Why content is still king
Jan 22, 2009
The following is a presentation given at the PF Digital Communications For Charities 2009 conference, complete with comments and questions from the audience.
Despite the bells and whistles of social media tools you may have heard about (such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook), content is what will actually keep users at your site and will keep them coming back.
Why do you have a website in the first place?
The main reasons pointed out by delegates at this year's conference were:
- to raise money
- to raise awareness of your own organisation
- to provide information
- campaigning resource
Not many charities have a list of their objectives written down and close to hand, so try writing down three reasons you have a website and the three things you're trying to achieve as an organisation.
You are experts in your field - people come to your website to share your expertise, so you need to identify why people are seeking you out, and to meet those needs.
The aim of volunteering charities, for example, is to attract volunteers, but saying "volunteer for us" is not enough. People volunteer for a charity for a specific reason, whether that's improving their CV, giving something back to a community that's supported them etc.
Your content therefore has to be worded to place your website visitor at the centre of your focus. "If you come to our organisation we'll help you..." helps initate and build a relationship, as long as you base your offer on their needs. You'll also need to identify how those needs will meet your aims as an organisation.
Before you take any action updating your ste, you need to decide how you're going to measure the results and guage your succeses.
How do you figure out what your user's needs are if you never physically meet them?
Web analytics are a great source of knowledge about your users:
- what search terms are they using to find your website?
- what other websites are they using?
- where in the world do they live?
- what pages are they looking at and what themes are they interested in?
Ban the word "user" when you have marketing meetings. Web users are people, they're just people you don't know yet, because they may not have enough knowledge about your organisation to make a commitment to working with you.
Make your homepage clear and unambiguous
If you work in a large organisation, or have lots of aims, everyone will want a presence on your website's homepage, to make sure that campaigns, fundraising, volunteering and other important information all get a fair and equal exposure. Unfortunately, this leads to a cluttered and confusing experience for the visitor, and anyway, according to our own statistics, around 80% of visitors arrive at websites from search engines and may never visit a company's homepage.
Remember your piece of paper with your three reasons and goals? Use it to tidy up your homepage.
Emphasise impact in your articles in terms your reader understands
Your text needs to say "I'm talking to you and this is what I want you to do". Write in a journalistic style and consider:
- what is it that interests people coming to your site?
- what are your organisation's effects on real people?
Write your articles with the biggest impact - start with the action you took or the result it had, for example "new cases of HIV reduced dramatically over the first twelve months of our new sexual health awareness programme".
The headline above is factual, but not very interesting.
This article has more impact as it details the effects on real people.
This third extract has the most impact as it refers to a specific individual and the effects on her. It also makes reference to specific measurements relevant to the intended audience (in this case the term "south of the river").
Optimise your pages for search engines
Search optimisation companies will promise to get you on the front page of Google search results, but there is no substitute for good, well-written, relevant content.
Relevent content helped get the Lesbian & Gay Foundation, a medium-sized, Manchester-based sexual health charity, onto the first page of Google search results for the term "lesbian" - quite a popular term on the Internet with over 157 million other results. This was done purely by writing relevant content of interest to lesbians including health guides, linking to websites and writing up relevant news stories.
Here's what you need to do get the best out of a search result from Google and to tempt a potential visitor to click through to your site.
Give your page an appropriate page title.
Google shows the page title as the main clickable link in search results. Explain, as simply and briefly as possible what the user can expect to see at the end of their click.
Example: "Example Charity: relieving poverty and homelessness in London since 1830" looks better than "Welcome to Example Charity".
Give your page a short description.
Many search engines allow a short description to be displayed in results Again, summarise your page into one or two short sentences, placing the most important information at the beginning of the sentence and reinforce the key theme of your page by using key words and phrases.
If you don't specify a description, search engines will often dislay some random text, may be less persuasive and may lose you some potential visitors.
Use plain english URLs.
Search engines often display the destination page URL. If you have control over how your pages are saved, give them sensible names. It doesn't matter if the address gets long - most people will be clicking on a link rather than typing it out.
