S1:E1 | 8 Nonprofit Website Tips
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[00:00:00] What's good? What's good? It's the Jeremy Haselwood show. What's good? What's good? Let's get ready to go. Welcome to the Jeremy Haselwood show. Plug in, turn it up. Let's go. Hey, hey. Welcome to the Jeremy Haselwood show. Push play, let it roll. Let's go. What's good? Welcome to my show. In three, two, one. Let's go.
Jeremy: Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of the Jeremy Haselwood show. I'm Jeremy and I'm excited to have you join me on this journey. This podcast is all about exploring a wide range of topics that spark curiosity. Build community inspire action and deepen our understanding of the world around us.
Now, each season we'll dive into a new theme, offering fresh perspectives and insights that are practical, informational, entertaining, and thought provoking. But first let's [00:01:00] do some quick housekeeping. Yes. This is your first episode with me, but it's going to be incredible. So subscribe or follow or do what you do.
Tap the button on whatever platform that you're seeing or hearing the song. So a little bit about my podcast, my whole mission with this is to create a space where we can explore the questions and ideas that matter. Bringing together knowledge from different fields and experiences, whether it's diving deep into digital fundraising strategies, exploring personal growth and leadership, or unearthing the inspiration behind business leaders and artists. My aim is to provide you with the tools, inspiration, and actionable insights that you need. Now, throughout my career, I've been passionate about connecting people with resources and ideas that will empower them to make a meaningful impact. This podcast is an extension of that passion, where we can learn together and grow together. Now I believe that at the heart of every great endeavor is a story waiting to be told my background in marketing music and entrepreneurship has shown me how powerful these stories can be in [00:02:00] transforming lives and communities. Whether I'm helping a nonprofit power, their cause, or working with individuals to discover their true potential.
I've always been driven by the idea that we all have the ability to create positive change. All we need is hope and as a messenger of hope, that's why I started this podcast to share those stories, insights, and conversations that can inspire you to take action no matter what field or passion you're pursuing. Now in our first season together, we're going to focus on digital fundraising for nonprofits.
It's been the cornerstone of my work for the past 10 plus years. This is a crucial topic for any organization, looking to amplify their message and engage donors to open their hearts and their wallets. We'll cover everything from setting up successful, monthly giving programs to leveraging social media for impact data and analytics.
And staying ahead of the latest trends. Each episode will feature expert advice. Real-world examples and practical tips that you can use right away. But don't worry if fundraising is not your main focus, [00:03:00] these strategies can also apply. Apply to a wide range of other marketing efforts. Now I want this podcast to be interactive and as engaging as possible.
If you have questions, ideas, or topics that you'd like me to hear about in future seasons, I'd love to hear about them. Connect with me on Instagram at Jeremy dot Haselwood, or shoot me a note on my website at jeremyhaselwood.com slash podcast. And if you enjoy what you're hearing again, please leave a review and also subscribe. Your feedback, not only helps others find my show and get inspired, but it also helps me create the kind of content that resonates with you as the listener. All right, so let's get started. Today's episode starts with the very foundation of your digital fundraising, and that is your website.
So let's get into the eight components of your website that you must pay attention to. Now, when we look at what I call the digital fundraising ecosystem, there are several different digital fundraising channels that come to play. You have email social media search, engine marketing, or SEM, mobile display ads, [00:04:00] your blog, your content. Out of home, which could be like a billboard or bus shelter and then direct mail and yes, direct mail.
I do consider this part of the digital fundraising ecosystem because there's ways that you can integrate that and even billboards with your digital fundraising. But it all starts with the website because all of these are pointing to your website. And if your website isn't really up to speed, then you're actually like, it's like having a bucket of water with a hole in the bottom of it.
So we want to retain as much of the revenue as much of your donors attention as we can. So I'm going to lay out the eight components that you really need to pay attention to in this episode first. And I'm just going to go through the list of eight here. Then we'll dive into each of them a little bit.
You have your content hierarchy and your layout of your website. You have branding and positioning and how that component plays a part of your website, your user experience. Number four is like your email capture. Number five, your donation, page number six, tracking and analytics. Number seven, search [00:05:00] engine optimization or SEO.
And number eight is privacy policy and terms and conditions. These are the eight pieces that we're going to dive into a little bit further here. Let's start with your content, hierarchy and layout on your website. Now, when you think about your website, again, think of this, like your home. If somebody is coming to your home, you want your home to be clean.
