There are lots of secrets. But I don’t have a “how to blog” mastermind program, so… you know… the best thing I can say is that it’s work. It is. It’s a lot of work. You have to stay focused. And learn how to write every day.

How can you blog for your nonprofit, blog consistently, providing value, telling stories, and helping people give to you and connect with your mission?

Tip 1: Read the post out loud. Whether it’s a post about your annual event, your staff transitions, or welcoming a new board member, or even about your programs, you need to read it out loud. Look it over again and again. You’ll be surprised at how many mistakes you had. I always am.

Tip 2: If you can’t think of anything to write about, then go interview program staff. Make a series of posts about your programs. Focus on ONE story. Problem to Solution. Start to Finish. If they have nothing for you, then go interview one of your volunteers. Add a link to start volunteering at the bottom of the post.

Tip 3: Add a picture! If you need to protect your clients or confidentiality, then definitely check out my Free Tips page, where there are three links to get free stock photos!

Tip 4: Are you taking advantage of every opportunity to get people to take action? Make sure the donation button is above the fold on your nonprofit blog. That way, every time you blog, they are reminded that they can also give. If you want a special gold star, you can also add a call to action at the end of the post. First, ask for a donation. If they can’t do that, ask them to sign a petition or take a survey instead. Ask them to tweet about you, or blog about you, and then make it easy for them to do it.

Tip 5: Add a link to getting onto your newsletter at the bottom of your blog post. The more people you have on your newsletter, the better chance you’ll have to engage them to sign your petition, become volunteers, or even give to you!

Like these tips?

Sign up for my e-newsletter. You’ll come for the fundraising advice, and stay for the snark.

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5 Tips for Nonprofit Blogging Success originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on November 30, 2011.

Sandcastle picture by Amerune, from Flickr, Creative Commons license

This post is about: Blogging, and writing, and what sort of education aids you in being of use to the world.
Number of words: 846
Readtime: 5 minutes

“The truth was that he’d never decided to do anything. He’d never really made that kind of decision in his whole life. One thing had just gently led to another, and then the press had to be fed. It was waiting there now. You worked hard, you fed it, and it was still just as hungry an hour later, and out in the world all your work was heading for the rubbish bin and that was only the start of its troubles. Suddenly he had a proper job, with working hours, and yet everything he did was only as real as a sand castle, on a beach where the tide forever came in.

(Why are you doing this? asked a printer)

…”I don’t know,” he admitted. “I suppose it’s because I’m no good at anything else. Now I can’t imagine doing anything else. Look, I’m useless. I was educated to be useless. What we’ve always been supposed to do is hang around until there’s a war and do something really stupidly brave and then get killed. What we’ve mainly done is hang on to things. Ideas mostly.” Pg 195, The Truth by Terry Pratchett

Is your blog like a printing press?

Sometimes my life feels like a Terry Pratchett novel. Let me explain. The above passage is from The Truth, a book about the first printing presses. In it, William de Worde, the protaganist, a slumming aristocrat, comes in between big powers in the Engraver’s guild and a plot to depose the leader of the city and he has to print the truth in the first newspaper.

This blog feels like a printing press, because it’s always hungry, and it does feel as real as a sand castle, on a beach where the tide forever comes in. You can blog and blog and blog for years, and it’s fun to do, and there’s no end to it. So you start to get help. Guest posts. And interviews. And you read books and you try to keep your press fed. But there’s always another day where you have to feed it again.

How do you deal with this, whether it’s for your nonprofit newsletter, or your nonprofit blog, or your own personal blog?

Solutions to the content question
Do you read books a lot? Can you work this into your blog? Can you make seasonal posts? Topical posts? Do you read other blogs and work a comment into a blog post?

If you’re blogging for your nonprofit, have you thought about getting guest posts from program staff? This is one of the ways that WildlifeDirect was able to go from 7 blogs to 73 blogs over the course of two years, according to Beth Kanter’s The Networked Nonprofit.

If it’s just you, and your blog is hungry, here’s a link to 100 blog post ideas if you’re getting stuck for how to begin or how to continue.

Speaking of topical posts, looking at the current flurry of 9/11 posts, it would have been easy for me to make that post. But I choose not to. Because there’s another, bigger thing to think about right now, and that is the October 2011 movement. Check it out.

Now, let’s switch gears.

Chances are, you were not educated to be a fundraiser or a blogger as an undergrad. Neither was I.

