Web Marketing For Charities

Web Marketing for Charities

The web presents a unique set of challenges for charities and not-for-profit organisations. The established web marketing industry has been built around a model of making a profit through selling goods and services, rather than bringing in donations and raising awareness.

But the web also presents a great opportunity for charities. In many ways the web - with its communities of shared interest, free information resources and interactivity - reflects the philosophy of not-for-profit organisations even more than commercial businesses.

In this guide, we use examples from some of the charities we've worked with - as well as some best-practice examples from charities we feel use the web well - to show how your organisation can make a positive impact online.

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What are charities "selling"?

Before embarking on a web marketing campaign, its important to establish what your charities goals are. Only be fully understanding what you want to achieve can the results be measured and the effectiveness of your work monitored and improved.

Some of the broader goals for not-for-profit organisations might be:

  • Raising funds
  • Raising awareness
  • Improving engagement
  • Educating
  • Attracting and motivating volunteers
  • Attracting membership
  • Providing support

Of course, with all these goals you will need to narrow down the broad terms to specifics that can be measured. For instance, if you are trying to raise funds, set a target, tie fundraising in with specific projects or specific campaigns, set goals for each and every avenue of fundraising whether its targeted emails, online donation forms or bringing in members etc.

Then you can really measure the effectiveness of all your online marketing work, allowing you to grow those that are working and change those that aren't.

In many ways, all these broader goals are inter-linked - a well-co-ordinated web marketing campaign will address all of these issues (and more). Raising funds will be much easier if you raise awareness, improve engagement and attract members, and improving engagement can only help you in your goals of educating the public and attracting volunteers.

We'll now look at some strategies for achieving these goals.

Charity Websites

Your website should be the centrepoint of all your online marketing work. This is the online representation of your whole organisation.It is a volunteer, a fundraiser, a charity worker, a receptionist, a spokesperson, a meeting room, a library, a collection box, a guide, a trustee - and more.

All your online marketing, and much of your offline marketing, will be channelled, measured and co-ordinated through your website. As such you need to make sure it is fit for purpose.

We can't overstate the importance of making sure you have clearly defined roles - job specs if you like - for your website. Look at it a virtual employee, or employees, and invest the same level of time and effort into your website's "career development" as you would for your staff.

It's vital to keep your website up-to-date and relevant. If you are launching a focussed charity campaign, ensure your website is flexible enough to support the traffic that will inevitably be driven to the site as a result. For instance, can you create a campaign-branded page, or even mini-site, within your website? Are you able to have a campaign-specific donation facility?

We recently developed the website for the Friends of Westonbirt Arboretum. One of the key aims of this site was to encourage membership sign-up and renewal - not just to attract new members and funds, but also to reduce time staff spent on admin.

It wasn't simply a case of creating a sign-up application on the site, but also promoting the new service online and offline, engaging with volunteers and members to ensure the system worked the way they expected it to, and measuring, tweaking and developing the application in response to feedback and user data.

The result of this holistic engagement with the charity's aims has been record numbers of online membership sign-ups and renewals, and a considerable easing of time pressure on volunteers and staff managing membership.

Social Media for Charities

Social media – done well – is a highly effective marketing and communication tool, and for charities, perhaps more so than for most.

What’s the big appeal for charities? Well, it ticks the following boxes:

  • It can be done by volunteers (with guidance)
  • It doesn’t have to take much time
  • It requires sign-up so your message is going out to people who already buy into your aims
  • It creates engagement and discussion among supporters – helping to highlight issues
  • It’s a cost-effective way of co-ordinating and informing volunteers, fundraisers etc
  • It can generate real-time calls to action

Where it’s done well, it can generate immediate and significant rewards. We’ve mentioned elsewhere how well we feel the National Trust uses Twitter.

By using it regularly to provide useful information to followers, they have built up a significant – and loyal – enough following to enable them to use Twitter as a powerful fundraising tool.

Following 2009's floods in Cumbria, a number of National Trust properties in the region were badly damaged. On the same day that the damage was being assessed, the National Trust used Twitter to launch an appeal for funds to help repair the damage.

Within just a few hours, several thousand pounds had been donated solely by their followers on Twitter.

The increasing power and importance of social media for charity fundraising was ably demonstrated by the recent Haiti earthquake.

In less than 48 hours, the American Red Cross received more than $35m in donations - including $8m directly from texts - as the result of its Twitter appeal. Social media alone - mainly Twitter, YouTube and Facebook - brought in more funds in two days than the charity recieved in total for it's Hurricane Katrina or Asian Tsunami appeals.

Not all charities have the same reach as the National Trust or Red Cross, but all can use this as an example of how to use Twitter (and other social media) effectively.

Facebook also offers an opportunity for charities. As well as offering some interesting applications for charities, Facebook provides another place to pro-actively create an online community around your area of interest.

For instance, the Great Ormand Street Children's Hospital  has 13,000 "fans" on Facebook, a substantial community that includes many people who would not have been drawn to the main charity website.

Just as a side note, when setting up a charity page on Facebook, it is usually better to create a Fan Page, rather than a Group - for the differences, read here.

Search Engine Optimisation and Awareness Raising

The web is built on information - it is the biggest research library the world has ever known. As such it provides the perfect resource for anyone interested in topics close to the heart of your organisation.

If you can establish yourself as a key depository for this information, you greatly increase the chances of being found by the people you most want to engage with - potential donors, volunteers and members - or simply the people you want to help.

The mechanics of search - the way Google, Bing etc work - is fundamentally about linking copy with search terms. If someone searches for "hodgkins disease", Google will look for the pages it feels deal with this search term best. It makes that decision based on reputation (how many people recommend the page by linking to it using the search term, and who are these people) and content (how relevant is the content to the search term).

Providing high-quality content, regularly updated and on-topic, on your website is the single most important thing you can do in terms of getting people to link to you and telling the search engines who you are.

Sending out links to that copy - in newsletters, Twitter, Facebook etc etc - just increases the chances of getting linked to, found or appearing in the increasingly important Real Time Search Results.

Public Relations

Being found for the topic of interest to you can be a significant aid in awareness raising offline. In fact, it is probably the most important tool for leveraging traditional PR available.

As a former BBC journalist, I remember the many times we would ask ourselves in the newsroom what we ever did before the internet. It is the perfect research tool - fast, efficient and interactive. With a deadline looming, and a comment needed - it is often the first port of call.

Need to get comment on a story about autism? A quick Google search throws up four charities on the homepage, with contact details and names of spokespeople.

Or, better still, if I'm a health journalist, I follow the Twitter feed of the National Autism Society - and guess what, they've already picked up on this story and issued a statement. I can use it as is on a tight deadline or Tweet them back to get an interview.

Being active online makes you the go-to choice - the more avenues you use, the more likely you are to be heard.

Online video

Attracting support for a charity is often about making an emotional engagement with potential supporters. In our experience, video is one of the most effective ways of doing this.

Video has an immediacy that can be difficult to replicate in text - we've found that having video on a charity website can make people stay longer, and increase the number of visits overall.

Video also opens up other avenues for engagement through video sharing sites - in particular YouTube. This charity video, for instance, has had more than 350,000 views in the last six months.