Managing Your Website to Promote Donations
To create an effective web presence that promotes your organization’s goals and, ideally, inspires visitors to donate, consider the following tips.
Keep content fresh.
For your website to remain effective, informative, and interesting, be sure to offer meaningful and up-to-date content. At least once each month, review and refresh the content — for example, you might add a news item or story that details your program’s achievements.
Include a mission statement.
Prospective donors need to know what you do, why you do it, how you do it, and why it's a good thing. Posting a succinct mission statement on the first page of your website can be a valuable attention grabber that conveys important information.
Collect e-mail addresses.
Building an e-mail list of potential donors is an important part of online fundraising, and your website is a great place to collect them. Include in plain view on your website a place for visitors to subscribe to your monthly e-newsletter or to receive special announcements and news alerts. You might also take this opportunity to collect other information (such as name, address, and interests) to make future solicitations more personal.
Include a privacy policy.
Respect the privacy of those who donate to your cause or who share personal information (such as e-mail address) with your organization. To make prospective donors feel confident that their personal information is safe with you, develop and include a privacy policy on your website. This should indicate that you never share e-mail addresses collected at your site with other organizations or companies. For help with developing a privacy statement, visit TRUSTe (a company that specializes in privacy issues on the Internet); you’ll find model privacy disclosures (in Microsoft Word format) that you can copy and edit for your own use.
Cultivate relationships.
Connecting with people through your website allows you to invite their input and feedback. Include contact information for your program, as well as a mechanism for people to submit suggestions or questions. Making your website more personal can stimulate interaction or comments by visitors; for example, each month you might highlight a volunteer in a story, or provide real-life examples of how a donation to your program was used to better the community or further your cause.
Make it easy to give.
Give people the option to donate online. But also remember to provide details about more conventional ways of giving, such as where to mail in a check, or how to donate services or make in-kind contributions. See Accepting Online Donations for more information.
Think integration.
It is important to integrate your lists: be sure to combine and cross-check your online donor information with your e-newsletter mailing list, as well as with your marketing and direct mail list. Whether or not all of this data is stored in one database, it’s important that the individuals you are contacting perceive it as seamless. This helps you avoid embarrassing and expensive situations where donors get multiple appeals for support, or are solicited too soon after they’ve already made a contribution.
Promote your website.
Your website can't be successful unless people know about it, so use every opportunity to plug your online presence. You might use technology solutions (such as search engine optimization), blogs or social networking, as well as old fashioned word of mouth. Current volunteers or service members can be quite effective in this capacity. Tell people your story — get the word out!
Be realistic.
The payoff for your investment in online fundraising may not be immediate; however, it’s important to take advantage of the web as a potential fundraising tool. Over time, your website may play a large part in sustaining the organization and helping you reach your goals.