Maybe you could also relate to the second part of the quote, about being educated to be useless? When you have a degree in poetry and gender studies, you may be able to dissect a sentence with ease and tease three different meanings out of it, but that doesn’t necessarily get the food on the table.

I don’t know if anyone reading this received a “liberal arts” education, but perhaps you’ve got some idea of what it means to be “educated to be useless.” I wish John Taylor Gatto’s “A Different Kind of Teacher and “An Underground History of American Education” was given to every new graduate of teaching college.

Don’t get me wrong. I love gender studies, and I love poetry, and I’ve used both in real life. But I also could have used a class in “How to start a business” and “How to be a consultant” and even, “How to fund a nonprofit” during my 4 years at an elite college on the east coast. According to Gatto, elementary, junior high and high school should be set up into a 5 day schedule of:

• 2 days devoted to the usual subjects,
• 1 day job-shadowing,
• 1 day devoted to a year-long project, and
• 1 day of community service.

What about you? Do you feel like your college education was helpful in a very concrete way, in the job you have now? Do you think that Gatto’s idea of how to structure a school week would be useful now, or would have been useful to you?

Is your blog like a hungry printing press, waiting to be fed? What to do? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on September 12, 2011.

What have people been saying about it?

Now, onto this week!

It’s Grants time!

But first, if you don’t already follow them, please follow Sandy Rees and Pamela Grow, subscribe to their blogs, and just get on that, because they know SO MUCH about grants!

Now, if you’re like me, you have grants heaped on your plate along with 100 other things, like marketing your nonprofit, events, major gifts, house parties, appeals, etc. Oh yeah, and social media too.

All of which could be full time jobs in and of themselves! So sometimes when you go to look for grants it’s hard to remember everything.

Which is why we created this Android App to help you do it.

So now you’ll remember each step and it will be super easy to stay on top of your grants!
And for $1.99, it’s like, so worth it.

So, you can buy Wild Grants! in the Android App store!

If you’ve downloaded it, please leave a comment here or a review at the app store, we are always trying to get better, and this is only our second app, so we know we’ve got a ways to go!

PS. Also, you should follow Desiree Adaway. Because she rocks at nonprofit management!

Do you need some grants? We’ve made an Android App to help you. originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on August 26, 2011.

So I downloaded and tested some. Today I’m going to review Two Fundraising Android Apps. These are not Apps to aid your constituents in fundraising for you, no, these are two Apps that purport to give you useful fundraising advice.

The first one I’m going to discuss is The Agitator Android App.

The Agitator is a fundraising blog which blogs 3-4 times a day, has lots of bloggers and lots of useful advice.

1. Fundraising News The first link on their app for “fundraising news” is a direct link to their blog.

2. Events Then they have a link that says “events” and you go there and it just says sign up for a 30 minute webinar with your name, email, and phone number.

The Agitator App Screenshot

As you can see from these screenshots, it LOOKS useful.

3. Calculator tool. There’s a place where you can calculate your donor retention, for example, but the numbers they ask you for will require you to get in front of your computer to look them up, and at that point, why not just use an excel spreadsheet to do the calculations yourself?

4. Successful fundraising examples. The Agitator purports to link to case studies of successful fundraising, event and mobile campaigns but when I clicked on those links, they said I had to text a certain number to get access to that campaign. Frankly, if I’m using an app, I want to stay in the app. I don’t want to get out and text something somewhere so someone ELSE can have my information.

Design flaw 1. I was on an android, but when I went to click on the case studies, the screenshot was of an iPhone. You’d think that their developers would have caught that before putting it out on the Android market.

Design flaw 2. The calculator has been made from a five box template, and there persist in being five boxes there, whether or not they’re needed.

I hope that in the future, the Agitator makes an App that would give us something a little more juicy, something that would not just be to sell webinars or drive us back to their website, or sell our info, but instead actually gives us value that we need as fundraising professionals.

Bottom line: This free app is worth exactly what you pay for it.

The second one we’ll talk about today is the ‘Nonprofit Manager’s FAQ’

This is put together by Jossey Bass, the fundraising publisher, and is made up primarily of excerpted text from their various publications. It’s organized like a blog, with all of the different excerpts organized under different subject headings. It might as well be a blog or an ebook where all of these resources are. I don’t like reading a lot of text on my phone, and this app is JUST text. Sometimes there are bullets, to be fair, but there’s a LOT of reading to do on there.