You want the floors mopped or carpet. Vacuum. You want your bathrooms clean. You want things in order so that people feel comfortable there and they don't want to leave. And it's very similar with your website. You want people to feel comfortable there. And what that means is people can find information easily.
What that means for you as an organization, is that the way that you structure the content on your website is that it makes sense, and it takes the user on a journey and it makes things easy to find and understand. So when we look at your content hierarchy and your layout, one piece that the first thing people are going to see is what we call that hero image or hero video.
The very first thing, when your website comes [00:06:00] up is usually that very top section. And that's your hero image. So you want this to be a powerful image or powerful video. Or if you have a campaign going, you want to have that same messaging that goes along with your campaign. The next piece that you want to have on your homepage is your value proposition. And his value proposition is very important.
It should say what you do, why you do it and who you do it for. What is the value that you bring? The next piece is using a block format. Now you might see a lot of websites that have different columns and it's okay to have like different icons or images scrolling across, but people read from top to bottom, especially on websites.
Think about a mobile phone. So your smartphone people are scrolling. So the natural flow of your user or donor's eyes is going to be from top to bottom. So you don't want necessarily a lot of distraction and a lot of different content. Content blocks that are one block on the left, one block in the middle of one block on the right and some cases that's okay.
But in [00:07:00] general, you just want to have one block and within that block of content on your homepage or throughout your website, you're focusing on one idea or one piece of messaging. Now the other piece is your donation button, of course. And what has become somewhat of a standard practice is to have the donation button in the upper right corner of your website.
And I don't see anything wrong with that. I don't see any data that says there's anything wrong with that. The only thing that you do need to make sure that you're doing is having that donate button distinguished. So if every other font. Size and font color. On your header at the top of your page or the menu at the top of your page is the same as where it says donate or give.
Now, then that actually doesn't really help your donation button stand out. So what I would recommend is if you're able to do this, depending on your website platform, is that you do have a different color, different font. You actually make it look like a button and that's a donate button. And what I'm saying here in this podcast, and even throughout the season, some of this may be basic [00:08:00] information to you and you may already be doing some of this, but I'm only going through this because these are the things that you need to consider.
And these are the things you need to know. And if you're going through, when you're building your website, if you're redesigning your site, you definitely need to have these different items built into it. All right now, after your donation button, you want a black for email acquisition, and I have a whole separate episode on this season that talks about email acquisition.
So I'm not going to get too much into that right now, but don't make email acquisition an afterthought on your donation page, or excuse me on your homepage. Think about it like this. If you pull your analytics and we're going to get to that in a moment why it's so important. But when you pull your analytics, your homepage is probably the highest traffic site or page of your website.
So we want to make sure that we're giving you an opportunity to grow your email list, and don't bury your email subscribe within the footer of your website. Okay, so we'll pay more attention to that in the future. Ah, the next piece is [00:09:00] prioritizing menu items and the content structure based on your organization's goals.
So the way that you're presenting information needs to be relevant to your donors and your audiences, but also the goals of your organization. If you have something that's taking up that hero image of your website, that isn't really a priority for your organization. Then you may want to rethink the kinds of items that you're showing on that homepage.
We are going to get into branding and positioning. These are important components of branding and positioning for your website. You want to use consistent use of your brand related colors. And you may already be doing this, but I'm only bringing it up because I've seen plenty of nonprofit websites where your logos are a certain color, but then the colors on your website are very different.
Maybe it's the template that you used and didn't know how to change the colors or something like that. But you want your brand colors to really be consistent throughout because. How that looks on your website is a part of your brand. I would also recommend that your logo of your [00:10:00] organization is on each and every page the upper left corner.
This is where we are pretty much trained as consumers to look for. How do we get back to that home page? So you putting your logo, there is not only one way to reinforce your logo and your brand, but it also reinforces to the people on your website. If I need to leave this page or go back to the homepage, I can. I can just click right here. Next you want to make sure that your images and tone of the copy on your website are the voice of your organization. Meaning, if you're using chat GPT or AI tools, you want to make sure that whatever it spits out actually sounds like something that will be the voice of your brand. And I've also seen situations, people that don't use AI or that predates AI, where you would work with a copywriter and say, Hey, we need you to write. X amount of pages for our website and they get it back and they post it.