Example: www.example.com/how-to-find-us/ looks better than www.example.com/findus
Tailor your email newsletter
One of your website goals should be to engage people who want to interact with you, and to start a relationship with a view to converting visitors into activists, volunteers, donors or members. In marketing speak, this is called "qualifying a lead".
People who have been interested enough to browse your website may sign up for a newsletter so they can be kept informed of your activities. This is a clear indication of the desire to start a dialogue or a relationship with your organisation and are the sort of people who will likely engage with you in the future and may become donors.
Tip: Don't tell people what you do, tell them how you're meeting their needs.
It's important to make sure your emails are also relevant. Many people are inundated with emails and will often delete messages which are not useful. These people will get into a habit of deleting emails without reading them if they have not been relevant in the past. At worst, they will click an "unsubscribe" link in your email and you will lose them.
Tip: make your subject line relevant
If you're a keen cyclist "Win more races in record time" will have more impact as a subject line than "New, lighter, more aerodynamic frame technology released"
Email communications are still very effective and when integrated with other communications, and is so cheap to manage as opposed to printed materials such as brochures, leaflets and reports.
Mailing list management software is freely available on the Internet, with inexpensive professional products also available. ngo media's list software cost £160 plus someone to install it, yet people sign up every day, because the stuff is constantly written with the user in mind.
Some mailing list software allows you to track your campaigns - how many people clicked on te links in your email, how many people actually opened your email etc. If you create special "landing pages" on your website for newsletter items, you can even use your website analytics to track the success of your campaigns.
Optimise your donation pages
Getting a visitor to click on a "donate now" button is not the end of the process, but rather an expression of interest in the possiblity of making a donation. To convert a casual browser into a donor at this point, it's important to:
- make the content as persuasive as possible
- make the process of making a payment as easy as possble
If you're giving options for specific amounts to donate, aim high.Offer an easily affordable amount for those who want to give but don't want to committ too much, but also offer higher amounts for any major donors who mightbe browsing. Offering a free-text "other" box also allows the freedom of specifyingsomething different.
If possible, your amounts should indicate what specific benefits their money will provide, e.g "£10 buys text books for 3 orphans". This will also help you measure your achievement in real terms, e.g. your annual report can state that you raised "the equivalent of 6000 books for orphans".
Tip: Offer at least three donation values
Many donors may opt for a higher amount if the lowest options seems too low.
Think about Amazon's website. When you click from your basket to make a purchase, all distractions such as navigation buttons are removed from the page design, and the linear, step-by-step checkout and payment process is made explicit. It's very difficult to return to browse Amazon from these pages, and it's difficult to abandon your purchase due to frustration at hidden steps and additional information needed. The main goal is to close the deal, to secure the purchase.
Make the best use of your "thank you" page
Once the donation has been made, many organisations will return the user to the homepage, or display a brief message such as "Thank you for your donation. Your payment is being processed". This hardly seems worthy of the gesture that's just been made.
Take the opportunity to reinforce how the money will be spent, what the results will be on real lives, and how people's lives will be improved because of that donation.
If you want more out of your new donor, why not pepper the thank you page with other calls to action? After all, they've already displayed a level of commitment to your cause. These could include:
- Offer opportunities for getting involved in volunteering;
- provide links to online tools to help them champion your cause or spread the word;
- ask if they want to receive special donor updates by email, to show how donations have led to new initiatives.
Questions from the floor
Where do you get email lists?
Gideon: Building a list is better than buying one, but takes longer. Purchased lists are often untargeted and will have less effect than building a list from people on your site who hve expressed a direct interest in your organisation through subscribing to a newsletter, commenting on a story or submitting a feedback form.
We're a small organisation with no web staff and a small budget - what one key piece of advice would you give to improve our website?
Matt: Think like the BBC, who often deliver an idea or a format rather than a single product. "The Weakest Link" for example, will be a TV show, a website and any number of other media, each delivering a unique experience. Think about what "platform" can best achieve your aims - what should go on your website, in an email, in a leaflet, on a social networking site etc.
Gideon: Write one page summarising your most important information into a top 10 tips style page. The keywords used will all be relevant to your organisation and to your users and will help your search engine rankings. People interested in your organisation will find this one page easier and may browse the rest of your site.
