Welcome back to our two-part series on nonprofit website best practices. In the first part, we covered powerful storytelling and design, clear calls to action, user-friendly navigation, and accessibility capabilities. Those were all about the user experience. Now it’s time to talk about ways to make your website work for you.
SEO
Ah, SEO. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot but not always a word people understand. So let’s dig in a bit.
SEO = search engine optimization. SEO helps your audience find you when they conduct a search on a search engine such as Google or Bing. It’s one of the best marketing tools available to organizations, and often one of the most overlooked. And two of the easiest ways to enhance your nonprofit website’s SEO? Blogs and FAQs.
FAQs allow you to answer questions that commonly arise among those who benefit from your organization’s programs and services. These might include addressing concerns, providing guidance on how to get involved, how to advocate for your organization, and resolving misconceptions of what you do and don’t do. FAQs are just as useful to your internal team as they are to the outside user because they create a standard source of truth to refer back to.
Bonus: let’s say you use a phrase that is commonly input into a search engine as your frequently asked question. Ding ding! The search engine may pick up on it and say, “Aha, here’s a source I can send to the searcher!” You can also use your FAQs as a way to answer commonly asked questions succinctly, while directing the user to a page that has more information — such as a blog.
When it comes to blogging, showcase your credibility and authority by sharing your knowledge, especially if it’s a topic that comes up often. Bonus: this has the added benefit of demonstrating your capability to solve a problem for the user, making them more likely to engage in your services or partner with you. You can also use blogs as a way to showcase success stories, demonstrate your impact, and highlight industry trends. All of these are designed to engage the reader and serve as a proof point that your organization is credible and truly making an impact.
Not sure what questions to include in your FAQs or topics to tackle in your blog? Ask your team what questions and topics they get asked about most frequently, refer to your analytics to see what search phrases are being input (more on this shortly), and explore your brand pillars and content marketing strategy for ideas.
Consent
It might feel like any time you visit a website these days, all you do these days is accept cookies and they’re not even of the munchy kind. But there’s a reason their presence is ever-growing. Cookies let websites remember you, your login, your preferences, your shopping cart, and more. While they’re used to improve and personalize your browsing experience, they can also be a goldmine of private information in the wrong hands.
Enter the privacy and cookie consent policies. By outlining your organization’s policies, you are detailing exactly how one’s information is being used by your nonprofit website and your organization. For example, if you ask users to subscribe to your email newsletter, you’re now capturing their email address and any other information you collected as part of the subscription form. A privacy policy gives you an opportunity to explain the purpose behind collecting their data while promoting a sense of trust that your organization will handle their information responsibly.
Other ways privacy policies come in handy: if someone registers for an event, a privacy policy can detail whether or not they’re automatically added to your mailing list for fundraising purposes. Share data with any third parties? Another thing to include in your privacy policy. What about who actually has access to their information? Yep, also belongs in your privacy policy. There are myriad ways in which users’ data can be used, so privacy policies and cookie consent policies are the best way to get ahead of that and ensure that you’re in compliance with national and international regulations such as GPDR, CCPA, CalOPPA.
The tricky part is we’re not all lawyers. Fortunately, there are multiple sources you can turn to for help. At Sunny Side Creative, we particularly like Termageddon though we know others are fans of Termly, Termsfeed, and more.
Make sure that your privacy policy and any other consent-based policies are easily accessible on your website. And whatever privacy policy generator you opt to use, make sure that it’s one that will update automatically to remain in compliance with current laws and new ones as they become regulation.
Analytics
If you don’t have a way of measuring what happens on your website, it becomes difficult to make informed, data-based decisions on how to make your website more actionable for users. For example, how many visitors are taking action to make a donation? Registering for an event? Applying to volunteer? If you don’t know, you can’t optimize your site to increase conversions!
Website analytics can help you identify where to refine and tweak your copy, enhance your SEO strategy, and adjust your design or calls to action. They provide a clear outlook on which content is performing best and what strategies are working for your site. That’s because analytics often measure the following factors:
- Overall website traffic
- Where your traffic is coming from (search engines? Emails? Social media?)
- Traffic on individual pages
- The number of converted leads (ie. people who are taking the desired action)
- Where your visitors are coming from, location-wise
- Demographics about your visitors
- Whether your traffic is coming from mobile or desktop
The most popular source for website analytics is Google Analytics (GA4), as its features are robust and best of all, free. You can use its built-in dashboard to identify low-performing pages, see what’s making high-performing pages work, and much, much more. Not to mention, it’s cool to see the details about who is visiting your nonprofit website and what actions they’re taking!
One other thing that makes analytics very useful: you can see what search terms users are using that lead them to your site. Take those phrases and use them as keywords within your page copy, as an FAQ, or a blog topic. It’s a sure fire way to maximize your SEO efforts and has the data to back it up.
And that’s it! While this is in no means a complete guide to what a nonprofit website should include, we’ve hit the highlights. Stay tuned for more blogs on this topic in the future — and if you need help with your website, let’s talk!
