How to build a Charity website Part 2.

Why and what you should include within your Online Shop.
The days of finding either cheap or cut-price goods at charity shops could soon be coming to an end as the sophisticated Charity retailers increasingly use the internet to boost their sales.
Online sales of second-hand goods from charity shops have increased rapidly over the last 12-18 months and are expected to increase furthermore.
Source: Charity Retail Association.
Charity shops readily admit that they regularly use eBay in an attempt to reach- out to a bigger, wider audience to achieve the highest price possible for their merchandise.
The vast majority of these charities also said that they predict their sales from the internet to increase over the next few years.
The website usually used is eBay, which apparently is used by 94 per cent of all charities selling online. This also includes 31 per cent of charities who sell items on their own websites.
Ebay said that UK charities raised £4.6m in 2010 by selling goods on the web – which is a 123% increase since 2011.
The survey of 4,000 charity shops found that 76 per cent of the charities’ online sales come from eBay, compared with 60 per cent in 2010.
Charities reported higher proportions of sales coming from online trading. 25% of charities who were trading online said that it made up between 3-5 per cent of their sales. Only 9% of charities reported this to be the case during the 2010 survey.
Nearly 90% of charities said they expected sales to increase, while more than half of these expected them to increase considerably.
The factors that prevent charities from selling more online were not having the appropriately trained staff with the necessary IT skills and not having the necessary ICT equipment to sell online.  66% of the charities also said that they find it hard to fulfill online orders efficiently.
So when creating an online shop for your Charity, there are 5 important things for you to remember.
Try and make it easy
Nearly all charities obviously run all sort of events, not just fundraising events. It may be a gala show, a music concert, a poker/casino night or a charity football match. Based on this and to get maximum reward and return on this, it is useful to offer tickets to attend these events via your website, especially if you can integrate this process within your online shop.  This will allow users to order a ticket to an event and place it in their shopping basket, as well other products, and perhaps even during the buying process make a donation to your charity just like ebay offers. This is very helpful when it comes to cross-selling all your products and services to raise vital funds.
Finding the RIGHT products to sell
Your merchandise and promotional items should also be sold on your website rather than just in your shop/a, local fairs or events. Sell these via your website as well, and approach other promotional companies that may be willing to re-brand  their products with your charity logo displayed. Brand exposure is GOOD.
Create a deal and add this to your IT or web-based system, so that when a website visitor makes an order and buys something via your website, a notification is sent to the supplier so that it can be drop shipped. This allows you to keep your investment in stock levels to a minimum and so your cash is spent in other areas rather than on Diaries and Calendars that are out of date. Ensure you have a sound service level agreement, as it is your reputation that will be affected if they fail to deliver and the order is urgent for a person’s birthday for example.
Put your second hand items from physical shops ONLINE
The objective of charity is so that people who want to give, can give. This is where you can potentially make your online shop really work and deliver for you. Ask your shop and other branches to add their items to the website. Enabling the website to list and offer all the items they have received and been donated to their shop. This allows anyone looking on their website to check what is in stock and perhaps visit the shop to buy it.  
Encourage donations throughout the entire shopping process
The objective of a charity is to receive and raise as much funds as possible. Therefore it is important to make it as easy for website visitors to make or add a donation to their order via the website and during the shopping process. One way to do this is to insert a text field for them to enter a donation amount, both at their basket and at checkout. And just like Argos offer when buying something, they give the buyer the opportunity to add a little extra to their final purchase value. For example, if the total is £7.99 then click the check box to round the order value to £10.00. That’s an extra £2.01 that has been donated you didn’t have before.
Make the most of your payment gateway
If you have an online shop within your website, then the chances are, you have paid for this item using a payment gateway such as Paypal or Worldpay. Based on this, and if you have it integrated within your website then it is an ideal opportunity to offer more of your services that require payment, such as:
·        Online donations
·        Supporter events
·        Fundraising pages (such as Just Giving and Virgin Moneygiving), so your supporters/fundraisers can create their own fundraising pages with targets and running totals.
You’ve done everything you can to get potential buyers to your website and then one day someone buys and submits their payment details.
What if there was a way to get more from this customer? What if this one order could give you more in RoI than a pay per click campaign?
When you are selling offline you get to meet everyone face to face.
In the e-commerce world, nearly everyone initially is an unknown at first. In fact, it could be anyone who has just placed an order via your website. But if the person’s name is David Beckham it suggests that this person could actually be a very important celebrity or sadly a bogus purchase.
Regardless of who it is, your first order is always precious, as are all other orders, so ensure you treat them like a celebrity or royalty. Not just because their name is David Beckham.
Always start as you mean to go on and you won’t do too much wrong..
- Reassure the user /website visitor that their order has been processed successfully. Email them an invoice and contact details on how they can make contact should they need to. Enclose a hyperlink to your FAQ or Help section on your website, should they need it and to reassure them the opportunity is there.
- Communicate and let them know via email every time there has been a change in their order process/status. Whether their items are being picked or dispatched to them, it is important to let them know about their order progress.
Additionally, there are other things you can do to add value to their shopping experience and try and impress them:
- Upgrade their 1st order to priority/next day delivery and let them know you have done this.
- Enclose a free promotional gift. Anything, such as a bag of sweets, but the more thought on this the better. For example, something for a woman, when the order was placed by a man isn’t that helpful to them. Or perhaps you either.
- This may seem old fashioned !! But call them to ensure they are 100% happy. Remember, a happy customer stays a customer. And respond and reply immediately to any contact the customer has made, whether phone call or email. An online sales chat platform is also a helpful tool for your website.
Try and follow all the above and every so often you will have a customer that is so satisfied they will tell their friends via world of mouth and maybe even tweet about you. All these efforts snowballs, until one day you have not just one order, but more than you can hopefully deal with.
Other tips to make your charity website more successful
With over 180,000 UK charities all competing to inform the world of their worthy causes, raise funds online and build support, it can be difficult for a charity to get noticed. There are a few things you can do to your current website to help raise your profile and make it as easy as possible for your supporters to find you and engage.
Attract more visitors
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the art of building, or tweaking a website to improve your search engine ranking and attract the supporters who are interested in your charity. There are many aspects to SEO and it can quickly become complicated, or look harder than it is, but there are a few simple techniques that everybody can use.
Identify key searchterms
The first thing to do is to identify the key searchterms to target. More specific searchterms are often less competitive and bring in visitors with a better idea of what they are looking for. For example, target the term ‘Cancer charity’ and you'll find yourself competing with thousands of other Charity web sites; refine your term to ‘Male Cancer’ and you'll find not only that there are fewer sites competing for the term, but also that the website visitors finding your website using this searchterm have a clearer idea of what they are looking for.
Include good page titles and descriptions
Very often, page titles and descriptions are overlooked and pages will be given short titles such as 'Home'. Using your key searchterms in a page's title and then repeating these in a short description will have a positive effect on your search engine ranking.
Headings, links and content
Think about how you word headings, links and content to be more relevant and specific to your subject and remember to use your key searchterms.