Frankly, I’d rather use the internet on my computer and just READ this text on someone’s blog. Also, this App took about 30 minutes to download onto my phone. It’s as bare bones as you can be.

I haven’t looked at every single subject heading, but I did delve through the entire fundraising section of this App. And while I am sure there is a lot of good advice in here, one gets the sense that in the end, they just want you to click on the bottom and buy their eBook. It feels like an ad for their products, rather than a resource.

Frankly, I would rather have an App that is useful rather than an App that is trying to sell me something on every page. Then again, this is a free app, so perhaps they think that if they’re giving the info away for free, they can get away with trying to sell you something on every page.

Bottom line: It’s basically a glorified Amazon “Look Inside the Book”

What about you? Have you tried these? If so, which ones did you like?

PS. I also tried to find and review Marc Pitman’s Fundraising Coach App, but every time I searched for it on my phone or in the Android marketplace search, the browser crashed, which makes me suspect that it isn’t available anymore.

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2 Reviews of Fundraising Android Apps originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on August 1, 2011.

First of all, figure out where you are. Here’s a map.
According to The Agitator blog and Forrester research, (the industry standard on measuring social media) there are five stages of social media. Which one are you in currently?
1. Dormant stage — one in five companies don’t use social media.
2. Small victories — baby steps and case studies.
3. Distributed chaos — the ‘testing the waters’ stage as various pockets of the organization excitedly do their own thing.
4. Coordinating stage — management takes notice and puts the ‘governance’ and resources in place to create consistency across the organization.
5. Scaling and optimizing stage — now there’s a steering committee, a budget, policies and process … and a focus on results.

How can you manage your online reputation?

How do you manage your nonprofit’s online reputation? It’s remarkably similar to managing your own.
Let me ask you this. Are you googling your nonprofit on a regular basis? Are you doing a little EGOSURFING of your own? AKA, do you google your own name? You need to manage as many channels as you can handle with your resources. If you are a one person shop with 3 people’s jobs, and you have to prioritize and just do 1 or 2 channels, I would recommend Twitter and blogging.

But also, you should research where your donors are. Do a quick poll with your next e-newsletter. Even if you only get 20 responses, that’s better than nothing!

What are some key measurements to keep in mind with social media?
If you’re a big corporation, you might invest in Radian6 or SpredFast. Since if you’re in a nonprofit, statistically, it’s unlikely that you have the money to invest in these systems, let’s talk about what you can do instead. Here are some tools you can use to measure the impact of your online marketing.

What’s the first step in online impact measurement?
Decide what you want to measure. Do you have a Facebook page? How do you measure what goes on there? Do you have a Twitter account? How are you measuring what happens there?

What tools should you use to manage your nonprofit’s online reputation?

For Facebook: Edgerank for measuring the efficacy of your Facebook page, although, frankly, I’ve never had any luck raising serious money with Facebook and I think there’s so much noise there for the average person that you might have a hard time being heard. But if this is one of those things that you HAVE to do, then try this tool.

For Twitter: Sprout Social, which helps to measure the return and reach you’re getting with your Twitter account. It shows you how many followers you are getting, when influencers retweet you and how much this increases the radius of your tweet, and also demographic data like age and gender of your followers.
You might also like TweetPsych, TweetSprout, and TweetStats.

For your Emails: Your e-newsletter software. I prefer AWeber. You can track who opens it, when they open it, and if they click and give. So, this is another dimension of your marketing efforts that should be pretty easy to measure.

For your website: Google Analytics. This is usually a conservative estimate of how many people are coming to your website, but it’s better than nothing. And it’s easy to set up and log into.

What if your board members are all: Show us the ROI or we pull the plug on your social media efforts?
What can you do to justify your time spent on social media to your boss or bosses? How can you show social media investment pays off for your nonprofit? How can you bring the social media metrics for your measurement-minded board members? You can use the tools above, so they can see a steady increase in reach over time. And you can also bring out the case studies.

What if your board asks you for social media case studies that have worked for nonprofits?
Amy Sample Ward has put together a marvelous resource list here. And you can also buy The Networked Nonprofit by Beth Kanter and Alison Fine, and Social by Social, by Amy Sample Ward and others, put out by OpenMute press.

If your main problem is that people AREN’T talking about you, how do you get a community built?
Again, Amy Sample Ward did a very good job of talking about how to get your community engaged in her recent blog post.

