Web Design

When it comes to your website, first impressions really do count! So to entice visitors to respond to your call to action and keep coming back for more, you’ve got to grab their attention, then follow through with some fresh content. And while it may be a little late for an official spring cleaning, why not take advantage of a few slow summer days to freshen up your website?

It’s very easy to become paralyzed by the variety of opinions about how to optimize donation forms for the purpose of improving online giving and donor acquisition. There’s no magic answer to the ideal calibration of layout, copy, images, fields, offer and headline that drives the highest possible levels of donor acquisition. Here are three things you can do today, without reworking your entire online strategy, to have an impact in acquiring new donors.

Be sure you make it easy for a potential donor to initiate dialogue — ask a question, get information and make a gift.

The last time I did a donating experiment was after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. I often ran into difficulties just making a donation. One donation page did not load so I left. Another required a registration process before I could donate so I left, and one organization did not have a donation page dedicated to Japan relief specifically.

Fundraising experts continue to test donation pages and more best practices have emerged. Here are some things that have been found (through testing) to work particularly well.

Trust is more than closing your eyes, stiffening your body and slowly falling backwards into a fabric of interwoven arms. Trust often comes from a process of slow cultivation, carefully built through the development of a meaningful relationship. There are many ways you can use your nonprofit’s website to build trust with your visitors. And as it turns out, building trust is crucial to your nonprofit ultimately achieving website success.

When I talk with clients I always ask them, “What do you want your website to do for you? What is its primary goal?” Sometimes I get a confused and glazed look, which is fine. The same thing happens to me when I watched that TV show "Lost." More times than not, people have a very long explanation about who they are and what they do and what makes them unique.

Way back in November 2006, when "Web site" was still the preferred usage, Blackbaud's Charlie Cumbaa wrote a Net Gain column titled "Put Your Web Site to Work" that outlined best practices for website development and giving donors a personalized experience online.

The team here at Network for Good has been working on our new mobile-friendly donation services lately so I thought I’d pass on our tips for making your site more mobile-friendly. You don’t need a special mobile version of your site or an custom-built app to improve how mobile visitors experience your site overall. With a few simple design tweaks, you can make your nonprofit website much more usable on a mobile device — and improve your visitors’ experience across all platforms.

It’s probably safe to say that 2013 is the year where mobile optimization will become mandatory. Designing mobile-friendly Web pages has been a really good idea for quite some time now, but it’s becoming increasingly important. An estimated 1.7 billion consumers will access the Web through a mobile device this year, a figure which surely includes some of your prospects. Here’s how to make sure your content is perfectly mobile optimized.

After a frustrating experience trying to make donations in friends' names for the holidays, I asked readers of my April 2009 Editor's Note to examine the ways that seemingly minor glitches and missteps can affect their all-important donor relationships.