For those encountering your nonprofit for the first time, your website serves as the first point of contact with your organization and cause. The best nonprofit websites need to tell a story, share the impact of the mission, engage users and solicit action.
Creating a high-performing nonprofit website design and brand experience can be a challenge for both new and mature organizations. A website that is easy to navigate will help more visitors understand your cause and recognize the importance of their donations, motivating them to give.
Whether you’re creating an entirely new website or updating your current one, keep the following tips in mind to ensure a positive visitor experience and drive more online donations.
Use Storytelling to Fuel Fundraising
When creating or refreshing your website, organizations need to ensure that their story is being told and that the brand identity is showcased properly using design elements from brand style guidelines. To tell your nonprofit’s story, you’ll want to include multimedia elements, such as pictures and videos, to showcase your fundraising achievements and mission impact throughout a clean and modern website layout.
In addition to branding and multimedia elements, nonprofits should enhance their story through the web copy on their website. By sharing a story, your cause becomes a real situation affecting people, rather than an abstract idea. A narrative can help supporters form emotional connections with your cause and be more willing to donate and become lifetime supporters.
To continue building brand awareness, website traffic and donations, nonprofits need to publish quality content regularly. For instance, publish blog posts that focus on your cause, provide updates about the organization and its recent fundraising efforts as well as trends or news stories about your cause. And, don’t forget to include a call-to-action that asks for donations!
Once a user has come to your website, read your mission statement and been impacted by your content and cause, don’t let their journey end there. Along with using quality content and visual elements to give your mission and goal the spotlight, be sure to utilize simple and easy to use navigation features to drive donations. This includes adding “Donate Now” buttons prominently across your website and in your menu navigation.
Bring Awareness to Drive Website Traffic
An effective nonprofit website should act as a brand awareness tool to create excitement around your cause and generate continued support. Consistently adding new and informative content to your nonprofit website design is necessary for successful SEO and driving website traffic. Successful SEO is not a one-time task, but rather an ongoing activity. This will ensure the best results over the long-term. In fact, if your nonprofit is blogging consistently, you have a way to potentially generate 67% more leads.
SEO is just one way to bring awareness to your nonprofit and drive website traffic. Other best practices include adding links back to your website in your social posts, profile and videos so people are just a click away from taking action and getting more information. Empower people to share your content, too. This is a great strategy to get more and new supporters because people have a lot of sway with their networks of like-minded friends and family members.
Nonprofits might also consider incorporating an events page on the website to encourage community engagement and increase lead generation through forms and popups. Additionally, it’s essential that visitors can access and use your site just as easily from their mobile devices as from their computers. Since we are spending more and more time on our smartphones, not optimizing your site for mobile is a common design flaw that should be avoided.
Elevate Online Fundraising with Online Donation Pages
When visitors are inspired to make donations, they shouldn’t have to leave your site in order to do so. It’s imperative for nonprofits to create a giving page that makes it easy for donors to complete their contributions online. Adding a secure online donation form to your website is a wonderful way to encourage contributions and grow your supporter base.
A donation page is essentially a sales pitch featuring all the information someone needs to make a decision to donate to your organization. When creating your page, consider that our brains are hardwired to make us feel good when donating, so incorporate information about your mission, a breakdown of where donations go and a clear call-to-action to increase that feeling and increase donations.
Donation pages should also comprise the same branding as the rest of your website. Interestingly, supporters find branded donation pages on a nonprofit’s website more trustworthy, and these pages bring in 6x more donations than external linking pages. Don’t forget to include important branding elements like your nonprofit’s logo and color scheme on your donation page. And, be sure to include links to drive supporters to your donation page across your website and even a “donate” button that’s easy to find on every page.
Through Panorama by FrontStream, nonprofits can easily create branded online donation forms in minutes that maintain the look and feel of your website. Branded, mobile-ready fundraising pages can encourage more donors to become lifelong supporters with recurring giving options as well. FrontStream’s unique platform is fast and secure with CAPTCHA and in-house payment processing that protects your donors and your data while ensuring a seamless payment experience.
FrontStream Supports Online Donations for Nonprofits
When your organization makes it easy for supporters to stay updated on your progress and make their contributions through a variety of convenient online methods, they’ll be encouraged to form long-term relationships with your nonprofit. These connections will provide your organization with the support you need to continue your good work well into the future.
Your new or improved nonprofit website is sure to draw in more visitors. In addition to an easy-to-use, attractive website with a branded donation page, incorporating a monthly giving program can increase the number and size of donations you receive each year. These plans allow donors to give a specified amount to an organization each month automatically. If your nonprofit doesn’t have one in place, now is the time to get started.
Learn how to raise more funds with your own monthly giving program in our free eBook.