But maybe it's a little too casual or too serious or too stoic or too fun or too professional. Whatever it is like, you need to understand what your brand [00:11:00] voice sounds like, so that when people are on your website, the pages sound like it's actually coming from your brand and not from an intern or someone who doesn't know your brand, because this is very important to the consistency of how your brand is presented.
Now let's talk a little bit about user experience or UX. The important components of user experience for your website? One thing that is crucial to understand is that your user experience is your donor experience. And by now most websites do operate from a mobile first design. Meaning if I pull your website up on a smartphone that it actually versions out really good.
I'm not having to pinch and squeeze the screen to make sure I'm enlarging the fonts and things like that. If your website is not mobile first now, like that is the first and foremost thing that you need to do. The second piece that is a really bad experience is, or can be the load speed of your website.
If you're using images that are very heavy files, meaning like you're using a large file, that [00:12:00] several megabytes it's taking longer for your website to load. So there are sites that you can go to, to lower the size, like maybe bringing in an image from. 56 megabytes to one megabyte, as an example, that's extreme, but there are sites where you can reduce the actual size of the file so that your page will load a lot quicker. Also, if you're running WordPress and you have a ton of plugins going, the more plugins that you use on your website, the more they can slow your page down and your load speeds down.
And naturally the longer it takes a page to load like you're working on the patience of the visitors and the donors to your website. You, so you want that to go pretty quickly. You want it to be within a second or two if possible. The next thing you want to look at is the ability to find information quickly. If I want to know what your services are, how to volunteer, where to donate who the board is.
I need to be able to find that quickly, or I'm going to get frustrated. So make sure that your menus and the way that you lay out your [00:13:00] data and where to find everything in your is very easy to find. So think about that piece. Also, you want to have the context of the images, make sense next to the content in which it appears to.
And a classic example I have just to illustrate this point is there was an organization. One that I work with that offered many services like homeless services and disaster response services. And they also did some human trafficking services and on the human trafficking services, there was a picture of an elderly woman.
And. And I'm certain that could be a scenario that, that occurs. I'm not saying that it doesn't occur where there are elderly women who are a part of human trafficking, but it's not necessarily the image that, that nonprofit or really anyone would associate with human trafficking. So that image actually belonged to a different page on the website that deals more with. Feeding services and soup kitchen and things like that.
So being aware of what those images are and that they contextually make sense next to the [00:14:00] content that appears to is very important. And one thing I'd recommend what the user experience is. Having people within your organization. Actually test your website, give them a list of tasks to do, have them find where to donate, have them find a specific service, have them find the name of a person on your board or. An employee and get their feedback and ask them how easy was it for you to find that?
So there's different ways that you can test that. There's also some tools available that Google offers. Where they can test different, like load speeds of your website and things like that. And it'll give recommendations on how to improve the speed. So that would be the UX piece. The next area that we want to talk about is email capture.
And again, I'm not going to spend too much on this. This is part of my whole components and one of the eight components that we want to look at. But I do have a whole episode about email acquisition. The important thing that you need to know for your website right now is that your website email capture should not just be a [00:15:00] little field that says sign up for our emails or sign up to get an email newsletter. You want your email capture to have value.
So what value will you give the person the subscriber? Why should they sign up for your email list? Because people get bombarded with emails all the time. So give them a reason, stories of hope in your inbox. Here are the latest or learn how you can make a difference, give them something tangible, other than sign up for our email list here. So we'll dive more into that in the future. The next piece we want to break up a little bit is your donation page.
And there's many tests that have been done on donation pages. And even through the years, some things have changed a little bit. So the latest recommendations that I'll give to you is to number one, keep it simple your time and or the time and attention of your donors is very valuable. So you don't want to fill it up with a lot of distractions. You do want to include things like a headline, maybe a small little paragraph.
And by that, I just mean, giving information to really affirm why [00:16:00] these people, why these donors are making a gift because they've hit your page and they still may be on the fence as to why they're going to make a gift. So you want to give some affirmational language to them and let them know how their gift can make a difference. And then you want to include a different string of amounts.
And you'll test into those. And there's different tools out there. There's one called AB tasty that maybe you try out. Or you, maybe you try it out without tools and you run one version of your donation page. For a couple of weeks a month and run the donation page the next couple of weeks, it may not be a very clean test, but you'll be able to get some data that way, but test different string amounts.
