 2012 we started work on a new information architecture for the website. Our aim was clear; we wanted to build and equip Disabled Motoring UK with an online platform to aid with the future development and growth of the charity.

The new website boasts an online shop, online membership registration, our tried and tested news system, advertising space to provide income and also incorporates responsive design, which enables the website to scale down when being viewed on mobile devices.

The site is now live and is receiving positive feedback and we are delighted to say that the Disabled Motoring UK team are thrilled.

It was a pleasure to meet and work with the Disabled Motoring UK team. To take a look at their new website, please follow this link: www.disabledmotoring.org, and take a look around.

Watch out for the full case study of how we approached this project with the charity – coming soon.

Click here to visit the website

For small charities there are too many hurdles involved in setting everything up from scratch, which is where services such as Just Giving and Virgin Money Giving are ideal. While there are some setup charges, and limited customisation and integration options, these services allow you to take donations without worrying about the technicalities.

The next step up is to make use of a service such as PayPal as this service is relatively low cost, yet still allows a good amount of flexibility and integration options. Registered charities get large discounts on the payment processing fees through PayPal and there are no standing fees for their standard service. PayPal allows even smaller charities the ability to create flexible and complex payment integration facilities if they are prepared to put the effort into website development work.

The final step for most charities is to move to their own Internet merchant account, with a payment service provider. In some cases these may be provided by the same company. Any bank can provide the Internet merchant account however there can be some hurdles with applications, especially for small or new charities. You then also need the facilities of a payment service provider to handle the payments. Many of these services out the payment pages for you, to handle much of the security aspects, however some allow closer integration. Services such as SagePay, WorldPay and Secure Trading are well known in this area.

Adept are experienced in designing and building websites for charities, both straight forward sites and complex bespoke solutions. Our team of experts are fully versed in developing and running such websites through many years (and decades in some cases) of experience. For advice or to discuss an upcoming project you are considering please get in touch on 01263 734198.

If you have the time and resources to devote to social media you can see great rewards. Facebook and Twitter are used by many organisations to effectively market to their supporters and potential supporters.

Before you jump straight in, here are some things to consider:

What are your competitors doing?

Every organisation, even charities should be able to identify competitors, or other organisations who market to a similar audience. Look at what social media platforms they are using and what sort of response they get to their content.

Which platform is right for you?

Everyone jumps on Facebook and Twitter, which are the most popular social media networks at the moment, but are these tools appropriate for the type of communications you want to have. Consider whether email marketing or a forum/message board would be more suitable.

Who is your target audience?

You need to have an audience in mind for you social media efforts. Think about how you are going to attract this audience, and whether they are an appropriate demographic for the platforms you have in mind. (For example, Twitter is widely used by younger people, but not so much by older people, who are you marketing to?)

Have a plan?

Effective use of social media doesn’t just happen. Someone in your charity needs to be in charge of monitoring and maintaining pages and posting content to keep your users engaged. Consider how often you want to post, what content your charity has that is appropriate and who actually has the time to do all this.

How will you measure success?

Often simple metrics like “Number of followers on Twitter” are seen as good measurements of success, but does this really fall in line with your charities goals. Having followers or members on a social media platform means nothing if they don’t engage with you, or take action that actually supports your charity such as making a donation or getting involved with an event.

Don’t be scared! Social media is difficult to get right, but easy to get started with, and you’ll learn as you go along. If you have the time available to make social media a priority you can make effective use of the tools available.

If you’d like to discuss social media in more depth give us a call and we’d be happy to discuss your options with you, and help you to develop a suitable social media plan.

This is especially important if you are using an open source CMS, but is equally important with any software. If new releases of your CMS are available, they probably contain security fixes for new vulnerabilities. If you aren’t up-to-date, someone may try to hack your website.

Don’t just think about your CMS though, are you also using a blog or any plug-ins? These also need to be kept updated, as these are often the cause of security issues. Bespoke code written by inexperienced developers can often be the cause of major security holes that you are completely unaware of until they become a major embarrassment.

2. Your security is only as strong as your password

Avoid using real/dictionary words as a password. Try to include numbers or non-alphabet characters in your passwords where possible.

Never use a word that is on your website as a password, bots will scan your site and try them when they try to crack your password. Simply replacing one or two characters with numbers will merely slow a bot down  a little, especially if you do the obvious (eg password to pa55w0rd). Longer passwords are much more secure against brute force attacks than shorter ones, 9 characters or more is best.

And finally, it shouldn’t be necessary to say this, but I can tell you from experience with clients it is, never use “password” as your password!

3. Keep your password secret and change your password regularly

If you are in any doubt that someone might know your password, change it straight away. When an employee leaves your organisation make sure you reset any passwords they had access to or cancel their named accounts. Even if you parted on good terms, make sure you do this for good measure.

