Whether your non-profit champions social justice, the arts, religious institutions, or charitable giving, NPOs face many challenges. Chief among them are fundraising and finding new donors.
In this time of great economic uncertainty and pandemics, most NPOs are busier than ever, providing social services and helping the marginalized. If you’re struggling to increase donations and find new donors, consider partnering with a non-profit web development and digital strategy company like Think Design.
In this article, we’ll discuss some tactics we’ll use to optimize your non-profit website to increase donations, as well as assist with donor acquisition and retention.
4 Steps to Optimizing Your Non-Profit Website for Fundraising
- Initiate a site audit
A site audit is needed to evaluate the search engine friendliness of your non-profit website. During the site audit, we’ll carefully assess your website and identify the issues preventing it from ranking in the organic portion of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
Some of the potential issues could be technical (like outdated online donation tools, modules, and plugins), subpar features (like broken links, duplicate content, and poor mobile optimization), and lack of web accessibility.
- Analyze the donor journey
You’ll need to analyze the donor’s journey to optimize your website for online fundraising. You can roughly break down the donor’s journey into the following stages:
- Awareness - This is when your potential donor becomes aware of your NPO through online or offline channels.
- Research - The potential donor researches your NPO to determine if it’s an organization they’re willing to support. You’ll need to guide them down the conversion funnel with informative service pages, blog posts, infographics, and other content assets.
- Decision - Your prospect is fully educated on your NPO’s mission and wants to support it. You can thank your excellent branding for driving them to conversion.
- Appreciation - After receiving the contribution, you can set the foundation for a long-term relationship by sending them a thank you note and a summary of the impact.
- Repeat - Establish donor lifetime value by sharing valuable updates and accomplishments with your donors. This engagement will encourage them to continue supporting your organization.
Analyzing the donor’s journey will provide a framework for optimizing your website and transforming site visitors into committed supporters.
- Observe the principles of UX and UI design
Potential donors expect their interactions with your website to be seamless, satisfying, and productive. Follow user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design principles, and your website will be functional, easy to navigate, and excellent at solving user problems.
- Streamline the donation process
Unless you partner with an appropriate online fundraising platform, your optimization tactics will be all for naught. The best online fundraising platforms (including Jotform, Fundly, and Qgiv) have customizable donation forms, integrated and secure payment processing, and detailed reports and analytics.
We’ll partner your website with the right online fundraising platform, improving the success rate of your non-profit online fundraising campaigns.
Fulfill Your Non-Profit’s Mission with Think Design
Are you ready to fine-tune your non-profit website, thereby increasing donor contributions, acquisition, and retention?
Think Design is NYC’s premier non-profit web development and digital strategy agency. We have more than 20 years of experience guiding the digital strategies of international and local non-profits involved in various causes.
Our services include:
- Digital strategy.
- Search engine optimization.
- UX/UI-backed web design and development.
- Content marketing.
- Social media marketing.
Get in touch and discover how we can help your NPO succeed in today’s tech-driven environment.