2011 is history.  (image from Jalopnik)

Okay, so the holidays are over.  Officially.  You probably won’t be seeing the type of donation volume you had over November and December again until next year’s holiday, but that doesn’t mean you can’t turn your organization’s website into a lean, mean fundraising machine.  Give your organization a fresh start for 2012 with these simple tips for increasing your fundraising power in the new year:

1.) Mind Your Manners.

By this I mean, be sure you send a Thank You to everyone who donated this year.  I’ve discussed how best to do this at length in previous posts here, but it’s different for every organization.  Be sure you send out an acknowledgement to everyone who supported your organization this season (yes, it’s different than a donation receipt!); it’s just about the best and easiest way you can motivate your donors to contribute year round.

2.) And Your Metrics.

Hopefully, you’ll have lots of data from the holiday season this year, so you can see what worked and what didn’t.  Doing some social networking campaigns that didn’t pan out as lucratively as you’d planned?  Pull ‘em.  Donors getting hung up on one of the steps on your donation form?  Change it up.  Do a review to begin 2012 strong and start making changes to your donation page, your site’s funnel, and anything else that’s seems to be in any way impeding the online donation process.  If you haven’t been tracking your donors behavior on your website this year, put some energy into getting it set up immediately.  The results will be enlightening and provide invaluable information how to further optimize your site’s fundraising functionality.  Our service can easily integrate with your analytics program, so if you haven’t yet taken steps to collect measurable data (outside of dollars raised) about your donation page as it functions in concert with your site, do it now!

3.) Incentivize.

So, the idea is that your organization has been building, through a series of interactions (online and otherwise), a relationship with a donor base that believes in your organizational mission enough to put their donation dollars behind you.  But even your wonderful, generous, saintlike donors like free stuff (everyone does).  Figure out something awesome (and cost effective) to give away to your donors in a planned fundraising drive- if you’re a water-conservation group, give away eco-friendly water bottles in your summer fundraising push; it doesn’t need to be something big or valuable and ideally it will also act as a guerilla marketing tool for your organization.  Bumper stickers, mugs, bandanas, those crazy LiveStrong-style plastic bracelets, packets of flower seeds with your organization’s logo (I think these are an awesome giveaway item for environmentally-oriented organzations). . . all these options can be made fairly inexpensively and are a little added perk for donors, especially at non-peak times of year.

4.) Get Some Fresh Perspective

Have a meeting early in 2012 and put your head’s together- get everyone on board with the fundraising plan for the year.  You might find that folks from different departments can shed some light or bring new ideas to the table and even if not, this meeting is a good time to reiterate to everyone (yourself, too!) that online fundraising is an organizational priority.  Online fundraising doesn’t just take a good donation page and good marketing, it takes a dedicated, organized team that manages and enhances donor relationships and has a collective sense of excitement and dedication.  Have a post-holiday re-group session to increase your chances for year-round fundraising success.

5.) Think About Your Ideal Donor.

To borrow a concept from Maureen Carruthers (whose work I love!), you ‘perfect supporter’ is that ideal donor you’re writing and appealing to.  Figure out who he or she is- Maureen offers a fabulous worksheet on the topic and while this exercise may seem simplistic, it’s a perfect tool to help guide your marketing and fundraising asks, as well as a way to shift your perceptions of your donor base.

6.) Best Laid Plans. 

image from Design*Sponge

A lot of your fundraising success this year will come from careful planning and forethought; no getting around or out of it.  The beginning of the year is a crazy time for everyone (we’ve barely taken a breath here at DonationPay since, like, September!), but to get your head wrapped around your fundraising goals for the year, you’ll probably need to set aside some fairly substantial time to plan out your online fundraising appeals and programs and how they fit into the landscape of your year.  Know the exact days in your email calendar when your asks will go out, when your online presence should support specific fundraising events, when you’ll be doing ‘maintenance asks’ (a soft ask reminding your donors that your mission is ongoing), and most of all, who and how this will be executed.  It’s helpful to have an overall picture of your year’s fundraising arc and to consider the how your fundraising methodology will be perceived and received by your donor base, as a whole, not as individual asks.

Knowing how everything will go, to the last detail, is of course not going to be totally possible and much of the reason that everyone involved with the non-profit sector (yours truly included) are closet adrenaline junkies, is that the wild deviations and pivots and improvisations necessary to stay current, are actually kind of fun or at least invigorating.  So, even knowing that much of it may fly out the window at a moments notice, do yourself and your organization a favor and set up a comprehensive online fundraising workplan.  Even if it only ends up acting as the vaguest blueprint for how you’d like things to go, it will help, I promise.