4. Use anti-virus

A virus on your computer can track everything you type and report it back to a hacker. Make sure you don’t get infected by having a good antivirus program installed at all times, and keep it up to date.

5. If you can’t do it well yourself, rely on a professional

While it can be tempting to try to save money by managing the hosting of your website yourself, or managing your own blog or CMS updates, it can often be much more complex than you imagine. Do you take regular backups? Do these include your databases? Do you know where to get updates from for the 20 plugins your CMS has? Do you have the ability to restore your website if something does go wrong?

If you aren’t confident you have the necessary knowledge to keep your website safe, rely on the services of a professional. Your website development company should be able to provide these services to you. This is certainly worth the small extra investment; you’ll wish you did when something goes wrong!

At Adept, we ensure our clients are always up to date with the latest version of the SmartWeb CMS, including all the latest updates and security features. This service is included in our hosting service at no extra cost. We take security seriously, and enforce the use of secure passwords wherever possible, and thoroughly check the work we produce before launch to ensure that as many avenues as possible are covered. For more information on any of these services please contact us on 01263 734198.

While this applies to simple things like your logo and colour schemes, there are also many other aspects that effect your recognisability. Consistent photo styles, image styles and fonts are also important as these all help to portray a sense of a professional organisation.

This consistency in design is often lost when a specialist website developer is brought in to create the website, who doesn’t have the backing of trained design staff. By mixing our team of creative designers with our experienced development team, Adept ensure that the impact of your brand isn't lost when taken online.

Some visitors are going to be looking to make a single donation to your charity, where others are going to be prepared to support you on a regular basis. Other visitors may not be in a position to support you financially but still have many other ways they can contribute to your cause, perhaps by fundraising for you or giving their time. Or maybe they wouldn’t make a donation but would purchase an ethical gift or use a paid e-card facility.

Taking some of the principles often used by e-commerce websites, charities can help to increase their response and level of support. Cross selling, and clearly showing other options can help visitors find the information or method of response they are looking for.

One often forgotten page is the ‘Thank You’ page that someone is taken to once they have completed an action. It is easy just to think of this page as somewhere to put generic text, “Thank you for your support…” but this page can be put to much better use introducing other ways a visitors might like to get involved. Visitors who have already chosen to support you in one way are much more likely to be prepared to further support you if you give them good opportunities.

2012 is going to be an exciting year at Adept as the company continues to grow and move into new markets, with some big announcements along the way. Watch this space for more...

Showing your visitors that you are on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook from your website is a good idea, but how it is appropriate to do this very much depends on how you use the networks. (Also, if you haven’t updated Facebook in 6 months, maybe that link to it on your website is doing more harm than good!)

The two common routes chosen are just linking to the pages via an icon or text link, or integrating a feed into the page.

Having a Facebook or Twitter icon is appropriate for most charities who actively use these tools. The links don’t need to be too obvious unless you are running a specific campaign, a link or icon in the footer of your site is normally just right.

Many charities choose to integrate a Twitter feed (or RSS feed from another platform) directly into their homepage. The homepage of your website is vitally important to the effective navigation of your website, so space here is definitely at a premium. If your Twitter feed is regularly updated and your tweets provide relevant information not found elsewhere, or show how much “buzz” you are creating, then this may be appropriate. If your tweets are really just links to content on your website such as news articles, it may be more appropriate to have something else on your homepage instead, as Twitter may not be the best way to present this content.

If you do choose to integrate your social feeds into your website, remember that you do need to keep them up to date. If you are trying to show the buzz you are creating and your feed hasn’t been updated for a month, it can look really bad and do more harm than good. Also remember if the feed is of user generated content you lose some control of the content of your website so it will be necessary to carefully monitor that this isn’t used for abusive purposes.

Attention spans online are rapidly reducing, visitors want to be able to find the information they want quickly and move onto their next task. If any process takes too long or is too complicated, people will be put off.

As a charity the key activities you want people to complete such as making a donation or completing a response form should be as straight forward as possible. That means it is essential to keep the number of fields as low as possible, make it clear what you want people to fill in, and make validation effective. Long processes can be split into multiple steps to stop them looking too daunting to improve the conversion rate of your website.

You should already be filling in the ALT tag (otherwise known as an image description) for all images on your site, but it is worthwhile remembering that this is an ideal place to include relevant keywords. Remember don’t try too hard though, it could look like you are trying to trick the search engines.

If you aren’t using ALT tags at all, why not? You could get your charity into trouble under the disabilities discrimination act if you don’t keep your website accessible.

This used to be a key point in SEO, however the value is no longer anywhere near as important as the major search engines don’t use this content for ranking.

