How your website can improve your fund-raising capabilities

Though there are a myriad of ways to fundraise using the Internet, for most charities their website will be the most obvious and number one consideration. Sadly, however, this is a marketing tool that largely under performs for them, and for no really good reason. The most common stock answer given by charities when told that their site is pretty dire (as most are) is that there is a lack of funds. Lack of funds, however, should not equal lack of imagination. Given a reasonable age span of supporters, there will be many capable sub-thirty year olds within the supporter base who can produce, with the aid of one of the many design packages around on the market, something quite acceptable. And what are the four primary characteristics that make so many charity sites poor?

1. No clarity of communication or message: What does the charity really do and how is the money spent
2. Poor design: the site is a ‘hotch-potch’ of thoughts and aspirations usually cobbled up by the ‘committee’
3. Too much Information crammed onto the home page: Often the many disparate departments within a charity fight and squabble over homepage pixels.
4. Illogical navigation and user inter-operability

1.1 BASIC GENERIC NEEDS

If you want your charity to be successful online, your website should serve the needs of your supporters easily, utilizing messages and communications that are readily understood. And because the Internet is an ever evolving platform, you will need to constantly and consistently work at developing your offer too. The following aspects of website design are the basic generic building blocks of success, and they’re all important

1.1.1. Fast Loading
This is blatantly obvious, but a concept that most charities fail to think about! The average patience threshold of today’s Web surfer is now below 10 seconds and falling, so if your home page does not load quickly, your supporters will surely click off and go elsewhere. Things that slow loading speeds down include:

a. Pictures can be huge files, often 3mb, so more pictures equals slower speeds. To ameliorate the effects of pictures, there are a number of tactics available:-

- Compress all pictures into .jpg, .png or .gif files
- Specify image dimensions (a x b pixels)
- Slice your images but avoid too many slices
- Don’t resize images within HTML
- Use the ALT tags correctly
- You can control graphic size by reducing the total number of colors used or “crunch” them using any of the popular GIF or JPEG crunching programs available (free programs include GIMP or Google’s PICASA)

b. Flash can be a big problem, if only for the fact that many users do not have it installed. Tactics to reduce flash problems include compressing or eliminating all unnecessary flash elements or using Javascript to implement a picture rotation system. Furthermore, although search engines are slowly increasing their flash readability, as with PDF files, they won’t follow the links and therefore never get past the homepage! Flash is generally accepted as being very negative for SEO purposes.

c. Cluttered Code . To reduce the problems associated with cluttered code, the following tactics are helpful

- Use CCS instead of images
- Convert from Table to CSS based layout
- Use external style sheets
- Remove unnecessary white space in HTML
- Use shorthand CSS
- Use relative links
- Specify the Doc type

d. Server congestion is an issue

- Reduce http requests from other sites
- Don’t use https:// unless necessary
- Upgrade your web server
- use a tier one provider
- Use Gzip compression to reduce HTML size
- Upgrade server memory

e. Database Design

- To maximize speed of download, separate content and database servers

f. Miscellaneous help points

- Use a loading progress indicator to reduce impatience in users
- Use AJAX instead of page refreshes
- Reduce size and number of cookies

1.1.2. Good Eye-Catching Design
Many of Andy Warhol’s pictures are justifiably revered for their relatively simple, but eye-catching designs. A website design is no different – make it cluttered and messy and no one will want to look at it for long.

Similarly, be careful when choosing colours to use – for example, red is used sparingly on the Net as it is difficult for colour blind people to recognize it. Remember also, that too many different colours make your text hard to read and look unprofessional – you’re not creating a crayoning book advert. Finally, there are number of protocols about colour on the Internet. For example, the use of coloured text to indicate links – blue is traditional, and to emphasize important concepts or points. For more about use of colours, please see the section following.

1.1.3. Logical and Simple Navigation
Your website should be easy to navigate, so don’t make your supporters click through tens and tens of irrelevant pages before you give them the information they need. If you make it easy for your visitors to move through your site, they’ll stay around much longer, and will be more likely to visit you again! Some basic points include

a. Logical site structure – categories, sections, and links in relevant positions
b. Show a list of locations you can use to browse the site
c. Show your current location
d. Always use a sitemap [covers as a back-up]

Similarly, good sites generally have navigation menus that remain in the same position throughout the site, though whilst every individual page need not necessarily contain a navigation menu or bar, it must contain a ‘home’ function or a small but readable crumb bar system. Users should not have to use the back button. Similarly excessive use of drop down menus is not helpful; other techniques using Javascript are preferable

Do not encourage any horizontal scrolling, or excessive pagination, and remember that a good designer should always link the site/company logo to the home page wherever that logo appears

1.1.4. Establish Credibility
Make sure your charity’s message is obvious because if visitors can’t readily understand what you’re about, they’ll go somewhere else. Does your charity name signal what you do? Is it an acronym such as the RNLI. Every aspect of your site should somehow contribute to your goal — be it to garner contributions, inform, or simply entertain!

Your site needs to transparently promote your registered charity status. If visitors to your site suspect something untoward, they won’t trust you and therefore will not become benefactors! Believable testimonials and images help create trust. Generally the more information you give your visitors, the more secure they’re going to feel about giving to you.

1.1.5. Focus on Relevant, Fresh Content
Your website content [often called copy] must be up-to-date and relevant to your audience. If your site is primarily information based, then you need to be sure that you are adding new content on a regular basis. Why would your visitors come back if there is nothing new for them? Plus, you lose credibility when your information is old and out of date. Make regular changes to your site. They do not need to be drastic changes — for example, quote recent web statistics instead of those from 5 years ago, change your testimonials regularly and update your copy.

To ensure consistency of your written English, including syntax and grammar, it is best to have one copy writer. If you have several, like a newspaper, you will need a copy editor to review the disparate offerings. For example if one writer uses very formal language and another writer is heavy into slang, then the copy can become dysfunctional. An editor will ensure consistency of text.

1.1.6. Robust Design and Brand Consistency
Remember, that though a charity, you are still a brand in people’s eyes. Cadbury’s chocolate bars are titled with a particular font which has remained the same over several decades, as has the dark blue contents wrapper! So be sure that the look and design of your site is consistent.

Choose a back ground colour and stick with it. Choose link and text colours, and use them consistently throughout the site.

Always put your navigation buttons in the same position, whether along the side, or across the bottom of the page. Consistency of design will ensure that the experience at your site is a pleasant one. It will also let visitors know that they are still at your site, and haven’t linked off somewhere else!

All links should be relevant to the site and encourage people to click on them. They can either detract from your site, or contribute to it. Think creatively when developing your links!

1.1.7. Consider Database Marketing
Design the website so that you can capture your visitors email address on a permission given basis. Provide your visitors with at least one viable reason why they should give you their email addresses, such as a free newsletter, problem solving / readers questions section.

1.1.8. File Names
Use descriptive and meaningful file names. Your files names not only show up in the search engines, but also at the top of your visitor’s browser and in their bookmarks! Would you remember why you bookmarked a page that looked like this:

http://www.neatsite.com/cgi-bin/900wty/f862uz?5331a7qw334

Or would you be more likely to return to

http://www.neatsite.com/cgi-bin/Newsletter

1.1.9. Easy Contact
Make certain it is easy for visitors to contact you – ensure that they don’t have to click through myriads of pages for your contact details. Part of building credibility involves ensuring potential future supporters know exactly who you are, where you are and how they can contact you. Obvious transparency definitely pays dividends!

1.1.10. Structure for SEO
Design your website so that all pages within the site, not just the homepage, can be optimised.