How to Use Your Nonprofit Website to Fundraise

You should always ensure that your nonprofit website includes links that viewers can use to give donations to your organization.

There are a number of reasons that people may be visiting your nonprofit's website. For example, they could be wondering where your business is located or are browsing around while doing some research. However, no matter what reason a visitor came to your website for, you should not lose the opportunity to try to get another donation. Here are our tips that you can use to possibly get more donations through your nonprofit website.

1. Give the Contact Information for Your Nonprofit

This is perhaps the simplest thing that you can do. Your website should clearly and consistently state what your nonprofit organization does, where it is located, and give several different ways to contact it (mailing address, toll-free phone number, e-mail…etc). Because deep-linking (linking into the inner parts of a website) is more common now, it is good practice to include the address and phone number of your nonprofit as a footnote on the bottom of each page inside of your website. As well, make sure that there is a "Contact us" link at the bottom of each page as well.

Depending on how involved your staff is with the work that your nonprofit organization does, it may also make sense to staff profile page. On this page, you can give a short biography of each staff member, talk about what each staff member does in their capacity inside of the nonprofit organization, and provide an e-mail address. This helps visitors to your website know the staff on a more personal level and can also lead to better communication with the general public. To avoid the problems with spam mail, you can list e-mail addresses so they are not easily linked. For example, place a space before and after the "@" sign -- gene.trueva @ nonprofitname.org.

2. Make sure that Your Nonprofit's Personality is Displayed

To get donors to give to your organization on more than one occasion, you need to build a relationship with them. To do this online, your best bet is to make sure that the "personality" of your organization is communicated. To figure out what type of personality that your organization has, it's best to look at some of the fundraising materials that you have already produced. If the donation letters go out on recycled hemp paper, your organization's personality may "green." On the other hand, if the mailings go out printed on engineering paper that has equations and graphs, the nonprofit's personality may be "scientific."

Once you have a clear picture of the kind of personality that your organization already displays, you need to make sure that your nonprofit's website also communicates this personality. It is always best to keep a steady theme running through your nonprofit so that your donor's do not get confused as to who is asking for their time and money.

Lastly, be sure that your website is targeted towards the audience that you wish to draw in. For example, if your nonprofit does work for the elderly, you should not have tiny text that is hard to read. Likewise, if your organization is targeted towards the rights of deaf people, be sure that your website doesn't have sound files that are necessary to use the webpage.

3. Give Your Visitors Something Interesting to Read

One of the themes that you would see if you spent time looking around in the best nonprofit websites is that they are always giving their readers something new to read. For instance, some nonprofit websites use a scrolling window that is constantly updated with the nonprofit's activities and volunteering opportunities. Other information that is provided includes articles about the future work that the nonprofit is planning and any articles that the members of the nonprofit have written. If you are feeling more ambitious, you have the option of going outside of your nonprofit website and looking for more information about the work that your nonprofit is doing. For example, if a newspaper recently ran an article about a project that your organization is working on, you can post a link to that article (or even post the full transcript of the article as long as you get permission first!)

You may be thinking that constantly updating your website is going to be a lot of work. Not surprising, it will be. However, getting new content onto your website at regular internals will keep your readers and viewers coming back. If you are even more ambitious, you can offer your readers an opportunity to sign up to an e-mail list where they can get weekly/monthly newsletters.

4. Make Sure Your Website is Up to Date

Once you have your website up and running, it is probably going to be a temptation to sit back and enjoy it. Look at how much work you've already put into the site! However, in order to get the full worth of your website, and to ensure that all your hard work actually pays off, you need to constantly be on the ball making sure that you keep adding fresh content.

One of the main reasons you will want to keep adding content to your nonprofit website is to keep readers coming back. Just as you would not continue to buy a newspaper that prints the same three stories for ten months in a row, the visitors to your site will most likely stop visiting your site if they do not see new information. As well, the more visitors that you can keep drawing back to your site, the more likely it is that those visitors will turn into donors at some point.

However, you should be careful not to take on too much. Instead of making sure that you have three new stories every day, you could instead make sure that your monthly newsletter is posted to your website. As well, you should invite visitors to your site to write articles that you can read and perhaps publish on your website.

5. Make Donating Easy

If there is one cardinal sin that you want to avoid in your nonprofit website, you should always make sure that any links to donating are easy to use and find. Many websites have never reached their full potential due to design flaws that placed donation links buried within blocks of text or hidden in remote areas of the site. However, just because you don't want to hide donation information, you do not want to be "in-your-face" about it either. Donation links should not be spammed across the screen when a viewer comes to your site. Instead, you should have tasteful donation links that also suggest to the donors how much to give and also provides some information about where their donations will be going.

Making a donation page inside of your website can be as easy as including a donation tab on your main page. This link could be labeled as "Supporting our Cause" or "How You Can Help." Inside of this donation page, you should include methods of payment for donations as well as information about volunteering. Always remember that the people that cannot afford to donate money will often donate their time instead.

When you are thinking about how your donors can submit donations, you should consider various methods. If you are up and running on online payments (such as PayPal or other electronic funds transfer services), be sure to include this information. If not, you an offer a "fill-in" PDF file that donors can fill out and send in by mail or fax.

6. Tell Your Donors Where Their Money is Going

Any great nonprofit website will have a page that tells donors where their money is going and how it is being spent. You should have a prominent link on your main page that goes to this information page.

There have been studies that have found that donors place a high value in having a webpage inside of a nonprofit website that tells how the donations are being used. Another important piece of information to have in this page is your nonprofit's annual report and your Form 990.

7. Publicly Thank your Donors

In addition to telling your donors where their money is going, it is just as important to publicly thank all of your donors. Your website should have a "Thank You" or "Our Supporters" page that lists the names of all the donors to your organization. However, you should always provide the option to your donors of whether or not they want their names displayed on this page.

Another benefit of this page is that it can lend to the credibility of your organization. If you can count a few prominent members in your community as donors to your nonprofit, displaying their names on this page may lead others to realize that your organization is doing good work.

In addition, you may want to create "levels" of contributions. For example, you could break down the contribution levels by the amount of money or time given by the donors. In the "highest" level, you may want to include personal information about the donors.

8. Track the Users of your Website

Getting your web developer to add a tracker into your website should not be very difficult. When you have a good tracking program installed on your site, you can gather information about what sites visitors to your site came from, and where they navigated after leaving your site. In addition, trackers can provide very useful information about the most-clicked-on links within your site, and which page in your site is the most common page that visitors see just before they leave your domain.

These statistics can be invaluable to the future development of your website. If certain pages are not being accessed as frequently as you think they should be, there could be a reason. Maybe you need to refresh the content of certain parts of your website more or less often. In addition, you may also be able to build on the SEO value of your webpage by noting which keywords draw in the most viewers to your website.

9. Advertise Your Website

So, now that you've gone through the trouble of getting your fantastic website up and running, remember not to stop there. Instead, you should advertise your website -- get word out about your newest creation! Make sure to put your web address on all of your stationary and business cards. If you have a pre-existing mailing list, you should think about offering incentives for the people on the list to switch to an e-mail list. Encourage your readers to get their friends interested in your site and donate to your organization.