37 Must-Have Strategies to Better Engage Website Visitors, Part 3

[Editor's note: This is part 3 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, and here for part 2.]

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 18-26 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.
18. Find ways to tell stories
Ask yourself: What impact are your activists, volunteers and donors having on your organization? There are tremendous stories in that answer.

“You actually have access to the greatest stories, the people who work in your organization, work on the ground, your members, your volunteers and your donors,” Kapin said.

She suggested testing a storytelling campaign online encouraging your constituents to share their stories. She added that you should consider framing your stories in a fairy tale structure, with a hero, villain, story arc, etc.

“Why does your organization continue to exist?” Kapin asked. “Don’t answer that with your mission statement. Dig deep, and find the stories that explain it.”

Manix said Defenders of Wildlife was successful with a video story, where his organization filmed its crew moving endangered bison to safe Indian land.

For other ideas on finding ways to tell your story, check out Kapin’s Frogloop blog post: “10 Ways to Reveal Your Organization’s Best Stories.”

19. Keep content fresh
A great way to do that is to develop an editorial calendar to publish new content on a regular basis, Reed said. Manix said his organization is very dependent on its editorial calendar for determining what type of stories to share and how long they should stay up on the site.

20. Build contact information into the navigation or design
“Having contact information readily available is crucial, including the mailing address and phone number right in the contact information,” Reed said. “It builds trust and reassures donors, especially those older donors who may still be a little wary of making donations online.

21. Keep SEO in mind, but don’t overdo it
Search engine optimization can really help draw traffic to your website, so it’s smart to employ some of these best practices that Manix and Defenders of Wildlife incorporated in their website redesign:

• Have descriptive titles of all your pages.
• Give your images descriptive names, and use dashes, not underscores.
• Have alt tags for images and links, along with descriptive names.
• Implement an internal linking strategy.

By doing these things and tracking Google Analytics and other metrics, Defenders of Wildlife saw a 26 percent increase in organic search results.

“Now is the time to invest in SEO,” Manix said.

22. Use dynamic content when possible
Dynamic content keeps visitors on the website because they want to explore that related content. Manix said that his organization moved to Drupal 7 and built in taxonomy that marks every piece of content that relates to each other, which builds a relationship between content and finds other related content automatically.

“It keeps users engaged and on the site,” he said. “People the spend more time on the websites and can follow paths to where you’d like them to go.”

23. Don’t forget about your thank-you pages
We all know about the importance of thanking donors. That’s why it’s alarming that so many organizations forget about the thank-you page, putting little thought behind it.

“The ability to gain conversions on the thank-you page is huge and largely untapped,” Reed said. “Give people something to do besides going back to the homepage on the thank-you page.”

For example, when you sign up to charity: water’s list, you see some great text, graphics and the option to do two things: share with a friend or return to the homepage.

“This is a great thing to do,” Reed said. “When people sign up, what are the next steps you are giving them to do?”

“We know after someone signs up they are the most motivated donors, so we provide a soft ask to share, donate, etc.,” Manix added.

And Kapin noted, “It’s crushing to me when an organization does not immediately thank its donors besides the standard, automated e-mail. If you truly want to cultivate donors and raise money, you have to come up with a solid plan to thank donors with a welcome series and take them through the ladder of the donor relationship. Take that time to cultivate the donor because you are missing out on opportunities if you don’t.”

24. Create mobile-specific donation landing pages
More and more, donors are visiting your organization’s website via their smartphones and reading nonprofit e-mails on their mobile devices. So you must have mobile-specific donation landing pages and links to make sure you don’t frustrate donors trying to donate on their smartphones.

“One of the worse experiences that users can have is coming to a website when trying to take action but can’t because it’s not mobile-optimized. They become so frustrated because they can’t find form fields that they click off the page, and chances are they’re not going to come back to your site, especially if they’re aren’t current members,” Kapin said.

25. Have a mobile landing site, but allow people to access the full website
Sometimes mobile viewers still want access to the full site, so make that option available.

26. Use a flexible/responsive layout to make your site mobile-friendly
Reed said having a responsive design that automatically reacts to any devices is the way nonprofits need to be going to ensure they’re sites are optimized no matter how visitors come in.

She provided these resources for WordPress themes and a Web gallery of responsive sites.

Check back for the final 11 strategies.