Top 5 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Nonprofit Website – and Increase Donations
The most important marketing vehicle for your nonprofit organization is your website. Your organization needs an online presence as dynamic as your mission. We’re honored to work with some amazing nonprofit organizations across the spectrum to create and design action-focused websites that engage and educate supporters to take action and donate. Our services include branding and messaging; website design and development; digital marketing and social media strategies to ensure you connect with a wider audience than ever before. Our experience working with nonprofits can help you achieve your marketing goals. Following find our five essential components to ensure a successful a website for your nonprofit organization.
1. Messaging and content strategy
Be unique: every nonprofit has it’s own amazing and unique story – it’s what makes you different from everyone else. Bringing your story to life will help connect you with your audience. Your story should educate and inspire your audience to take action. And messaging is more than just well-written text: beautiful images, audio and video throughout your website can further engage your audience and communicate your mission without as many words. This is especially important since most people visiting your website will be viewing on their phones, so your messaging is be clear and concise.
2. Responsive and mobile-friendly website design
Mobile is changing the world. Today, everyone has smartphones with them, constantly communicating and looking for information. Your website needs to look and work great on all computers and mobile devices and responsive website design will provide a great user experience on any device. While this may seem like a given, we were surprised to see how many great nonprofit organizations websites are not responsible. Aside from a poor user experience, Google and other top search engines demote websites that aren’t mobile-friendly, meaning your website won’t appear at the top of search engine results – which is critical for the success of your website. You can see whether your website is mobile friendly by taking the Google test at https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
3. Call to Action – make it easy for donors to give
A call to action (CTA) is your chance to motivate your visitors to take real steps to make a donation. The first CTA should be at the top of your homepage, next to your mission statement. Most visitors won’t go past your homepage, so it must be prominently featured right up front. The call to action should be easy, enabling visitors to complete a simple form with their donation. Note that these submissions should be automatically entered into a contact database like MailChimp, and you’ll have a captive audience for sending out subsequent emails. The CTA button should stand out, large and a bright color, so it can’t be missed. Ideally, a CTA button should appear at the top of all pages to ensure it’s always seen by your visitors.
4. Optimize your website for search engines
You can have a beautiful and educational website, but people have to know about it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will help to ensure your website ranks high in Google and other search engines. There are many things we do on the back-end to help our websites get traction on Google that are highly technical, and it’s due diligence on our part with every website we design. But Google is just as interested in strong, engaging and useful content and this can greatly help your search engine status. It’s essential that your text is easy to read and follow and is focused on the topic at hand. It’s also key to keep your website updated with new content (news, updates, etc.) via a regularly updated blog, which will also attract more traffic.
5. Use social media to drive traffic to your website
Social media is another opportunity to tell your story, engage with supporters and get results—which means there’s no time like the present to create or refresh your social media strategy, which should be consistent with your messaging and content strategy (above). From pictures and graphics to short videos and text, your organization should share a variety of posts across its networks. Visual content can often reach emotional triggers in a way that words alone cannot. Creating a social media calendar will help you plan and schedule your social media posts in advance. Using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram will help to ensure more traffic is driven to your website, which is the goal.
(Below: our work for non-profits including MC-LEF, The Pilot House, NSCP, MissionSAFE)
Designsite nonprofit clients include:
We can help you meet and exceed your marketing goals for your nonprofit organization. Contact us today for a free evaluations and to talk about your project.