By Lizzy Berryman
Running a nonprofit can be hard. There are challenges of budget and of message. It can be difficult to allocate resources effectively, organize volunteers, and to reach key audiences.
Simply staying on timelines and goals can be a huge effort. Many believe that adding changing digital technologies to the mix can just become overwhelming hassle, but it doesn’t have to be. These days, building and maintaining a digital presence through a website and social media platforms is not only necessary, they are also critical tools that can be used to engage audiences and communicate your work in new and interesting ways.
The first thing to think about when building a digital strategy is to really reflect on the reasons someone would want go to your site. While this may seem obvious really think about it, what kind of content do you provide that is wholly different or fresh that your audience can’t get somewhere else? How can you position the site as different from others? Most nonprofits visitors either want to know about the work of the nonprofit or they want to participate by donating, signing a petition, etc. To get your audience coming back, you need to make your work and your calls to action clear and easy to navigate. The way to do that is by having great content (usually though multimedia), good storytelling, and strategic and customized use of social media.
In no particular order, here are three main things we found really helpful to think about while tinkering with a nonprofit site at Asia Catalyst.
Great stories and content (including multimedia storytelling) are key.
All sites need great stories and content to make visitors stay on the page and to entice them to return. Do you have video of your work? Put it in your blog like Refugees International did here. It is great that you can view all the videos together or regionally. If video editing is way out of your reach perhaps photo slideshow like World Vision can dynamically tell your story. This isn’t just a gimmick. Telling your story through images can often help your viewers to greater understanding of your work. Here at Asia Catalyst we plan to continue to add pictures and video to tell the stories of our great partners at work in the field and to bring these stories to life.
Plain calls to action help guide a viewer.
Visitors often come to sites looking for information or ways to get involved with the work. Make these different points of contact clearly available on your site like PowerShift here. In one fell swoop you can watch video, add your voice to growing interactive maps, or sign the pledge. All viewers are automatically drawn to the calls to action. It makes a real difference to include a call to action: ask people to learn more about your work, or stay in touch using your newsletter or email. You can do that with Asia Catalyst here. Of course, never lose a chance to ask people to donate.
Smart and sensible social sharing help magnify the voice.
Viewer and visitors are great for a website but in the land of social media these supporters can also become actors and promoters of the site. Our Facebook page (accessible from the top right of our site) aims to do this as it pulls together our newest reports and analysis from the blog and stories that we think are important. Putting our stories on more platforms magnifies our views and our voice and allows our audience to interact with us more. We are looking for even more interaction and hope that our page can become a place to start conversations.
We ultimately decided against an organizational Twitter account and instead use that of our Executive Director, to respond to important news using a more interesting and personal voice.
Remember that while a well-organized and clear site can guide people through your work–it sends your content out into the world and allows users to share the information with even more people. The easier it is to share your content, the easier it is for others to forward your work to other individuals, organizations, and email lists, as well as followers or friends.
Let us know what you think of our new site and share with us what has worked for your online presence. Tweet us here, like us here, or get on our lists here.