Is it $25 50 and a hundred? Is it 35, 75, 1 50, but you want to test different string amounts and find out which ones are actually pulling in more donations. And these are. You can develop whole strategies based on how people enter in to your organization as a donor. For example, if they come in as a $25 [00:17:00] donor. Now we can try to upgrade them to becoming a $50 donor down the line. But that is another podcast topic for another session at another time. So without getting too far ahead of ourselves, Also, you want to equate your dollars with an impact.
So if it is a $25 handle, you know, $25, we'll do X $50. We'll do X. If you're in human services or homeless shelters or rescue missions, maybe it's $25 equals X amount of meals or X amount of nights of shelter. So you always want to equate it with something tangible that when people make that gift, it is that instant gratification where. I'm donated this amount of money.
So I feel good laying my head down tonight, knowing that I was able to purchase five meals for a family or something like that. Now you also want to use trust, checkers and trust checkers would be like the logo of your organization or the logo of a security company that does, online cybersecurity or something like that. Maybe a [00:18:00] statement saying that your gift is secure, maybe putting a lock there that says it's SSL secured.
But th this needs to be truthful. You need to make sure you have a very secure donation system, which most of them are. That's not a huge concern. But from a donor's perspective. There's still a distrust of people making donations online. And we want to make sure that we try to alleviate those fears as much as possible.
So put those trust checkers on your website, reaffirm the donors that their donation is safe. And here's the technology we use to make sure that your gift is secure. Now another thing that you want to do on your donation page. As you want to eliminate the top menu. So if your menu still says like home services about us, contact us. Your social media handles no strip.
All of that away. These are all exit points and think about it. If people click on about us, that's one doorway out. Contact us. That's one doorway out your Facebook and Instagram icons. Those are [00:19:00] two doors out. When people are on this donation page, we only want their focus to be on giving. Now, the only thing that I will say is okay to have on there is still that logo in the upper left-hand corner where people can still go back to the homepage if they want to. But eliminate those doorways out, strip away any footer, any foot or menus.
You need like your privacy policy and things like that, but nothing that's going to take them off of this page, unless it's about security or terms and conditions, or going back to the homepage. And then the last thing that I'll mention about your donation page is definitely have an option there for recurring giving.
And this is like a huge deal to pass several years in nonprofits. There's been. Tremendous gains made with recurring giving programs. And this is a really like a lifeblood for nonprofits because when you have recurring giving you have money that you can pretty much bank on and budget on as a nonprofit.
And again, I have a whole separate episode during this season about recurring giving. So I'm not going to get too [00:20:00] much into that. Just make sure that you have that option on your website. All right. The next piece we're going to talk about is tracking and analytics. And this is going to be a little short section here.
Really? The point is make sure that you do have tracking like Google analytics on your website and Google analytics. They come out with new versions every so often the one at the time of this podcast is a GA for. Which is a little more complex to use. It does still provide very useful information though.
So it allows you to identify different web website trends and content engagement and marketing attribution. Meaning if people come in from Facebook or Instagram or through search, like you can capture all that. If you put out a specific post on your social media, And all of a sudden you have a big bump in traffic that kind of lets that we might want to continue making posts like this because this one actually did really well and it brought a lot of traffic in and it also keeps that historic log of site activity. So this is a really, if you absolutely need to have Google [00:21:00] analytics on your website, so make sure you do that. The next piece we'll spend a little bit of time on is search engine
optimization or SEO. So why is search engine marketing important?
This helps your organization be easily found through relevant searches and there's two kinds of SEO. One. One is on page SEO and the other is off page SEO. Now on-site SEO are the things that you can control within your website. So these are things like the page descriptions, the keywords that you're using on your page. Atl Tags, which are things that you can actually there, if you're using WordPress or similar one this is where you can provide tags on your images.
So they'll come up in Google search. If people are searching for specific keywords that are related to your organization, that will show up on like images dot, google.com. But also your page the titles within your page, like your headlines these are called like H ones or H. Two's which is a sub-headline. And then making sure that your URL name, these are [00:22:00] all these little pieces, make a difference in SEO. And this is your on-page SEO.
The off page SEO are things like directory listing. So are you on the Google business profile? Are you on Yelp for example? And there's, and we'll talk a little bit about that here in a minute. And then one tip that I would give you is to set up Google search console for your website. And I would do that today, if you have the time.