I gave you a little taste today of how to monitor your online reputation, and I am having a webinar on June 15th about monitoring your online reputation. I will be available to answer ALL of your questions, personally. And it’s only $19.99!

When: June 15th, 1:00pm-2:00pm, CST
Where: At your desk!
Cost: $19.99
Webinar Description:

As Alex Bogusky, Chairman of CP&B said: “You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in social media…. you’ve got to be willing to play to play…”

Want to control your digital reputation? Want to make some money on the side?

Here’s what you’ll learn.

1. How to develop a social media strategy
2. How to create social media policies
3. How to start building a contact list of people who visit your site
4. How to connect with influencers
5. How to promote yourself online
6. How to impress people!
7. How to become an infopreneur
8. How to use Twitter effectively
9. How to use Linkedin to become an expert in your field

Bonus Materials:
1. Blog commenting calendar
2. Blog posting grid
3. Checklist of top WordPress widgets

Click here to sign up!

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How can nonprofits monitor their online reputations? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on June 13, 2011.

OF COURSE!

You know it!

What did you buy? Was it a book from bookfinder.com? Was it something off of Amazon or iTunes?

More and more people are shopping online, and more people are giving online. How can you take advantage of the fact that people are often online with their credit cards in their hands? Do you want to take advantage of the fact that your donors are online, looking for things to do? When they come to your website, how can you help them take the leap and give to you?

1. Make your programs into modules.
Ever since Kiva/org‘s record amount of donations in 2007. When I saw how they were putting the stories of each person they helped on their website, I knew that the multi-social service nonprofit I worked for should also make “modules” of each program. Due to a number of issues, that never happened on the website, but every time I looked at it, I thought, “How much money are we leaving on the table because people get overwhelmed by everything that we do?”

Kiva.org

I wish we all could be like Kiva and make our programs rotate on our front pages with 1 click donation.
Tip of the hat to Katya’s Marketing Blog for this first one!

2. Help donors give to you through buying things.
The CSO Website is really good at this. You’d think, they’re the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, what could an orchestra do to have more income? Well, they sell MP3s of their songs, they sell CDs, they sell different levels of membership, they sell sponsorship, it’s a dynamic combination of earned income, fee for service, gift certificate, and donation.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra really has it together. If you work for an arts organization, how could you sell more products on your website? CSO sells gift certificates, t-shirts, boxed sets of their performances, tickets, memberships, and more!

3. Add your blog stories to your email newsletter.
If you have a link to give already in your newsletter, how can you make that bigger? How can you make it more compelling?

You can have the beginning of a story, and then link at the bottom to continue reading the story on your blog. At the bottom of the story on your website, you can have a link to give to the particular program the story highlights. Make people more aware that you have a blog, and maybe they’ll start to talk with you there, and build a better relationship with your nonprofit.

It’s worth a try, right?

Any other tips?

Leave a comment below, or tweet this!

3 tips to dramatically increase website donations originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on May 16, 2011.

Move on up! And give yourself a leg up the career ladder!
A step-by-step guide to getting the attention you deserve for your accomplishments and expertise.

Thursday May 26th
Start Time: 1:00 PM End Time: 2:30 PM (Eastern Standard Time)

Only $49.99

Webinar Description
What can you do to move on up and take control of your career? Well, if you’re not just there to do a job and go home, if you actually care about how far and how fast you rise in your field, then this webinar is for you. What can you do to make yourself irresistible to employers? What does your online presence tell potential employers about you?

According to MyWebCareer.com, a survey of employers revealed:

* 70% have rejected candidates based on reputational data found online.
* 75% have hiring policies that require the review of online reputational data.
* 84% believe the use of online reputational data will increase in the next 5 years.

This means, like it or not, people will judge you by what they find online about you. So why not manage your online reputation now, before you are even looking for a job?

Get Your Questions Answered:
In order to effectively answer the questions of the participants, this interactive webinar is limited to 35 people. There is also a question-and-answer session at the end of the webinar.

Webinar Outline:
During this 90 minute webinar, in an easy-to-follow process, we’ll cover how to go from nobody to shiny person that everyone wants. We’ll answer all of these questions and more:

Learn:
1. How do you start from nothing?
2. How to control what people find out about you online?
3. What are the ways you can get known online?
4. What are ways to identify and reach influencers on Twitter in your niche?
5. How do you get recognition for your accomplishments?
6. What is the best way to build an audience?
7. How do you make money on the side with what you already know?
8. How much of yourself should you reveal online?
9. How can you dominate LinkedIn and really work your profile?

