How to build a Charity website Part 1.

How Charities differ from the Corporate Business

  • Charities sometimes have a fixed budget.
  • Charities may not have full-time employed web developers, marketers, usability/e-commerce consultants or any other web-specialists.
  • Charities may not have the funds or money to hire web developers or consultants.
  • Charities do not sell just products or services - they want to accept or receive donations.
  • Charities need to provide a service to real people via the web, who currently aren't able to give anything back in return.

Based on the above, Charities are sometimes unable to accept donations via their website. Also, their websites are sometimes not promoted or marketed well via the Internet.

Planning a Charity website

A website needs to define their business objectives and design their website around the goals that they seek to achieve. A Not for Profit or Charity needs to establish who they want to reach out to, and so it is imperative that you/they identify the demographics.

A key point to remember is what the Charity cause is. The greater the cause, the better people relate to it and so the easier it is to promote and market the charity website. Based on this, the charity should build an online community on the charity's cause and have a forum and blog as Online tools to spread their message.

However, before the forum is added to the website, the website needs to offer something of real interest to
the visitors. Not just an online form to donate money. That's why it is essential for the Charity website to have leading quality content. This content is key as it will attract website visitors to the website ongoing. Charity websites need content that will provide valuable and helpful information to everyone who visits the website.

Here are a couple of examples of communities and content types a charity site can build:

  • A website for the Medical profession to discuss their topics. Or a website for the Scientific field to discuss possible advancements etc.
  • A directory of websites, information and resources that are related to the Charity such as Research Institutes, Hospitals/Clinics and other similar charities etc.
  • A website where people can communicate and arrange local meetings.
  • A website that lists interesting research papers on the Charity topic.
  • A blog, which discusses various aspects of the Charity topic. Or a blog that publishes all the latest news and rumours within in the Charity sector.
  • A blog that lists a collection of success stories, where donations received have helped achieve something.
  • A directory of organisations that support the Charity
  • A classifieds section on the website
  • Advertisements of products or services, aimed at those who are affected by the charity topic.

Other Things to do.

Inform your audience and let them know who the people are behind the Charity such as Management, Volunteers and Trustees. Tell your audience what they do, why they joined, and what their goals are for the Charity. Share their dreams.

Make it easy for people to be responsive and interact with the Charity's website.

If there are ways that people can help, let them know what they need to do, and give them some idea of the impact that their help will have.

If getting volunteers is a goal of the website, make it clear how people can contact the right person, and what they might do during their time.

If the charity aims at raising awareness of an issue, consider creating ebooks or videos or helpful resources that can be shared freely.

Make buttons that website visitors can add to their websites which link back to your information pages.

If donations make a difference, make it easy for people to donate, and let them know how much of an impact their donations will have.

Tell the story

If the charity is established, and has a long or interesting history then make sure you tell the story. Let people know who they are working with, what the organisation has accomplished in the past, and what its goals are for the future. Keep people informed of the initiatives the group is undertaking, and news about goals achieved. You want people thinking that your charity is an active organisation, which makes a difference,
and can make even more of a difference with their help and input.

Having interesting and valuable content on your website should make your charity website not only a resource on charity specific information and the cause, but will also help you build more trust with your potential sponsors.

How to develop the charity website

Special attention should be given to slowly develop a working, stable and scalable website. And from my work experience, Drupal seems to be the tool for building such websites. A Drupal developer can set-up the website and you only pay for the installation and website customisation and not for the Content Management System or Template design.

CivicSpace is a specialised version of Drupal that has been developed to be helpful and useful to non-profit organisations and charities. If you have or can obtain the technical skills to install Drupal, you should be able to handle installing the CivicSpace version. They will install, create themes, and even host websites at affordable rates.

Note: You should make sure that you reference check and like the work of the web designer before you employ or hire them. Just as you get bad builders, you can get bad website designers.

Now that we have our platform to build our charity website we now need to find our forum software. And the one that stands out is in my opinion vBulletin. I prefer vBulletin on a website as it offers nice features, loads fast and offers plugins (alike Wordpress) such as vbSEO to make your website search-engine friendly - which is imperative if you want your website found.

Content.. Content.. Content.. Content..

Now that we have a website, we need to create and populate the website with quality content. Creating 50-100 informative and educational articles will be enough to start promoting and marketing the website.

Set up and create a blog and forum immediately will be helpful, as this will allow and help you to convert the early website visitors to becoming constant, regular visitors and create your online community. And you will be able to build strong friendly relationships. Do not begin promoting or advertising anything on your website at the start. Let your website develop and mature so that it gains repeat visitors.  Once that is achieved
the website will be ready to advertise the products and service your online community requires.

Optimising your Charity website

Overall to successfully attract donations, you will need to ensure your website works effectively. This is where you will need to adopt and use SEO services. I will be providing more detailed information on this shortly.  However, the key goal of improving your website is to ensure that every website visitor will eventually be interested in donating to your charity's cause. To achieve this you will always need to:

  • Improve the website usability
  • Optimise the website speed
  • Improve website accessibility (this is a legal requirement within the UK)
  • Format the content properly, so that it is found and understood
  • Develop a solid internal linking structure/mapping



    The higher the quality backlinks that are linked to your website, the more credibility your website will have “in the eyes” and “opinions” of the search engines. Thereafter, the more credibility your website has, the higher the probability and likelihood your search engine page ranking will continue to increase.
     
Promoting a charity website

  • Now that you have a website with quality content, you can start promoting and marketing it. Put simply this means that you inform all the potentially interested parties that you are online and that they should spread the word about you. How you can do this is by:
  • Getting mentioned on industry/charity specific Institutes websites.
  • Participate on industry/charity specific Forums and Blogs.
  • Find other industry/charity specific blogs and tell them about your organisation and Charity cause.
  • Find other websites, which sell products or provide services, related to your Charity cause. Tell them about your website and charity cause and find ways to cooperate and create joint ventures etc.
  • Find local bloggers and find ways to cooperate and create joint ventures with them.
  • Finally, send interesting press releases about your organisation and its achievements. It is likely to be picked up, the more interesting your news is. So cooperate fully with local newspapers and local media types such as TV and Radio stations.
  • Additionally, there are loads of online directories that are specifically for charitable organisations and volunteer opportunities. It is worth finding these websites directories and submitting your contact information about your organisation to them. These are often free to join and create a Charity profile page or an "add a link" to/from other similar charity websites.
  • Include your charity website address on your charity letterhead, brochures, posters, business cards, and other marketing materials.
  • If your charity's message can be best captured effectively with photographs, then consider submitting images to photosharing sites such as Flickr.

Conclusion

There are numerous opportunities on how to improve and promote your charity and website. In order to do this, you need to provide real value to the website visitor who are interested in your cause and to communicate by building online relationships and cooperating with them.

To read our other page on how to build and create a Charity website Part 2 then click here