6.) Get Help. Online.

I’ve been browsing the internet quite a bit these days, and lest you think I’m shirking my work duties to do some Ebay shopping, let me clarify: I’ve been surfing the web with purpose.  I’ve been impressed with the Biz Ladies posts at Design*Sponge lately (brief aside: I’ve been obsessed with D*S forever and most recently made an awesome version of this amazing herringbone-painted dresser for my house and I love it!)- they provide a lot of advice that’s not too lecture-y about planning, stress-management and how to integrate your creative life and goals into your day-to-day.  I’m trying to be better organized, better tempered and more connected to the community here in the Bay Area in 2012 and I’m reading everything I can about how other people go about doing what I want to do.  For fundraising advice, do the same: check out the blogs of organization’s you support or are impressed with, read all the expert advice you can find, and think of the web as a gigantic support group for your fundraising efforts.  Because, if you look in the right places, it kinda is.  Obviously, our readers are already on top of this (pat yourselves on the back, y’all), but try to freshen up your online reading list by seeking out some specific information about particular fundraising or organizational goals for the coming year.  My favorite news aggregators for non-profit info are AllTop and Mashable, and there are so many good blogs out there, so many good books. . . find time to do some productive web research about how to freshen up your fundraising approach in 2012 and it will pay off!

Got some good ideas to share?  How is your organization going to effectively fundraise in 2012?

-AJ

The Pre-Holiday Donation Page Workout

Warm Up Your Index Page: Start on your website’s index/main page.  How easy is it to get to your donation form?  Can you immediately see the button that will take you to the page?  Are your Donate links and buttons prominently displayed?  If you have various fundraising campaigns running, are there links, front and center, that will take the user (who right now is you) directly to a page where you can easily complete whatever conversion your organization wants (whether this is signing up for an email list, making a donation, engaging with the blog content or following your organization on Twitter)?  Check the other pages of your site- is the Donation link prominent and easily found?  What you’re looking for in the warmup are any stumbling blocks to making a donation or engaging with your organization in the intended way. . . make sure you note any confusing areas or extra steps.  From the Donate links on your front page, you should be taken directly to the donation form- every page between a donate button and the actual donation form loses some donors.  The idea is to make the process as easy and painless as possible- don’t give your donors any excuse to ‘abandon the shopping cart.’

Exercise # 1: Donation Page Calisthenics

Donation page dress rehearsal- you’ve arrived on the donation page after a brief warm up and review of your site’s pages.  Now that you’re here, take a look around.  Is your page understandable and easy to use, even for the least tech savvy folks?  Make a test donation and see how it feels.  Is it easy to enter your billing information, to set up a recurring payment and maybe to enter an honorarium message if you’re donating in someone else’s honor?  Does the Thank-You page you land on after you’ve successfully completed a payment acknowledge your contribution and give you an option to return to the home site, sign up for a blog, or share new of your donation with friends through social media?  Make sure your donation experience is smooth, quick and makes you feel more deeply engaged with your organization.

Exercise #2: Strength Training For Your Story

What’s the story?  It’s tricky to bring a narrative to the forefront of the donation process, but the most successful donation pages do just this.  Is it apparent to your donors where their donation will go and how it will be spent?  Do they have an idea of what their donation will do?  It’s important to keep your donation form clean and user-friendly, but donors also like to see graphics and small text blocks describing what your organization does.  Limit long-winded explanations and favor anecdotal evidence of your donors positive effects within your mission.  Earthshare’s donation page does a fabulous job of this, as does A Home Within’s- both give great specific examples of what a donation will do and donors can easily visualize where their donation dollars will actually go when they make a donation.  Review your page- does it tell or suggest a story that donors are a part of?

Exercise #3: Some Social Media Cardio 

Are you linked in to social media? Once you’ve made a donation, can you easily Tweet about it or post to your Facebook page through links on the Thank You page or on your organization’s website?  Is it easy to join the conversation?  Is your donation page taking advantage of the, essentially, free marketing available through your donors social networks?  Make sure that once their donation is completed, your donor can immediately share a link to your donation page or a link to a content page on your site.

Exercise # 4: Stretch To Keep Your Fundraising Limber

What are the suggested donation amounts on your site and donation page?  Are you selling yourself short?  Donors respond well to suggested donation amounts, but will donate less if given the option.  Unless your fundraising plan is specifically based on lots of small donations, your suggested amounts should begin at $20 or over.  Of course, donors have the option of donating whatever amount they want, but does your site present a substantial enough example donation and with the example, provide a compelling enough reason for them to make that contribution?  Make sure your donation page offers inspiring reasons supporters should make a considerable donation to your organization.

