Whether you are looking for donors or about to start a new fundraiser, it is important your Non-profit website is in tip-top shape at all times. So to help you we have put together four tips to improve your Non-profit website.
Layout and usability
Ensuring that your website layout is user friendly is key to keeping your website visitors engaged. An easy to navigate website will also help stop these visitors from bouncing off your site! It is good practice to make sure you utilise your menu tab well and include key menu titles such as: ‘Home’, ‘About Us’, ‘Our Mission’, ‘Donate’ and ‘Contact Us’ etc. These key signposts should help your users to navigate your site more easily and to find what they are looking for much quicker.
Next, If you are looking for new donors, make sure you clearly shout out your key messages and mission goals. All success stories are excellent aids to support engagement so why not consider dedicating a whole page on your site to these great advocates of your organisation?
Another tip for testing and evaluating the use of your site is to install “Hot Jar “. This handy software tool records and tracks every click made by your users. A benefit of “Hot Jar” is that it can produce a page to display a visitor activity heat-map. This heat map can show you where your visitors click the most often on your site, and how far down your page they scroll.
Pagespeed
Interesting news in the pipeline is Google will later this year release key findings about its algorithm. This update has been named ‘Page Experience Algorithm Update’. This is what they already have said:
“The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimising for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.”
A large part of the user experience is page speed. This aspect of SEO is becoming more and more significant. If your website is slow, users will bounce off your page and even worse, your website could be ranked lower by Google! Just for a moment, reflect back on any websites you have visited in the recent past to which you have closed because nothing would load – frustrating right? Absolutely the last thing you would want is any potential donors to be experiencing the same on your website.
To check your page speed, Google has a ‘PageSpeed Insights’ tool, that is completely free to use. This will inform you of any errors or elements that could be slowing down your site. Work your way through this list, and you will be well on your way to a faster website! Some areas may be difficult to do yourself, so if you need help from a developer, try Pedalo.
Good use of call to action
Many businesses tend to use “sign up” or “find out more” to drive conversions. This works well for profit-driven units, however, as a Non-profit, a slightly different approach is required which is why it’s key that you convince your visitors to act now and donate! Put it another way, it is key that we give our users extra motivation to act as soon as possible. Instead of the CTA’s I mentioned, try “donate, change, end, transform” and “invest” instead.
Another great way to capture your visitor’s attention is through the use of ‘exit intent’ pop-ups. These appear on your page as the user heads towards the ‘x’ on your Non-profits website tab. This is your last chance to keep your user on your website. It’s here you can experiment and use terms including ‘before you leave, help us to do more’ for example. There are plugins you can use to create your exit-intent pop-ups here.
Consider writing blogs
Writing and adding blogs to your Non-profit’s site is a great way to drive free traffic! Having and updating your blog regularly lets search engines know that they should keep coming back to look for new content, which helps increase your visibility on the search engine results page. It’s also a great way of keeping your website visitors engaged for longer. Our advice would be to make sure that your blogs are relevant to your sector as a Non-profit and ensure that they’re good quality. If you’re unsure where to start, try thinking about the most talked about topics in your sector and the questions people ask the most about your Non-profit and go from there. As well, having a monthly or yearly achievements blog where you go into depth about what you have achieved with your funding. This is a great way of connecting with your audience too.
I hope you enjoyed our ‘4 tips to improve your Non-profit Website’ blog!
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