5 tips for creating a highly successful nonprofit website
As a nonprofit, your organisation’s website plays a vital role. It helps you:
- Raise more money.
- Engage new and existing donors.
- Attract volunteers and supporters.
- Create corporate partnerships and media opportunities.
- Show the world what your organisation’s mission is, and how supporter contributions are making the world a better place.
That’s a lot you can achieve with your website!
Here are our five tips for creating a highly successful nonprofit website to help you achieve your objectives.
1. Strong value proposition
You don’t have a lot of time to impress your visitors and get them to take action on your page.
A study from Hubspot suggests that 55% of visitors spend 15 seconds or less on your website.
This means you need to present your organisation’s value proposition ‘above the fold’ to maximise engagement and decrease drop-offs.
Use powerful photographs and headlines that speak directly to your audience, right at the top of the home page. The more enticing your strong value proposition is to your visitor, the more they are motivated to scroll down and find out more about your mission, activities and how they can be involved.
2. Clear content strategy for better user engagement
It sounds basic, and indeed it is. You need a clear content hierarchy and simple navigation menu to drive better user experience and ultimately online engagement.
Depending on your website’s goals and priorities, your content strategy needs to accommodate. Simplify your content strategy and navigation by removing distractions that distract from the actions you most want your audience to take…
To read about how we transformed Habitat for Humanity Australia’s content strategy for promoting their organisation’s mission and pushing for more volunteer signs ups here.
3. Making donating and signups easy & impactful
The easier it is to do something, the more likely people are to do it. And that applies to making donations or registering for events on your website.
You can have the best offer or most compelling case study in the world, but if the process to make a donation or sign up is too complex, you’ll lose supporters and miss out on donations.
We’ve seen donation forms where supporters land on the donation page only to be distracted by other ways to help the organisation. This creates an opportunity for visitors to drop off the form and not donate at all.
Donation forms should have minimal distractions and be specifically designed to get your visitors to donate. Best practice for donation pages is to create forms that take less than 1 minute to complete.
The design of the form should be minimalist and specially designed to get the visitor to complete the
4. Streamlining the donation workflow
WordPress is a popular Content Management System (CMS) for nonprofits. In fact, we only use WordPress to build our nonprofit websites so we can develop template donation forms that can integrate smoothly with any nonprofit’s CMS, enabling a seamless donor experience.
With a templated donations form, your nonprofit can reuse donation forms for different campaigns at ease. With the WPBakery Page Builder plugin (formerly known as Visual Composer), your team can truly be empowered to change the content and assets to suit each individual campaign without having to create a microsite each time.
Not to mention, every piece of content and asset on the website can be easily self-managed by your team.
5. Responsive design is non-negotiable
A responsive website caters for mobile traffic and reduces your bounce rate. There is no reason in this day and age that your web presence should not display optimised content on mobiles and other devices.
53% of mobile viewers will abandon a website if they have a poor mobile experience.
The statistics don’t lie. A responsive website is the most basic requirement to keep visitors on your site. Make sure your developers and teams do rigorous user testing and cross-device testing to ensure that your nonprofit website is accessible across all devices and web browsers used by their audiences.
