This blog was originally published by Kanopi Studios as a guest contributor on July 13th, 2021. The original author has updated this post as of March 10th, 2023.
As one of the most widely used social media platforms, Facebook has become a popular peer-to-peer fundraising tool. With its easy sharing options and direct exposure to new audiences, Facebook is a common place for individuals to host their own fundraising campaigns and conduct social giving efforts.
Many nonprofits encourage their supporters to raise money on their behalf through Facebook, as you can see here with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Atlanta. Some even invest in social giving solutions to increase their success with Facebook fundraising. But how can you engage new supporters beyond the Facebook platform?
Start by considering the steps of the donor journey:
After becoming aware of your organization through Facebook, the donors will take the next step in the journey – research. This is where your nonprofit website comes in.
Your website is most likely the first thing a prospective supporter will look up to learn more about your organization. A great nonprofit website will incorporate these elements:
- Invite users in with engaging and intuitive design
- Make it easy to learn more
- Provide clear ways to support your organization
- Ensure your site is accessible and fully ADA compliant
- Prioritize your SEO
To leverage new donor relationships, make your nonprofit website engaging and informative, and ensure it meets your visitors’ needs. In this short guide, we’ll dive into the above tips to help ensure that your website is doing all it can to help build relationships with new supporters.
1. Invite users in with engaging and intuitive design
When someone discovers your organization and clicks through to your website to learn more, they should be presented with easy navigation and engaging visuals. According to Kanopi, your website design can power your mission and influence the experience visitors have on your site.
Without a positive user experience, people won’t stay on your website long enough to engage with your offerings, learn about your mission, or support your cause. How can you ensure that visitors feel welcomed as soon as they land on your site? Consider these quick tips:
How can you ensure that as soon as someone lands on your site that they are immediately welcomed? Consider these quick tips:
- Keep your homepage free of clutter. If your website has too many visual elements, it’s going to be more difficult for your visitors to find the content they’re looking for.
- Incorporate a sticky navigation menu. This is a menu that moves with your screen as you scroll through a site and doesn’t cover any important headers or footers.
- Host your important content front and center. If you have an upcoming campaign or exciting event coming up, focus on this content within your homepage.
- Design should be user-focused. Prioritize ease of use over visual appeal.
- Make use of strong visual elements like images and infographics. Strong visuals can elicit an emotional connection between your site visitors and your mission.
- Prioritize mobile-friendly design. Make it easy for visitors to find your nonprofit and explore information about it from their phones.
Without that great first impression, potential supporters may never come back to your website again. Always keep the user experience in mind as you balance usability and visual design aspects.
For more insight into the visitor experience, use a tool like HotJar to track website user behavior. This can help you determine the most and least engaging aspects of your website and make improvements where necessary.
2. Make it easy to learn more
Your website is a critical part of the donor journey since it provides an easily-accessible research tool for new audience members. When a potential supporter visits your website, they should be able to immediately find the information they’re looking for. In fact, if they can’t find it within just 7 seconds, they’ll likely just give up.
This is where a navigation menu will come in handy. Make sure that your menu has links to these popular landing pages:
- About us and mission statement
- Past accomplishments
- Case studies and reports
- Blog roll
- Events calendar
While a Facebook Challenge can help introduce someone to your organization, they’ll need to do research before becoming a long-term supporter. According to Double the Donation, “visitors are likely to abandon your site if they can’t find what they’re looking for within a few seconds.” Having the necessary information easily accessible from your nonprofit website is essential.
3. Provide clear ways to support your organization
Once they’ve done their research, your supporters shouldn’t have to click around and visit multiple pages to find where they can donate. Along with making it easy for new site visitors to learn more, your website should provide clear ways to support your organization. Consider these tips for making support more easily accessible:
- Incorporate key calls-to-action (CTAs): Embed clear and prominent CTAs on your donation page that encourage people to give. CTAs can be bright buttons or cleverly-placed links.
- Offer an easy-to-use online donation form: Only ask for need-to-know information and offer suggested donation options to make the decision process easier.
