Your nonprofit’s website is your supporters’ go-to place for organizational updates, information about your programs, and news about upcoming fundraisers. Whether you’re planning a charity gala or a shoe drive fundraiser, your website will have a huge impact on your success. If your website isn’t intuitive or organized, you could miss valuable opportunities to connect with donors and drive support for your mission.
Profitable fundraisers rely on effective marketing, and your website is vital. To optimize your website for marketing your next fundraiser and beyond, use these tips:
We’ll detail these web design strategies and how they can help you better promote your fundraisers. As we dive in, consider reflecting on how your nonprofit’s website currently measures up to see where you can improve.
1. Intentionally design your fundraising campaign page.
This is the main page you’ll direct supporters to during your campaign, so ensure its design works in your favor. Every page element should connect supporters with your fundraiser and lead them to action. This includes putting thought behind your:
- Visuals: Be selective about the images or videos you include on your campaign page, and don’t go overboard. Each visual should serve a purpose, such as eliciting a positive emotional response that makes visitors want to donate or explaining how a shoe drive fundraiser works.
- Text: Your campaign page should balance between visuals and text that work together to get your message across. Use storytelling to emphasize the fundraiser’s impact on your mission. Stick to the most important information here, like why you’re raising money, how to donate, and how much progress you’ve made.
- CTAs: Write clear calls to action (CTAs) that make it easy for donors to take the next step. For example, if you’re running an eCard fundraising campaign that lets supporters send someone a Valentine’s Day card when they donate, you might add a large button that reads “Donate & Spread the Love.”
- Links: Put yourself in your website visitors’ shoes. Aside from your donation page, what other pages would they want to visit? This could include an event registration page, an informational blog post, or a signup form for your mailing list.
When in doubt, look at what’s working well for other nonprofits. Kanopi’s analysis of the best nonprofit websites highlights successful campaign page tactics like using uncluttered design and well-placed, eye-catching CTA buttons.
2. Optimize your website for mobile devices.
All the work you put into your campaign page won’t make a difference if your website isn’t optimized for mobile. Any promotion you do for your fundraiser via email, social media, and text will lead donors to your website from their phones.
To engage with these mobile visitors, you need to align your website with your marketing strategy by creating mobile-responsive pages. This process could look like this:
- Making sure your website’s formatting automatically resizes to fit the size of each user’s device.
- Improving load speeds so visitors can access your website quickly.
- Designing new pages with mobile users in mind and catering to their experience.
These strategies can not only increase engagement with your website, but they can also directly lead to more donations. According to 360MatchPro’s fundraising statistics, donation pages optimized for mobile yield 34% more contributions on average than pages that aren’t.
3. Improve user experience.
Improving user experience (UX) goes hand in hand with mobile optimization. Broadly, UX refers to how visitors navigate and engage with your website. Do they leave the site after visiting one page? Do they arrive on your homepage looking for information about how to get involved, only to end up confused by your navigation bar? Or do they quickly get the necessary information and stick around for more?
For nonprofits, improving UX is especially beneficial. Good UX leads to lower bounce rates, higher conversion rates, and better online relationships with your supporters. Using user-focused design, you’re showing donors that you value their time and want to engage with them online.
Follow these UX best practices to improve your website’s design:
- Focus on making your site easy to use. On your donation page, this could look like limiting the number of fields donors must fill out and including a one-click checkbox to make their contribution recurring.
- Prioritize accessibility. Along with optimizing for mobile, you can make your site more accessible by avoiding complex, industry-specific, or technical language, adding alt text to images, and putting captions on videos.
- Always provide clear next actions. Use CTAs often, and don’t make supporters hunt down any information or next steps. For example, on a campaign page for an online event, you could give straightforward instructions for downloading your event platform or app and provide a download link.
Ideally, you should aim to improve UX across your entire website to provide clear user pathways for visitors. If you’re short on time for promoting your current fundraiser, focus your efforts on optimizing your campaign and donation pages.
4. Leverage social media integrations.
Your CMS likely includes several options for social media integrations that can help you spread awareness of your fundraiser. Adding these tools to your website can make your marketing strategy more cohesive and drive traffic to your social media accounts:
- Social sharing buttons: Add buttons to essential pages on your website that let supporters post a message about your nonprofit to their Instagram Stories or Facebook profiles. Supporters can share that they donated, invite friends to register for events, or share blog posts about your cause.
- Live social media feeds: You can embed a social media feed into your site to display your most recent posts automatically. For example, a Twitter feed on your campaign page could display all the latest updates about fundraising progress and upcoming events.
- Social media menu: A social media menu is a menu of links to all of your organization’s social media profiles. Add this to your campaign page or your website’s navigation bar so users can easily find your accounts anytime.
If you decide to take advantage of any or all of these integrations, adapt your social media strategy to take them into account. For example, when creating new social media content, consider how it’ll appear on your website’s social media feed and how it’ll drive donations on your campaign page.
5. Promote matching gifts.
Amplify your fundraiser’s results by spreading the word about matching gifts on your nonprofit website. You’ll not only be able to generate more revenue, but you may also encourage more people to contribute. In fact, 84% of donors indicate that they’re more likely to give if their donation will be matched, and 1 in 3 would give a larger amount as well.
There are several basic ways you can highlight matching gifts on your website, such as:
- Creating a page dedicated to matching gifts. Many donors may be unaware of matching gift programs and unfamiliar with how the process works. To make it easy for them to get involved, provide a matching gifts resource to your website visitors. On this page, you can include a brief introduction to the corporate giving opportunity, along with how they can amplify the impact of donors’ gifts.
- Include CTAs on relevant pages. Catch visitors’ attention by adding CTAs to your matching gift page on areas of your website such as relevant blog posts. This can compel your supporters to learn more about these programs and contribute even more toward the success of your fundraiser.
- Add a matching gift search tool to your donation page. It’s one thing to know about matching gift programs. It’s another to understand whether or not your employer has one. Therefore, empower more donors to support your fundraiser with matching gifts by including a search tool right on your donation page. This way, they can easily find programs that they’re eligible for and submit a matching gift request.
In addition to your website, you can send out email newsletters and put together social media posts that spread awareness about matching gift opportunities. This can broaden your fundraiser’s reach and inspire more people to get involved.
As you implement these strategies, don’t forget to update your website often to reflect any changes. Keep fundraising progress and goals up to date, and use data like click-through rates and referral traffic to inform and update your web design strategy as needed. With these proactive, user-focused strategies, you’ll attract new donors for your campaign in no time!