 An Analytical Cool Down

Now’s the time for analysis: do you have your analytics program hooked up to your donation page?  Is it easy for your organization to track a donors path from site entry to donation completion?  Are you set up to do the kind of tracking necessary to make improvements to your site’s funnel and conversion rate?  Be sure you’re set up to collect as much data about your donors and your donation process as possible, because even if your fundraising is booming, there is always room for improvement.

Whew, that’s it for now!  Pat yourself on the back, take a look at your notes from the workout and get started improving your donation page.  We’ll be posting lots of helpful tips and tutorials in the next few months to help get prepared for the upcoming push.  The holidays are upon us, folks, let’s get your organization’s donation page tanned, rested and ready to bring in record fundraising dollars this season!

Happy fundraising,

AJ

Take charge of your sites potential

This is one of those weeks where I’m feeling like the creative well is dry, so I’ll be directing you today to a couple fascinating articles to help you develop your website further.

These 25 tips on how to improve your website are quite general, perhaps just the teeniest bit dated, and some of them are repeats of concepts I’ve already tried to drill into your thick skulls (just kidding, readers), but can be used as a kind of Web Improvement for Dummies bible.  If you don’t know too much about the web world and are trying to suss out best practices for guiding your website to conceptual and practical success, this is a handy one to have printed out and tacked on your office wall.

Article Number Two, for your consideration, is a fairly comprehensive guide to improving the conversion rate on your website.  The term conversion sounds kinda culty and scary, but it’s perfect for what it actually means: as far as web sites go, your conversion rate is the percentage of your web visitors that perform the task you want them to perform.  All websites have a different idea of what a conversion is, for their particular site.  For us, a conversion on the blog is someone subscribing to it and on our DonationPay official site, it’s someone signing up to be notified.  For an online retailer, it would be a sale and for NPO’s a conversion might be signing up for a newsletter or making a donation. Before you start your web design process, one of the first things you should decide is what a conversion is for you and build the site based on guiding your web traffic to perform that particular task.  And if you already have a site but you’re not sure what a conversion is for you, chances are your site is underperforming, so get sure, right quick, and start using these tips to guide your web traffic to the right place.

-A.J.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not like a Magic Eye Painting, where only programming nerds and web designers can see the sailboat behind the chaos. It’s not an esoteric concept or a unicorn or something that only techie geeks can understand.   SEO is a real thing, honest, and if you take note of some of these simple tips, you can build a successful site that will ably promote your business or cause.  No matter how web-savvy or experienced you are (or are not), you can improve the SEO practices of your site.

1.) Choose Keywords Wisely

Picking keywords is an art and a science.  There are many tools online (like WordTracker and the Google Keyword  tool) to help you with keyword research and guide you through the process.  Spending a little time enhancing your keywords, in text and tags, will result in increased traffic that is specific to your business and your website.  I find keyword research to be extremely fun and satisfying- even if you have a couple of false starts with keywords that don’t really pan out, the strategizing and investigation required to revamp or develop your keywords and phrases is pretty edifying.

Below is a video tutorial on how to do keyword research using the Google Keyword Tool.

2.) Title Tags

Your title tags need to be different on every page.  Most search engines, most of the time, will use the title tag on a webpage as the link text that pops up as search results so it needs to be in sentence form, human-readable, 65 characters or less (including spaces)and keyword specific.  It’s crucial to SEO success to spend the time to make sure you’re titling each page with an appropriate and accurate description of the information available on that page.  Your title tags should reflect your keyword strategy-what you discover in your keyword research, you can apply here, to solicit specific appropriate to the corresponding pages of your site.  SEOMoz is pretty much the ultimate resource for SEO tips, blogs and tutorials, and here is their owner, Rand Fishkin’s clear and instructive description of best practices for title tags.  Also, if you have a content managed site (i.e. one built on a Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, or others) there are ways (contained in the above links- you’re welcome!) to work around your CMS and personalize your title tags.  Dudes, you might not want to know about ‘em, but there are ways. . .