Write and create readable content
When optimising your website for search engines, a mistake that many people make is to saturate and over populate their website content with key search terms and forget that their content should primarily be written for people to read - easily. When writing content, it is important to keep a balance between ensuring that the search engines rank you highly but also provide interesting and readable content for your website visitors. And they don’t feel bombarded with sales content, but are happy to revisit your website as the content was helpful and interesting to read.
Lead them through the site – holding hands.
What do you want your visitors to do once on your website? A common mistake to make is drawing too much attention to every piece of content on your website. This just creates a busy – busy looking website that will annoy your site visitors and leave them going around in circles. In order to avoid this, choose no more than 3 things you would like your visitors to achieve on your website, whether it’s donating money to your cause, reading your blog for insights and charity updates or to make contact and have easy to read and see links so that these actions stand out on all the relevant pages. As long as your website is easy to navigate and your content is well written and presented, they should be able to find out everything they need to know or what to find out on their own.
Establish credibility
With so many websites around, it is important to convince visitors that you are a legitimate charity. To convince them of your legitimacy, supply a business address, contact details, regularly updated content of what the charity is currently doing and make good use of design.
Help your supporters to get involved
Use your website to encourage your supporters and potential supporters/fundraisers to get involved in any upcoming events or to help raise awareness of your Charity’s cause. You can build a profile of your volunteers and add photos of your supporters/volunteers who have got involved in previous fundraising events.
And also provide details and information on how supporters and volunteers can get involved within their area. Add a webpage where you can collect email addresses (use Mailchimp) to build a mailing list ongoing so you can send pre-designed e-newsletters to inform people about news and events.

To read our other page on how to build and create a Charity website Part 3 then please click here

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