5 Internet Strategy-building Musts

According to Lynch, younger people are accustomed to making small transactions ($3 and up) using their debit cards, which is something nonprofits can leverage.

5. Acquiring new donors. All of the aforementioned steps are meaningless unless you have a solid method for driving traffic to your Web site and acquiring new online donors and prospects. Optimize your site for e-mail collection and search engines. Search-engine optimization is the most important marketing technique for nonprofits to do, Lynch said, as 80 percent of most organizations’ traffic comes from search engines.

Come up with a search-engine optimization strategy. What are your search phrases going to be? Lynch recommended choosing two- to three-word search phrases, not just keywords. Do “link” campaigns to encourage constituents with Web sites to link to your site, as the more Web sites that link to you, the more the search engines will assume your organization is an expert on a topic, which will, in turn, boost its rank. Use header and header tags that include the search phrase and are easy to scan. And update your content regularly, as search engines increase the rank of sites with the most updated content.

Harry Lynch and Paul Habig can be reached via www.sankyperlowin.com