Common failings of charity website strategies
Charities are potentially missing out on millions of pounds in online donations by not putting digital at the heart of their fundraising strategies. Storytelling, explaining your work and creating often hard-hitting campaigns are crucial to successful fundraising and earning long term support from donors.
While many charities spend significant sums increasing awareness and getting people to engage with their work, many other charities are missing out on potential support by not taking advantage of the change in donor attitudes towards engaging and supporting causes through online channels.
The British public increasingly depends on online resources and has high digital expectations of every organisation. In addition, viral campaigns such as last year’s #ALSicebucketchallenge can drive massive engagement and spikes in donations. However, some charities have been slow to capitalise on their supporters’ shift to online engagement and donation methods leading to a potential shortfall of millions of pounds worth of donations per year. Over 20% of all UK charity donations in the last 12 months were executed online.
In many instances, when people reach charity websites for more information or to make a donation, they are let down. Many sites are difficult to navigate or don’t work hard enough to convert interest into support. In our research we found there are four common website failings that charities need to correct in order to begin to gain their fair share of the potential support and donations online. These relate to home page optimisation, website page loading, donation buttons, and mobile buttons.
Home page optimisation
The page title is the most important "on page" search engine optimisation (SEO) signal. Yet 42% of charities fail to optimise their home page titles and risk a poor performance in search engines, as well as missed donations. If your site doesn’t appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) when people search for you (with possibly a slightly incorrect name or spelling), how can they find you?
An optimised page title and correct mark up for the homepage will help you in a variety of ways. It is essential in helping a site rank higher in the SERPs for a wide range of relevant search terms, and for creating intelligible search snippets in the search results. It also influences the way the page is shown in tab titles of internet browsers and when shared via social media.
Non-optimised page titles often reference just the charity name or include the keyword "home". So unless your charity name equals the search term, people will have trouble finding your website. On the other hand, a bespoke homepage title will encourage conversion and clicks to your site. There are a few things that you can do to make this work for you.
Firstly, while search engines will truncate titles in the search results if they exceed a certain length, many SEO experts believe that the keywords used in the page title will be used for ranking purposes. So don’t feel restricted by a particular specification or word limit.
Secondly, use your important keywords upfront. This can be your brand name if your charity is well known or keyword descriptors of the work you do. By getting to the point quickly and using the front of the title tag to explain what your site is about you can positively impact click through rates (CTR) from the listing in the search results.
Finally, create an emotional connection with a potential supporter by conveying the most positive message possible about the work your charity does and reassure them that you are dedicated to your chosen cause. You can do this in the meta description that accompanies the page title and appears below the search snippet heading.
Website page loading
Every one second delay in page load times results in a 7% loss in conversions (source: Tagman).
Let’s take the average donation size of £29 and average charity conversion rate of 3.96% (site visitor to donation). We can assume that if your charity website usually receives 100,000 visits per month but takes one more second to load, your conversion rate will drop to 3.68%, so donations could fall by up to £97,440 every year.
It’s relatively easy to determine whether a site is running slowly. Google takes page load speeds into account for search rankings by assigning each website a speed score between 0-100 points. A score higher than 85 indicates a site is performing well. Anything below that would require improvements.
We found that only 10% of charities achieved a score of 80 or higher. 32 charities had a speed score of less than 60, which denotes poor page load speeds. With another 35% having scores in the 60s, there are a significant number of charities which could do more to improve site speed to increase visitor engagement and donor conversion.
In order to compare the performance of key landing pages in your site and also review suggestions for improvements to individual pages, consult the site speed data in Google Analytics on your website. Improving page speeds can be a highly technical task, but there are a number of actions that every webmaster should be able to take such as avoiding landing page redirects, enabling compression, optimise images and prioritising visible content to name a few.
Donation buttons
Donation buttons need to be visible to work. Yet 26 websites (20%) included in our research did not mention the word "donate" on their home page at all. Of those that do facilitate giving, the donation buttons are often not prominent enough to attract particular attention.
It is important to recognise that the primary reason for a visit to your website may not be to donate. Many users’ first visit to your site may be an information search, often prompted by a personal experience. The role of the site is always to answer questions about what the charity does, why it is needed and by whom. Answering visitors’ questions plays an important part in nurturing their support and so prompting them to help you financially or in other practical ways should always be included as you tell your story.
Every charity should make it simple for visitors to access the information they need and to donate, if they decide to do so. Yet too often, this dual requirement is not adequately reflected in home page design. Site visitors need to be guided through your site and you must tell them what they should do, in an obvious but not intrusive way.
Frequent and obvious suggestions to "find out more" and to "support our work" instruct the user how to get more involved with the site and the information it holds, as well as how to show support for the cause. Having multiple calls to action that encourage visitors to donate must therefore be a key consideration for every charity.
Mobile websites
According to Google, 36% of all searches in the "Donations and Charitable Giving" sector are now on mobile devices and this percentage is forecast to continue to grow.
Charities need to make a step change in the way they market their brands and become more accessible for mobile device users. However, almost 70% of the charities surveyed used the same template for their mobile, desktop and tablet sites. If they continue to ignore the importance of delivering an appropriate mobile device user experience, opportunities to maximise donations or support online will be lost.
For our own charity clients, on average 21% of all website sessions are on a mobile device. If we again take the average donation size of £29, unique monthly users totalling 100,000 per month, and average mobile conversion rate of 0.2%, then on average, mobile contributes around £14,616 in donations for our fictional charity each year. Charities which cater for a mobile audience and move to a responsive design will see conversion rates increase significantly and they won’t lose out as more people choose to browse on their phones or tablets.
Additional donations
Over 20% of all UK charity donations in the last 12 months were executed online. While charities spend significant sums of money on awareness and engagement campaigns, many unfortunately lose sight of their website’s role in securing donations.
Addressing the barriers to success could help charities increase website donations and help future-proof their online strategies to ensure they secure additional donations as more and more people use online and mobile methods for charitable transactions.