The meta description however is often used on the Google search results pages, instead of the automatically generated snippet of information. This can help entice visitors to click on your page in the search results. Try to make the meta description of each page unique to that page and its content.

Remember, Google makes the words that the user searched for bold in the title and description, which draws more attention to them. Getting these keywords into the description helps your page to stand out. Make sure it is readable though, and not just a list of keywords!

While search engines are starting to get better at this, don’t expect them to understand text that is in a Flash file or an image. Text should be written on a web page as standard HTML text with CSS styling to make sure the search engine can read it. Make sure text is marked up correctly in the HTML, so headings are in heading tags, body copy in paragraph tags etc, that way the search engines can understand the hierarchy of your content.

If you have to use an image, there are CSS replacement techniques the more advanced user may be able to use.

Content is only really valuable if it is unique. It’s easy to fall into the trap of copying and pasting content, for example manufacturers stock descriptions of products. If your webpages look just like another one somewhere on the internet, Google may not choose to list your page, and even if it does, it probably won’t get the same ranking as unique content would get you.

When writing articles or descriptions for other websites, try to make this unique rather than copying and pasting something from your charities ‘about us’ page.

Each page of your site needs a core message or theme. Taking this further, develop themes that run through sections of your charities website, with similar key phrases in the content. Internal linking between pages where appropriate can help to bring relevant content together.

Find excuses to add content to your website, like a latest news page. Up-to-date content has lots of SEO value. This should be easy for charities, as you’ll always have a new story of how you’ve helped someone, and this sort of content helps to engage supporters.

The number of links pointing to your charities website is still a very important factor for SEO. As a general rule the more links the better, however some links are more valuable than others.

Links don’t have to go to your homepage; links directly to internal pages or news articles are also good. It can often be easier to get these sorts of links than more general links.

Good links:

Not particularly useful links:

Bad links:

The title tag is what is displayed in the top of your web browser, and the title of the entry comes up in Google when you get found. This is a valuable space, so make sure it descriptive of the page.

Make sure your file names and URLs are descriptive and contain relevant keywords. Search engines get no meaning from URLs that are full of numbers.

So a charities donate page may have a URL like: yoursite.com/donate-now/one-off-donations

This has a lot more meaning than something like: yoursite.com/site.asp?page=123

At its most basic level this comes down to thinking about what people are searching for, and getting those words into your pages. Don’t try too hard though, the content needs to be readable to humans as well as search engines.

A couple of additional points:

However, what they are likely to see is the ALT tag of the image, which is normally shown in place of the image until images are displayed. Effective use of ALT tags can encourage recipients to view the images, and where images are used in place of text, the ALT tag help to convey the wording even when the image isn’t displayed.

Encouraging users to view the images is also essential if you want track how many people open the email, as this is only possible if a user views the images.

SEO is a constantly changing game, with the major search engines such as Google and Bing constantly updating how they work in order to provide the best results to users. In order to do well in these rankings you need a wide ranging digital strategy, and one thing that is worth considering is Twitter.

Since late 2009 Google and Bing have both had partnerships with Twitter, giving them real-time access to the data posted to the site. In Google’s case these have been popping up in some searches as real time results, that update on the screen in front of you. However, Google and Bing have both now confirmed that the contents of Tweets can actually affect the normal organic search engine results as well.

If a tweet contains a link to a page, Google will be aware of the link (even if it has been shortened by one of the many services out there) and will use this as one of the signals for how popular a news article or page is. More links on Twitter equals a more popular post. But that’s not all, Google also look at the authority of the author to judge the quality of the link. The simplest way to think of this is by looking at how many followers a Twitter account has, the more followers, the more authority the link is awarded.

That sounds pretty simple, and that is what has been confirmed by Google and Bing, however using a bit of common sense and knowing how the search engines treat other content we can guess that the following also are important:

When you come to think about your social networking strategy, you need to start thinking about more than publishing. While pushing out your own content is a great start, to get the maximum benefit from social media you need to get engagement. That’s retweeting, other people tweeting your content, and having an active pool of followers.

Now, think beyond Twitter, and apply the same concepts to other social media outlets such as your blog and Facebook, and the long term SEO value of your social media efforts starts to show its effect.

Want to get an email our to your customers or supporters before Christmas, but haven't managed to sort it out yet? We are offering to design a Bespoke Christmas Email for only £395 (that's £200 off our regular price!).

Offer ends 10th December 2010.
If you would like to take up this offer we require your creative brief, copy and images by the 10th of December in order to guarantee this price and delivery before Christmas.

To continue the festivities into the New Year, we are extending this offer for New Year emails as well. Plan ahead and we'll match our Christmas price for emails sent in January 2011, that's only £395!