3.) Image Tags

Be sure to include keyword-rich alt-tags on images.  You never know when an image might break on your site or be unviewable by someone’s browser your image tags need to be in complete sentences, rife with keywords and descriptive of what the image actually shows.  The search engine crawlers cannot see the images, but they can see the alt text.  Your images add enormous value to your web content; you know that, but the search engines have no way of knowing that (those damn, dirty machines).   You have to tell them what your image is and why it’s relevant- with your alt- tags.  Also, web readers for the blind read the image tags, so this is a chance to make your website accessible to more people.  It’s easy enough to forget to include your image tags (I have been guilty of it many, many times myself on this very blog and others-do as I say, not as I do, as my mom used to say), but you will be doing your business or NPO a great disservice if you do so.  Here’s a more detailed how-to, if you’re so inclined.

4.) Link Building

Link building is a trick of the trade that can easily go awry.  Two relevant links from related sites are exponentially more valuable than ten links of dubious quality.  The search engines algorithms are complicated, but the basic deal is this: Google casts it’s expansive eye all across the web, looking at which sites are connected to other sites, and considering each in-link you have to be akin to a political endorsement- sites with the most links generally show up high on the search engine results pages.  Like political endorsements, some can help, some are neutral and some can badly damage your search engine standing.   Never pay for links, as this is, well, frowned upon by the search engines.  The best, easiest and most enjoyable way to link-build is to continuously update your site with interesting content and link to other industry blogs and sites; the more relevance your site has in the ongoing web dialogue about your industry, cause or featured topic, the easier it will be for you to link to other interesting sites and enhance your popularity with the search engines and your presence on the web.  Check out these savvy, detailed tips on how to improve your link building skills.  Also, these.

5.) Site Maps

This is actually an easy thing to do that some newcomers to the web world find intimidating.

Here is a brief tutorial on how to create and submit a sitemap using free tools.

Submit updated site maps regularly to all major search engines.  Just do it, you won’t be sorry.

6.) Directory Listings

Carefully choosing several online  directories specific to your industry can help your site’s search engine standing enormously.  Not all directories that appear initially to be valuable or relevant actually will be, so do a little research before you get on board with one of these.  Some good ones for non-profits are here, here and here.  Also, of course be sure to submit yourself to larger directories like the ones at Google, Yahoo, Bing, Joeant, Dmoz, etc.  But you already did that, right?  Ahem, I’ll wait while you get on it.

7.)  Social Networking

I know, I know, this is a topic that I have beaten to death in most of my blog posts and this will surely not be the last, but, seriously, social networking can work wonders for your site.  I know Tweeting is ridiculous and Facebook can seem like a steaming cesspool of old high school boyfriends and weirdos covertly trying to sell you something (or, ah, services), but for your business or NPO, both those sites can really be a boon to your web traffic.  There are many factors to consider when using social networking sites to enhance your own site, especially for a non-profit.  Be strategic in terms of which methods you choose, post consistently engaging content and your efforts will be rewarded.  Here is an article from the Chicago tribune about the doors social networking is opening up for non-profits (forgive their poor archive formatting.  Also, for laughs, check out Gawker’s sassy beatdown of annoying Twitter users tweeting their causes.

8.) Blog/ Post Relevant Content

Yep, if you want to have a compelling website, you need to have regularly updated, interesting content.  Period.  There’s really no way around this, so just suck it up and do it.  It’s fun, stimulating and makes you feel connected with your web community and it is the single easiest way to have a dynamic site.  When you’re first building the readership on a blog (like this one), it can feel like your carefully constructed posts are like shots fired into the darkness.  The important thing to remember if you are just starting a companion blog to your website is that it will take some time.  But once people start finding their way to you, they’ll have a fabulous archive to browse and a way to further connect with you, your website, and your business or NPO.  Also, the search engines know which sites are regularly updated and can recognize when web traffic is repeatedly returning to your site.  That’s right, search engines are now smart enough to assess whether or not your site is valuable.  Make it valuable.

So, again, man up (or, you know, lady up) and do the damn thing; it’s addictive after awhile and will make a dramatic impact on your web traffic.

Here’s some basics on how to write a blog post using WordPress:

9.) Analytics

One of the easiest way to track your burgeoning web progress is to install a free analytics package on your site.  It will let you track how many views each page of your site is getting, where your web traffic is coming from and gives a daily breakdown of your visitors and site activity.  This is an invaluable, free tool that can help guide your site to greatness.

10.) Be Dilligent

All these tips are fine and good, but SEO is like an endurance trial: it requires a constant, low-level effort that will ultimately bring you to achieve your web goals.  If something isn’t working, if your site is underperforming or your keywords aren’t working . . . well, the best advice I can give you is to try, try again.  Try a new  SEO trick every day, read articles, get proactive with your web presence and you will be richly rewarded for your efforts.

Have fun and happy search optimizing!

-A.J.