NEW! The following bonus materials are included with this webinar:
1. A blogging calendar that you can use to automate your posting
2. An automation plan for your social networks, so you only spend 15 minutes a day building your reputation.
3. A process tree diagram for tried and true ways to drive traffic to your site every day

Click the link below to sign up.

What the people say

“I found Mazarine’s presentation not only helpful but fun. It was a great way to understand more about getting a job and moving up in the nonprofit sector. As a fundraiser I think it was especially helpful.” -Karen Gilbert

“Mazarine was amazingly insightful and helpful in showing us how to develop a web presence to help our job searches. Her knowledge and humor make her presentations both thought-provoking and conversational. Thank you Mazarine!”

MOVE ON UP!

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May 26th Webinar: Move on up! And give yourself a leg up the career ladder! originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on May 12, 2011.

I am adapting some of the tools from a book that I’m reading called “Make your Contacts Count” by Anne Baber and Lynne Waymon.

For your reference, here’s the pretty picture I made about it.

How to get more donors

So now, we’re talking about how to make an associate, after just being an acquaintance.

Associate
What’s the next step between acquaintance and associate?

Survey!
Send them an email and ask them to take an online survey about what they care about, what problems they have, etc.

Say thank you!
If they complete it, thank them again through email.

Send them your e-newsletter
Send them an e-newsletter telling them about all of the exciting things your nonprofit is doing, link to blog posts if you have them, or invite them to connect with you on twitter, if you have a twitter account.

Invite them to something.
Send them an invitation to a friendraiser you’re doing in a couple of weeks.

Actor

Conference call with program people
Ask them to join you on a conference call to talk with people doing the work at your nonprofit, maybe overseas, or maybe people in this country. Help them start to feel personally connected with your mission through giving them a chance to learn more about the people doing the work that they don’t have time to do.

Ask them to give of their time, or money
Ask them if they’d like to become more involved with your organization through volunteering, or donating.

SAY THANK YOU AGAIN!
If they donate, thank them promptly. Give them a shout out on your website, on twitter, on linkedin, and on your blog.

Advocate

Would they like you to speak at their workplace?
Call them up, ask if their workplace would be interested in having a speaker come and talk about what you do.

Follow up and say thank you
If yes, follow up right away and ask who you should speak with, and ask them if they can advocate for you, and also advocate with their work friends to donate a portion of each paycheck to your nonprofit automatically. (This is a wonderful way to get monthly and recurring donations that are unrestricted and will keep your nonprofit running for a long long time.)

Ally

Ask them if they would like to serve on your board
Then ask them if they would like to sit on your board, or ask a friend from their work to do so.

Ask for a major gift
Finally, ask them if they would like to become major donors with your nonprofit.

Thank them! give them things!
If they say yes, give them even more special things, perhaps a member-only night at your museum, perhaps a special cruise down the river, perhaps a certificate for their wall, perhaps some small token of your appreciation.

Planned Gifts
After a long while, continuing your thank yous, and followups, you may feel comfortable enough to ask for “The Most Thoughtful Gift” aka “The Bequest.” But that’s another post. About planned giving.

So you can see the amount of THANK YOUS and FOLLOWUPS in here is kind of nuts. But this is what it takes to build a relationship with someone, you have to thank them and make them see that they are important to you. That you really do care about their day, and what is going on with them, and why they give to you. Saying thank you is a show of respect. if you don’t respect someone, no way are you going to thank them. So imagine the message you’re sending when you don’t thank someone. YIKES.

Donors crave recognition and attention, most of all, AMIRITE?

Isn’t this an INSANE amount of work? But imagine if you could connect with each person at a speaking engagement this way. How can you make this happen?

Remember, it takes 5-7 touches to make people move through these stages into allies for your nonprofit. I hope, now that you’ve seen all of these touches, you realize how important it is to have a fundraising team at your nonprofit. This means volunteers if you’re a one-person shop.

I have just given you Stewardship 101. You’re welcome!

So, how can you apply this?

Where is a place you can speak this week?

Where is a place you can go to get corporate donations?

Have you got some volunteers you could reach out to and get to know a bit better?

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How do you turn an accidental donor into an ally? Part 2 originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on May 3, 2011.

