How important is an effective online presence for a nonprofit organization?
Tucker Eskew, Founding Partner of ViaNovo, mentioned an important statistic related to this question at the Converging Campaigns panel discussion:
Two-thirds of people donating to a new nonprofit will visit that nonprofit’s website before making the donation. This includes donations being made by check.
Obviously, a nonprofit organization’s website needs to meet the needs of these potential donors. The website needs to have a professional look and feel that reflects the personality of the organization. Key information and the ability to donate should also be accessible from every page.
It is important for nonprofit organizations to have an online presence. It is also important to reflect a professional image to potential supporters.
Don’t scare your online visitors away. Make sure your website encourages them to get involved.
Related post: Converging Campaigns: How the Internet is Changing Philanthropy, Advocacy and
Politics
It’s so interesting that Tucker brought this point up, because Peter Genuardi, a Connection Cafe blogger, made a post last month (http://www.connectioncafe.com/post/connectioncafe/please_lets_think_outside_the_site.html) about the same idea and received a great response. So many people harp on the singular Web site, and this is quickly moving toward a broader Web “presence” – not just one location but the entirety of where your name and organization reside online.
Jordan,
Thanks for sharing the link. It is a great post. I agree there needs to be A presence beyond the corporate website. My thoughts on the topic of multi-channel communication will be posted very soon. Thanks again for your comment.
Have you read Richard McPherson’s book Digital Giving? It opened up my mind to so many new ideas in online philanthropy. He has a quote that says something like: The future of fundraising is in how many people are talking about your organization in online forms.
Great observation and I’m excited to see how the online philanthropy world changes in the coming years.
http://www.asmallchange.net/is-the-world-listening/
If you have a new site or are launching a new site consider following these steps and you would end up in gaining huge free traffic. Always submit your site to free search engines. Once the links are indexed, it becomes easy to optimize the site. Write good content and submit your site to social book marking sites as del.ico.us, digg, myspace, simpy, reddit etc. Create blogs on different sites and regularly keep on updating them, Try adding useful and unique content, Visitors are always looking for useful and unique content.
Submit your site to free web directories, search engines, niche directories, and high page rank directories, authority directories as DMOZ, yahoo, and Google directory.
Write articles on your subject and submit in article directories. It is usually seen that articles provide permanent back links. Place adds on free classified sites
Make RSS feeds and syndicate your sites content. Submit your feeds on RSS directories
If any page is missing or is not found or 404 error redirect that page to index page or any other important page
Offer something free on your site be it free newsletter, free articles-books, RSS feeds
Participate in link exchange
Add your site to Google webmasters account
Create xml site map
Leave comments on blogs with your sites link
Create a guest book on your site
You tube and pod casts are also an excellent way to launch viral campaigns.
Send emails with description of your company
Advertise on Craig list and gum tree
Submit in forums with link to your site
Ask bloggers to write about your services or products
Submit in deep link directories