Offer ends 7th January 2011. Emails must be completed and sent by 31st January 2011.
If you would like to take up this offer we require your creative brief, copy and images by the 7th of January in order to guarantee this price.

Conditions of offers
Both offers are for Bespoke Email Templates, these are designed for one-off sends and are not editable through SmartMail. If you would like to send more than one email based on the same template but with different copy we may be able to offer you a special price for multiple bespoke emails.

Job must be raised by the offer deadline for the advertised price to be valid, and all copy, images and creative brief must be received by that time.

Bespoke Emails will be uploaded into the SmartMail system for you to send, or provided as HTML and images for use in another email system of your choice.

Prices exclude VAT. Note: Invoices sent after 4th January 2011 will be at 20% VAT.

Your charities homepage needs to load in an acceptable time, so avoid heavy graphics or Flash animations that will make your website slower than it needs to be unless there is good justification for having them. Absolutely never have a video on your homepage that plays automatically when someone visits the website, not only is it slow to load, I can guarantee 99% of your visitors don’t want to watch it and will find it annoying.

Avoid making your homepage too wordy, it needs to be quick and easy to see the important points to allow the visitor to navigate to other pages. Make sure there are inviting images that are relevant to your charity on the homepage to help portray what your organisation does.

Your homepage also wants to be something that can be updated and create interest for repeat visitors. A standard paragraph about your charity is good for first time visitors, but isn’t what repeat visitors want to see. Latest news updates or details of upcoming events are often popular features, and the homepage can be used to feature new promotions or campaigns your charity might be running.

For the best insight into how effective your homepage is, monitor the navigational path your visitors take from your charities homepage using a tool such as Google Analytics (see our recent article for more info on Analytics).

Website statistics give you an overview of how many visitors you are getting (good to show to the charities trustees) but also things like bounce rates (the number of people who are only looking at a single page before leaving the site) and the average time spent on the site. You can also monitor navigation paths so you can see where people are going on your site.

The statistics tool we recommend to all our charity clients is Google Analytics. It is completely free to use, and offers a wide range of detailed reporting. If you use Google Adwords (pay per click advertising) it also integrates well with this to give you an insight on how effective your campaign is. Once you get comfortable with the system you can get a tremendous amount of information out of Google Analytics which can be used to inform you as to which pages are doing their job and which are currently ineffective.

Some of the basic features of Google Analytics you should definitely be using for your charity are:

In the future we will cover some of the above points in further depth to help your charity get the most from Google Analytics. If however you’d like more information on Google Analytics, Adept can offer a full Google Analytics integration and reporting service to our clients. Call Dan on 01263 734 198 for more details.

One way is to produce a printed newsletter: however this takes time, and can have significant costs associated with it. With the design, copywriting, printing and mailing all adding costs it’s often difficult to justify sending printed newsletters as often as you’d like. That’s where email comes in! Email newsletters don’t have the printing costs associated with a physical newsletter, and the distribution costs are tiny compared with the price of stamps. This allows your charity to send more regular updates to your supporters via email, keeping them informed of what’s going on. Your email list can also be of great advantage when it comes to a specific cause, such as the recent Haiti earthquake appeals, where getting a message to your supporters quickly can make all the difference.

Once you’ve decided you want to start an email newsletter, you have the task of building an email list. You need permission to send someone promotional emails: sending unsolicited email is called spam and is taken very seriously by the law. Even if you are working within the law, it’s still necessary to be careful what you send and how you send it. Email service providers can choose to block your emails if they have too many spam complaints so you need to avoid this at all costs.

If you have an existing email list, that is a great start. Make sure that whenever you collect information from people, such as when they donate or purchase a product from your charity, you get permission to add them to your mailing list. You can also consider having a newsletter signup option on your website for people who are interested but may not have had any interaction with your charity yet.

When it comes to producing your email newsletter there are a number of routes you can take. The cheapest is to do it all yourself, using an email service provider and building your own email newsletter template using their included resources. This is a great place to start if you need a low cost route to start your email newsletter. However, if you want to get the maximum benefit from your email newsletter, it is important to make sure your template fits in with your charity’s brand and overall marketing efforts. Getting a professionally designed email template produced can give much better results, as well as giving you flexibility over what you have on your template.

Adept have produced many email newsletter templates for our charity clients. We either produce one-off templates that can be updated each month with new text and images through our Content Management System, or our team produce the complete newsletter each month to ensure a professional finish. Emails are distributed through our SmartWeb platform ensuring maximum deliverability, as well as providing details tracking information such as open rates, click through rates and bounce rates.

For more information about our email marketing services or to discuss your charity’s email marketing strategy with one of our experienced team, feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to help.