Web Design

If I told you that you could double your digital fundraising quite easily, wouldn’t it be stupid of you not to? I think everyone would agree. Yet the sorry state of affairs is this — donation forms stink, and people are not fixing them. When you move someone with a clever piece of fundraising communications, your donation pages are a deciding factor in whether you get that gift.

I recently talked with a nonprofit communications director whose challenge for 2014 is to remake her organization’s communications voice, style and tone from something that is, frankly, a little frightening to something much more friendly. Here are three approaches I recommended. Maybe you could try these too?

Running a usability test of your online donation form and website can give you a few jitters if you’ve never done it, but usability testing is not complicated. Anyone can do it. Moreover, usability testing is an invaluable tool for improving your website design and increasing donation conversions. Running your test really only involves four aspects: orienting your participants, giving test tasks, observing participants driving your website (without helping) and wrapping up with exit questions.

Some nonprofits have not made their websites a priority, feeling that they don’t have the resources to dedicate to them. However, nonprofits can no longer ignore their websites, as the website is sure to be one of their largest sources of income in the coming years. Once the decision to improve the website is made, nonprofits must then focus on creating a positive user experience that helps boost purchases and donations.

Here are a few key points to keep in mind when designing a nonprofit site.

Over the last few weeks I’ve looked at hundreds of nonprofit websites, ranging from small community organizations to large, national hospital and university foundations. While layouts, style and content management systems all differ, there are a few shared characteristics of all nonprofit websites — a few of which aren’t positives. Here are three common nonprofit website mistakes and how to avoid them: 1. no blog; 2. "gallery" pages; 3. too much emphasis on donation forms and not enough on lead capture.

Here are some well-tested guidelines for crafting bios that help audiences connect with your organization, illustrated by some useful models.

Let’s have a look at six types of landing-page conversion killers. Avoid these mistakes, and your chances of creating a high-converting page will dramatically increase. 1. Are you wishy-washy? 2. Are you too clever? 3. Are you using meaningless graphics? 4. Are you a hype machine? 5. Are you irrelevant? 6. Do you rely too much on the power of free?

At bbcon, two fundraising professionals shared the key attributes of engaging e-mail and ways to optimize e-mail communications in their session, "Email in a Social Media/Mobile Device World."

If your website doesn’t have as many viewers as you would like, don’t fret. There are a variety of ways to easily drive more traffic to your site without paying for ad space or being too pushy. By becoming more involved in your business, building your social-media presence and following a few other tips, you will soon have hundreds or thousands more views regularly.

FundRaising Success announces the 2013 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence Website winner: Covenant House.