Charity Website Tips - Monitor web stats
The best and most effective charity websites aren’t built that way from the start, they have been iterated and tweaked to improve content and site facilities over a number months or years. In order to know what is working and what isn’t working it is a good idea to monitor website statistics.
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:
- Bounce rate – if people aren’t staying on your site are they finding it hard to find the content they want. Analytics shows you bounce rates for each traffic source and keyword for a deeper understanding.
- Average Time on site – Are people staying around on your website?
- Exit rate – what percentage of people leave your website from each page. If the rate is too high, is there something wrong with the page or annoying your users?
- Keywords – what keywords are people typing into the search engine to find you? Is your content going to answer their questions?
- Goal conversions – Analytics allows you to set up Goals to monitor how many people are performing a certain action such as completing a form or registering on your website.
- E-commerce tracking – If you have an e-commerce website you definitely need to be monitoring your transactions so you know how people found your website and what pages they looked at before they purchased.
- Traffic sources – are you being found via search engines or links from other websites? Could you improve the description of your charity in the incoming links?
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.
We are recruiting
Web Developer
Adept is looking for a Web Developer to join their growing team, producing websites for a wide range of clients working closely with a team of design and development staff. If you are eager to learn and have a good understanding of HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, and Photoshop this could be the position for you.
The job will involve:
- Building HTML/CSS from web design visuals
- Coding bespoke website functionality with PHP and MySQL
- Building websites using our CMS system
- Managing/maintaining existing websites as required.
Experience with Flash and Javascript would be a bonus, but not essential.
The position is full time, based in our office in Aylsham, Norfolk.
For more information contact Dan Gothard, Head of Web Development
Email: dan@adeptdesign.co.uk
Phone: 01263 734198
Web: www.adeptdesign.co.uk
NO AGENCIES PLEASE
Web Designer
Adept is looking for a Web Designer to join their growing team, producing websites for a wide range of clients working closely with a team of design and development staff.
The job will involve:
- Designing websites, from initial concepts to final design visuals
- Building HTML/CSS from design visuals
- Using CMS systems to manage/update existing websites.
Experience with Flash, Javascript or PHP would be a bonus, but not essential for this role.
The position is full time, based in our office in Aylsham, Norfolk.
For more information contact Dan Gothard, Head of Web Development
Email: dan@adeptdesign.co.uk
Phone: 01263 734198
Web: www.adeptdesign.co.uk
NO AGENCIES PLEASE
Produce an email newsletter
As a charity, keeping your supporters up to date with what you are doing is an important way to ensure their continued support. It’s even more important for people who aren’t yet supporters but, with the right information about the work your charity is doing, may make a donation to your cause in the future.
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.
Email success for Cancer Research UK
We have just designed and produced an email campaign for Cancer Research UK promoting fundraising ideas for their Breast Cancer Awareness campaign.
Cancer Research UK has just been in touch to say that they have already had an outstanding response, one of which came through within 9 minutes of the email being sent.
Charity Website Tips: Use Flash Sparingly
Flash presentations – particularly as an intro page to your website, are extremely irritating for most web users. They want to get straight to the information on your website, choosing what they want to see, rather than having to wait for your video/animation to complete. Flash can be used in effective ways, to add a dynamic edge to a page, but consider if this could be achieved using alternative techniques such as using Javascript and CSS. Libraries such as jQuery make many popular effects very easy to achieve.
If you do decide you need a Flash intro for any reason, make sure that you still have navigation on the page so visitors can explore the rest of your website. At the very least have a skip intro link that takes them to the next page of your website. Make sure these links are done in standard HTML so that they appear before the flash has finished loading.
It is very easy to use Flash in bad ways. Only very experienced web designers should be contracted to provide you with Flash designs otherwise you may find your website ineffective, slow, and inaccessible to search engines.
Everywhere you use Flash, remember that some people won’t see it as they won’t have Flash installed or will have an older version that may not be capable of displaying your animation. Make sure you specify an alternative, static representation so that these users still receive a good experience when browsing your website.
Charity Website Tips: Use Photos Effectively
Photos on your website can have an enormous impact on your visitors. For charities, photos give the opportunity to create an emotional response with their visitors, and help them identify the people they’ll be helping.
Carefully select photos that are appropriate for the audience of your website. The purpose of the photos isn’t to shock visitors, but to inform them. Images that are positive, showing the impact your charity has in the lives of the people you are help are often the most effective, however there is still a place for photos that show people in need to show your work isn’t finished.
The way you use photos can also vary depending on the area your charity works in. For example animal welfare based sites wouldn’t want disturbing photos of animals on their opening page, many people can’t stomach the sight of these images and will simple turn away without exploring any further. If your images are extreme in nature, or likely to make people upset, consider putting them on a page deeper inside your website, with a clear warning. Keep the photos on the main pages of your website more positive in order to maximise your websites pulling power.
Charity Website Tips: The Donate Button
For many charities the donate button is one of the most important design elements on your website. Online donations can be a big part of your income and leading people to this page on your website is important to get maximum return on investment.
