37 Must-Have Strategies to Better Engage Website Visitors, Part 2

[Editor's note: This is part 2 of a four-part series on the session "37 Must-Have Strategies to Better Engage Your Website Visitors" at the Bridge Conference. Click here for part 1.]

At the 7th Annual Bridge to Integrated Marketing and Fundraising Conference last week in National Harbor, Md., three fundraising technology professionals shared some website best practices in their session “37 Must-Have Strategies to Better Engage Your Website Visitor.” Here are strategies 9-17 from presenters Sue Anne Reed, account manager, online fundraising at The Engage Group; Allyson Kapin, founding partner of the RAD Campaign; and Rob Manix, director of marketing technology at Defenders of Wildlife.

9. Find ways to incorporate video and other multimedia
"Video is becoming more and more important," Reed said. "You have to find ways to use video in compelling ways."

It's now an expectation, not a bonus for website visitors. A good example of prominent video use is the way the United Eco-Action Fund put a video featuring Noam Chomsky right on its homepage.

10. Create an easy-to-find sign-up form
Capturing that e-mail address is important for marketing and fundraising purposes, so visitors need to be able to find your e-mail sign-up form easily. If not, the chances decrease that you'll capture that information.

Defenders of Wildlife found that when it sent visitors to another page for sign-up, it saw people then were leaving the website after signing up, Manix said. So now the organization has the sign-up pop up on the current page so visitors don't have to leave it, which encourages more time on the website.

"Find ways to never leave the page to sign up," Manix said. "If people stay on that page during sign-up, then they continue to explore the website, which is what you want."

11. Give visitors a reason to provide additional information
People will sign up and give you their information if you give them reasons for why it's important. For instance, uses sections such as "Get Connected," "Get Active" and "Get Informed," giving visitors something of value in exchange for their contact info.

12. Have the most important information 'above the fold'
At times, this can be tricky because "when redesigning the homepage, there's a battle of homepage real estate because everyone wants their department's most important thing on the homepage," Kapin said. "You have to think about organizing the homepage in a hierarchal structure. What do you want them to know about you, and what do you want them to do? That's most important."

You don't want to clutter the website with too much information, she added. Focus on the three to five key goals and priorities you want people to do on the homepage. More than that and the homepage is out of control, making it difficult for visitors to focus on any one thing, Kapin said.

13. Don't make pages too long
Defenders of Wildlife used to have pages that looked more like pages in a novel than pages on a website. So it audited its content and broke down the pages into smaller, more user-friendly ones, down into five or six subpages. What the organization found was that page views declined, but the time people spend on the site increased, which is what Defenders of Wildlife wanted.

Ask yourself who your audience is and if your page is appropriate for what you want to accomplish, Manix said.

Kapin added that when she was working on a redesign for an organization, it wanted to cram every piece of information it had on one page. So the two parties kept going and back forth without much progress. Finally, Kapin printed out the wireframes for the entire page the way the organization wanted it to show that it was actually larger than Kapin herself, who is 5 feet 4 inches tall. Sometimes people need to see a real visual of how long their website truly is.

14. Include a clear call to action on every page
Reed again used the example of DoSomething.org, which always displays very clear calls to actions on its site, such as "Subscribe to your Newsletter" and "Become a Member."

15. Reduce the use of Flash
"Apple hates Flash," Kapin said. "It's one of the big reasons we don't use Flash anymore — it's not supported on the iPhone or iPad. As more and more people are adopting mobile, which is huge — used more than desktops now — it's really important that the site is mobile-friendly."

You can still use those nice visuals Flash allows, but you need to use other platforms like JavaScript and HTML5 to build them so they can be viewed on virtually all devices, she added.

16. Make your mission statement easy to find
Many people want a really quick snapshot of what you do, and having your mission statement readily prevalent in the header or footer is a great idea to accomplish that, Reed said. She said The Nature Conservancy and Human Rights Campaign do a great job of this, putting their short mission statement tag lines right in the header.

17. Tell compelling stories
"In fundraising, we have all tested that if you tell personal stories in fundraising appeals, you'll raise more money because people are ruled by emotions. The same holds true for websites," Kapin said. "People want to see how you're making an impact in the lives of others. Tap in to emotions by telling those stories."

Check back for the remaining 20 strategies.