- Highlight unique giving opportunities: Offer more information about different ways to give, like matching gifts, volunteer grants, or peer-to-peer fundraising opportunities.
Capitalize on moments of inspiration, as these are when your supporters are most likely to donate, sign up to volunteer, or register for an event. For example, you could provide ways to donate directly through Facebook since your supporters might feel inspired by your posts and can give as soon as they feel compelled.
4. Ensure your site is accessible and fully ADA compliant
The last thing you want to do is turn new site visitors away because your website is inaccessible.
In order to reach nonprofit web compliance standards, your organization needs to be aware of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This law prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities and requires all “public accommodations” to be fully accessible—including nonprofit websites.
To ensure your website is ADA compliant, follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), a set of usability standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. Here are the four WCAG principles your website should follow:
- Perceivable: Users should be able to perceive the presented information and user interface components.
- Operable: Users should be able to operate interface components and site navigation.
- Understandable: Users should be able to understand the information and operation of the user interface.
- Robust: A wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies, should be able to reliably interpret your content.
Here are some specific ways to increase your website’s accessibility and compliance:
- Provide alt text for images
- Optimize your forms with field names
- Text and background color should have a contrast ratio over 3:1
- Provide captions for videos
- Keep line spacing to at least 1.5 times the font size
- Give users enough time to read and use content
Even if your website doesn’t classify as a public accommodation, it should still be as accessible as possible. Content management systems, like Wordpress or Drupal, offer plenty of built-in tools that you can use to make your website more accessible.
However, it’s also important to manually assess your website for accessibility to ensure everything is functioning properly. You could do this by increasing your screen view to 200% or navigating the site using your keyboard to replicate the experience of using assistive technology. This will help you provide an equally engaging experience for every site visitor.
5. Prioritize your SEO
While your nonprofit website should be linked within the Facebook fundraiser, there will be times that users simply look up your name on Google to find out more. This is when search engine optimization (SEO) becomes important.
Search engines rank websites on the results page by looking for keywords that relate to a user’s search and assessing content relevance and value.
Billions of online searches happen every day and a lot of sites use the same keywords, so prioritizing SEO is critical to engaging supporters and encouraging them to give.
How do you know if your website is SEO optimized? Let’s consider what Google looks for when it crawls pages:
- Relevance to the keyword, which is determined by crawling site content and evaluating it (algorithmically) based on the keywords it contains.
- Website link profile, which includes the number and quality of other websites that link to a page and site.
- A site’s loading speed and “mobile friendliness.”
- How much unique content a site has.
Google also offers an ad grant that gives nonprofits $10,000 in free Google advertising. Google ads can supplement your organic SEO strategies to make sure your website shows up first among the search results.
If you want to capitalize on your new Facebook donors, making your website easily discoverable when searching for it is essential. Without an SEO-optimized website, you’re missing out on a crucial component of your digital strategy. In the end, Google and other search engines are looking for high-quality content.
Conclusion
If you scroll down your Facebook newsfeed, you'll likely stumble upon one or two fundraisers hosted by your friends. Perhaps they started it in celebration of their birthday or because they’re participating in an online Facebook Challenge. No matter the reason, Facebook fundraisers are key ways for nonprofit organizations like yours to meet new supporters.
To start these relationships off on the right foot, having an engaging and informative website is key. Use the tips above to optimize your website and engage new supporters beyond the Facebook platform.
About the Author:
Anne Stefanyk, Founder and CEO at Kanopi
As Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios, Anne helps create clarity around project needs, and turns client conversations into actionable outcomes. She enjoys helping clients identify their problems, and then empowering the Kanopi team to execute great solutions.
Anne is an advocate for open source and co-organizes the Bay Area Drupal Camp. When she’s not contributing to the community or running her thoughtful web agency, she enjoys yoga, meditation, treehouses, dharma, cycling, paddle boarding, kayaking, and hanging with her nephew.
You can connect with Anne on LinkedIn or Twitter
