You need more than a "Donate now" button

The web is a platform that charities need to be taking advantage of in order to extend their reach. Increased online engagement can boost charities’ incomes, cheaply and quickly. But too many org.uk domains are littered with basic errors.

The aim of a charity website should be this: to foster a relationship between the donor and the charity, attract and engage new donors, and make it easy for advocates to donate.

To test out the process I pretended to have a million pounds I wanted to donate to cancer research. I googled international cancer fund and the top result was at that time a particular cancer charity (of course, rankings change all the time). All good so far. Then I clicked on the website of this no doubt excellent charity to test out the donation journey.

I was greeted by a whole host of typical mistakes. First sight, in the only colour that popped out from a mass of purple was a welcome message and above it were nine calls to action - in fact there were 26 buttons to click on the home page alone.

Littered with options

The site was quite literally littered with options and links like an overzealous Christmas enthusiast decorating his tree. And the carousel kept changing every seven seconds; clearly the site designer went to the same talk as me in 2003 when carousels were seen as the cure for people with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder)

In fact the number of twitter icons all over the home page was the only thing that convinced me that this site wasn’t built and deserted back then. I finally found the "about us" section hidden away in a secondary navigation bar, only to land on a page with one shrunken stock image and even more text littered with links.

I was about to give up before spotting the shiny yellow "donate now" button. Perhaps they’d get me to part with my cash after all? So I clicked on it. But to my confusion I was presented with more text and links leading to a duplicate site for their UK branch. I was trapped in a recurring nightmare: another flicking carousel, another shiny "donate now button".

I backtracked and checked the charity on the Charity Commission to see if it was a legal charity. All fine – so I thought it must be a small charity with no budget, but it has an £8.9m income. I also read the annual report and don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the document which says "our website continues to be an excellent resource for a number of key audiences".

Glowing talk about visitors

It went on to talk glowingly about website visitors and boasts about these figures as "impact". I would love to see the bounce rate on the poor 700,000 visitors a year; statistics like "total traffic" just do not prove impact.

Sadly the site is symptomatic of many brochure sites, built as an internal projection of the organisation onto the outside world, but utterly perplexing to you or me. It is not difficult to create an entirely personalised and reactive website, where once you sign up, the information is directed exactly at you.

Considering the supporter journey

I doubt many people actually get through to making a donation on that first site I visited at the time. The supporter journey has just not been considered, and whoever built the site clearly hasn’t even tried it. And what is an even greater shame is that the beneficiary journey has not been considered either. I imagine that those 700,000 people who visit the site each year leave feeling frustrated and angry.

In order to get donations, we need more than a shiny yellow "donate now" button. We need a compelling case for support and convincing calls to action. The charity needs to consider, like an earthquake appeal, what its epicentre is, and that will help activate people to advocacy. "What we do, why we do it and how you can help" needs to run through a website like a stick of rock, and a clear mission statement explaining its objectives serves as a solid basis from which to guide visitors into how they can help.

Missing out on online marketing

A greater loss is missing out on the power of online marketing. There is a reason why the commerce sector and gambling businesses focus on online marketing: there is the potential to crush costs and increase income on an unprecedented scale.

Charities can secure massive additional funds, hundreds of thousand of pounds a year through Google grants, and social media couldn’t be more suited to sharing social causes if conveyed in a fun way.

But it is pointless using tools like this unless landing pages are drawing people through to pages with purpose and clear calls to action. If only the £2.3m spent on generating income at the charity whose website I visited that while ago was invested more in these online tools, I could only imagine the potential impact. No doubt things have now changed.

The bigger issue is that there is so much potential to help people by just being a little more innovative. It should take only two minutes using various social media monitoring tools to go and look across Twitter, Facebook and Linked In at everyone with concerns and interest in “nutrition AND cancer”, bringing back thousands of results within a couple of hours.

One could then send all these people a message within one click to draw them through to the site, perhaps even to a landing page that specifically relates to their concerns. None of this is rocket science but too few charities are engaging with people in this way.

Unlike email, social media is novel enough that these personal approaches work. I am constantly surprised by how accessible the world is through these social platforms. Last night for example, I was exchanging messages with people I wouldn’t be able to get to in a hundred years. The world is small and fortuitously beneficial to us in our social age.

Relying on dry facts

It is also frustrating when the causes behind charities are so compelling, but their websites rely on dry facts. A simple short story from a credible source has far more impact, and if we want to achieve behaviour change we need to start with emotional engagement.

The problem with most charity websites, like the one I visited, is that developers or design agencies forget we’re dealing with real human beings with real concerns, challenges and cares.

Videos can be a good way to remedy this, and allows the charity to really show what they’re about. And you don’t need slickly produced celebrity-studded masterpieces. Short interviews with those who’ve benefited from charity funds can have just as much impact, as can a simple animation with an explanatory voiceover.

A regularly updated blog is also a great way to keep supporters updated with activity and tell the stories of those helped by the charity. It also offers the opportunity to increase a charity’s visibility and digital reach by boosting it up Google’s organic search. So it ought to be a top priority when it comes to a charity’s marketing strategy – and it doesn’t cost a penny.

Display of target thermometers

Many charities also fail to build a sense of urgency into their web donations, but target thermometers can work well. This is because smaller goals are more attractive as a result of their achievability.

Tapping into this psychology by launching micro campaigns supported by target thermometer graphics can be a good option to pursue, helping to tick all the boxes in that people know where exactly their money is going and can see the direct impact their own donation has made.

When it comes to the actual process of making a donation, the simpler the better. As soon as visitors are convinced they want to help charities need to make it easy, and this means as few questions as possible and a non-registering, one-off donation option.

Another tactic to boost repeat donations is to create sign-in profiles for users. This allows charities to securely store credit card information on third party servers via, for example, CTT or Stripe, and reduce the number of times a donor has to enter their details.

Increasing charitable donations

Already increasing the conversion rate from visitor to customer on e-commerce sites it can do the same for charitable donations. Also, just as e-commerce sites have learnt, in an age of smartphones and tablets, failing to have a website formatted for viewing across different devices is like buying a Swiss Army knife without the bottle opener.

Instead it’s worth consulting with an expert when designing a website to ensure it has a mobile responsive design.

But leaving behind the nitty-gritty technical details, to get the most out of their websites charities simply need to establish why people should give up their time or money and exactly what that will involve, but this is often glossed over by charities.

Importance of the charity

Perhaps too close to the issue they fail to recognise the need to convince people of its importance, but this is really the crux of the issue. Charities have a responsibility to cater for real people and provide real solutions to their needs through their websites. As a result the human interest element, a personalised experience needs to be prioritised.

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