Make sure your donation link is always displayed at the same place on each page, and is placed in an obvious and prominent location. As such an important element of your page, make sure it is always “above-the-fold” so it is always seen when visitors first hit your website, preferably on the top left or right where people will find it easily.
If you use a service such as PayPal to receive online donations, consider keeping their donation button rather than designing your own. For smaller charities this gives a sense of security as the symbol is recognisable and may encourage visitors to give when otherwise they may not.
Another effective way to increase online donations is to let your supporters know what their donation will achieve. For example, £10 will buy a first aid kit, or £100 will provide a family with food for a year. Choose amounts that are achievable for individual visitors. This may encourage them to give to the next level in order to achieve a particular target.
Charity Website Tips: Use Video
The web is no longer just about static content pages. Multimedia is becoming increasingly important, especially now that a large number of your visitors are going to be on broadband. YouTube is currently the 4th most visited site on the internet so video is definitely here to stay.
Charities can make great use of videos on their websites, to show more of their cause and the work they are doing. It’s cheaper than ever to produce a video yourself, you can do it on most home computers with a fairly cheap video camera, or you can employ a specialist company to give you something professional.
Hosting videos on your website can be expensive if they are popular. Many charities choose to use YouTube or Vimeo to host the videos and put them into their website using the services embeddable player. This means that the other site has the cost for the bandwidth, but also your video will get more exposure by being available in their directories.
Charity Website Tips: On Site Advertising
In recent years it has become very popular to include streaming “pay-per-click” ads provided by major search engine companies such as Google on your website in order to get extra income. However, increasingly these adverts are being placed excessively on websites in order to increase revenue, which makes all websites that include these adverts have a similar feel. Internet users are becoming aware of these adverts, and seeing them on a site often puts visitors off, as many sites using these adverts have little or no real content of any real value.
If a visitor has come to your website to find information about your charity, the last thing they want to be staring at is a collection of irrelevant adverts. If you have to include “pay-per-click” adverts on your website, try to do so subtly, without taking the focus away from the main content of the website.
You should also be aware that even though the adverts automatically displayed on your site are supposed to be relevant to your charity, they are often not. For example, if your charity focuses on animal welfare, the last thing you’d want would be adverts being displayed selling farming implements. Unfortunately, the way the keyword matching works this is a highly possible link that could be created. There are also a suprising number of "get rich quick" type adverts that come up, even when there is little relevance on the host website.
If you do want to try to build a revenue stream for your charity with on-site advertising, look instead at the more directly relevant “affiliate” advertising methods. With these, you can display adverts on your site, and receive a payment or commission for all sales made through your link. You can choose exactly what adverts to display, and carefully select who you wish to be affiliated with. Instead of adverts being displayed on every page of your website you could try having a “shopping” page and put all the adverts on their.
Affiliate advertising is generally run through large advertising networks, although some sites may have their own systems in place. Look out for an “affiliates” link in the footer. Some popular advertising networks are Commission Junction, Affiliate Window, Affiliate Future and DGM.
Charity Website Tips: Content is King
Quality content is the number one key to a good website. On the internet, content really is king, and always will be. People use the internet because they want to find information of some sorts, and in order to stand out from all the other websites out there you need to offer something of a high standard.
For charities, the quality of your content will make the difference between having a website that may look pretty, but is rarely used, and does nothing to support your charitable aims, and having a website that is engages your audience, attracts repeat visits and receives significant donations towards your cause.
In addition to making your charities website more engaging to your visitors, good content will also help your position in search engines. If done correctly, good content will lead to good search engine positions, the same things your visitors are looking for are what the search engines are looking for.
Consider your audience
If your audience is “the general public” try not to write in technical language that only an expert in your field can understand. It’s easy for charities to fall into this trap, using the same wording on external marketing as they would in an internal report. Try to use the same and similar words in your content that your visitors would use when they search so your page has a chance of matching in the search engines.
Have enough content
The amount of content you have on your website can be very important for a charity, as if you don’t have enough content you won’t look like a significant charity and this creates an impression in your visitors mind.
Show what’s happening right now
Regularly updated information such as news, blogs or project updates are features that make visitors come back to your website. Return visitors are a valuable commodity for any charity, as its these visitors who are going to be your biggest and more regular donors. Keeping your website up-to-date with new information is also good for search engines which like to see that a website isn’t getting stale.
Keep content well organised
It’s great to have loads of content on your website, but it’s no use if no-one can find it. Internet users are generally impatient, they want to get to something quickly. Your most important information should never be more than a few clicks away, and the website needs to be easy enough to understand so they visitors know where to click next.
Present content in more than one place
If for example you have a latest news page, why not display your latest headlines on your homepage, or other pages of your website so that visitors to these pages don’t miss this important information. Do make sure the information is relevant to the page you are feeding it into though.
Don’t overdo it
Try not to take on more than you can handle. If you have too much content it will likely become out of date quickly. If you are only a small organisation, don’t pretend to be something you are not, it will soon become obvious when most of your pages are a year out of date.