And what I like about Google search console is that it can show you keywords, your average search position for those particular keywords, what your click through rate is. So it provides a lot of really good data. So if you're really curious about whether or not your website is ranking for a particular keyword, you can look it up in Google search console and it will show you where you're ranking for. Specific keywords. All right, so digging in a little bit more into SEO, and I want to focus more specifically on headlines.
And if this is your first time even being introduced to search engine optimization. If you're looking at headlines [00:23:00] within. I don't know whether it's WordPress or something like that. Or even if you're reading a blog post, you might see. Like H one H two H three. And this is just like heading one, heading two, heading three, and heading one would be your main headline.
It's always a bigger font. And H two was really a sub-headline and H three is like a sub sub headline. And these typically have different types or different font sizes, but the importance of headlines is that. Search engines will scan websites and they're going to look for headings and relevant content. So if there's a particular keyword you want to be found for like animal shelter near me. That should probably be the name of your page and it should be in the description of your page.
It should be in the headline of your page, and then it should be in the paragraph of your page. And that is not considered keyword stuffing. This is just good SEO. What you don't want to do is have animal shelter near me written on your page like 50 times, because you can't game the system. It's not [00:24:00] about the quantity of words.
It is about being found and making that, making sure that keyword is found on your page. But you also want to make sure the quality of your page is good and it reads well, and it provides really good information. The next thing that we will talk about on SEO is your offsite SEO. And I already mentioned like your local business directory listings, like Google business profile, but there's also local directory aggregators, like Localeze or Yext. And these aggregators, they typically have a fee to them.
It's like a subscription service, but you put all of your nonprofit organization information into these one time. And what this does is they distributed out to hundreds of different local directories. And this is important because. If someone is searching for your organization or an organization that provides the kind of services you do, search engines, like Google will look at all the websites that provide this, these kinds of services.
But they're also going to look at what does the internet say about this particular keyword or [00:25:00] organization that I've searched for? So using animal care, as an example, if you're an animal care organization and you only have a website and you never registered for local directories, But then a competing one in town has a website and they're registered on a Google business profile and on Facebook and through all these other directories, Google is most likely going to put them ahead of you in the search engine results, because Google will say, okay, these two organizations both have websites, but this other one has all this other presence online from sites that have authority like Google business profile and Google business profile.
You need to set that up if you haven't already, because. Because this is a high authority you have to do. Verification order to get those. So Google recognizes that this is an authority and it's a Google product. So you need to register there anyways. But outside of that, why p.com Yahoo, small business there's being all these different places that you can register your business. But search engines, look outside of [00:26:00] your website and see, is this, does this seem like a legit website?
So the more you focus on both on-site SEO and off-site SEO, actually the better your rankings will be. Now, the last thing that we'll cover here in today's episode is having a privacy policy and terms and conditions on your website. And even now I still have to bring this up because there's a lot of non-profits and you listening may be in this boat where you don't have a privacy policy for your website.
You don't have terms and conditions for your website. If you operate over in Europe or the EU, you have to have GDPR, which is general data protection regulation. You have to meet those required. now I am not an attorney. I'm not going to make. Really any recommendations about what should be in your privacy policy and your terms and conditions. All I'm telling you is that you need to have this on your website.
It needs to be in the footer of your website. And this work is now yours. You need to Google and find out privacy [00:27:00] policies, what needs to be included. And honestly like having an attorney review that, to make sure that they cover all the liabilities and all the legal language that you need to have in your website.
If you're doing any form of marketing, whether it's Facebook ads or Google ads, like you need to have some information about. What that, what information you're collecting and how you use that information. So that is all related to your privacy policy and terms and conditions. If you do not have this, then you could be facing lawsuits and have liabilities against you.
So please make sure you do this. Okay. So the last thing here, This is our first episode and we're coming in. Just around 30 ish minutes, some of these episodes will be 10 minutes. Some might be 15, some may be an hour. The thing that I want to do is make sure that I get you the information that you need to be successful for each episode that we do. Thank you so much for being a part of this first episode.
I hope you took lots of notes. This season is going to be full of note taking. So when you're listening, I have that keyboard up, have that notepad out and [00:28:00] be ready to roll. If you enjoy today's episode, don't forget to follow or subscribe.
So you're always up to date when the latest episode drops until next time. Keep following your dreams to find your purpose.
Let's go. Let's go.