“Hey Twitter, can you help me out? I am looking for small rural clinics and hospitals using social media.”

The response was instant and tremendous, because @TweetSmarter picked up my question and retweeted it to others.

Over fifty people, complete strangers, responded, and some of their answers are below.

People’s responses ranged from retweeting my question to asking me to tell them what I found out, as well as providing some extremely helpful answers.

TweetSmarter ROCKS!

TweetSmarter is so incredible!

I was so touched! Total strangers, helping me out, simply because I asked for help!

What did I get out of this?
I got lots of different links to different hospitals and clinics, I got smarter around how to ask this question, I started to create relationships with new people, and got new followers too!

If you have a question that you’d like answered, and you want to connect with people on Twitter too, I suggest that you ask a question, and ask @TweetSmarter to retweet it. You might work for a nonprofit that cares about domestic violence, for example. And you might want to ask, “How are other domestic violence agencies doing social media? What are some policies I can follow?”

If you work at a hospital, how are you doing social media?

Do you have a facebook page for your hospital?

Do you have a twitter account?

Do you have a blog?

I have so many resources now pertaining to hospitals and social media! Here are some of the first links!
Ed Bennett’s comprehensive list
How doctors use twitter to help people follow a live surgery.
A big hospital social media resource list

Here are some people on Twitter who know more about this!
@Concentrahealth
@MissionAVL
@Doctor_V
@CorvallisClinic
@RMHCFamily
@EdBennett
@MatthewBrowning
@MDelaCalzada
@SimTara

And MORE! More people responded! But there were so many, I don’t have time to write them all.

If you responded, please feel free to write a comment below, or just tell me more about what your hospital is doing, and how it is going for you!

Thank you!

Do you work for a nonprofit hospital? How are you doing social media? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on April 28, 2011.

Have you ever tried to redesign your nonprofit website? Was that fun? No? Why not?

Is it because you were trying to skimp on people who knew what they were doing, and decided to DIY? Is it because you trusted people who said they knew what they were doing, and then they didn’t really know? What did you learn from that experience? Did you learn to ask people, “How do you know what you know?” Did you learn that actually, you can’t teach yourself how to create a WordPress Theme from scratch?

Here’s a quick checklist of things you need to get clear on before you redesign your nonprofit website, straight from the book, “Don’t Make Me Think” by Paul Krug.

• What is the goal of the site? What do you want to happen?
• Does this website make us look attractive to donors, funders and the community?
• How many people on your team have to be involved? At what level?
• What are some successful websites we could look at in terms of fundraising?
• Are we telling a story which will help us achieve our fundraising goals?
• Are we hoping people will watch or learn or donate?
• Are we making it easy to spread the word using various social media tools?
• Can people use us as a community resource?
• Are we making it easy to leave contact information, and track visitors and potential donors on our website?
• When people come to our site, are they trying to answer a specific question?
• How many places link to us, and how can we increase that?
• Who needs to update this site? How often?
• How often can we afford to overhaul this site?
• Does showing up in search engines matter? If so, for what terms? At what cost? Will we be willing to compromise any of the things above in order to achieve this goal?
• Will the site need to be universally accessible? Do issues of disability or language or browser come into it?
• How much money do we have to spend? How much time?

So once you answer these questions, you are ready to start redesigning your site.

Remember!

Focus above the fold
This means don’t put useful information where people have to scroll down for it. Put your navigation links, pictures, stats and donation button at the top of the page.

Don’t assume you know how the donor is going to look at the website
Test the website with different people, like your mom, or the receptionist, or anyone you find wandering around. What are the “hotspots”? Left hand side? Right hand side?

Make your tagline clearly state what your nonprofit does
The last thing you want is someone getting confused on what you do.

Clear Call to Action
Make your call to action something concrete. Not “Save the Earth,” but “Can you commit to recycling all waste paper at work and home this week?” Not, “Stop Domestic Violence” but “Can you donate $100 to our rural education program, to help educate one child about self-esteem and healthy relationships?”

Put your donate button in your navigation bar
In fact, put a way to donate into two or three places in your website. It has to be simple to give.

Build transparency into your website design
This means you need to show why you need the money and where the money goes as quickly as you can once the user comes to your website. Kiva does this exceptionally well.

Anything you’d like to add to this list? Leave a comment please!

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Re-designing your nonprofit website and other things that are sent to try us originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on April 25, 2011.