Seven simple rules to elevate your charity website

Starting from scratch on the development and implementation of a new website is a significant project - even for bigger companies with ringfenced budgets. For charitable organisations, the challenge of full website development can feel overwhelming.

Which is why, in part, we launched the Good Business Fund - to share our years of creative agency and website design experience with an exceptional social cause.

Our Good Business Fund delivered a brand-new website for the amazing charity Memory Matters, and will open for submissions again later in 2024. Stay tuned to the Altitude Design socials to ensure that you are first in the queue when applications open.

Whether you were unsuccessful in the Good Business Fund application phase last time around, or have found your way to the Altitude Design website seeking some guidance for your charitable organisation’s rebrand, here are seven simple rules for a successful website refresh - gathered from over a decade’s experience in web development for charities, working alongside the likes of leading mental health charity Mind.

1. Understand your audience

Before you even begin committing design ideas to paper, it is important to consider the person profile of your target market.

Who is visiting your website, and why? How do they like to be communicated with, and consume their information?

Market research provides a strong foundation for your tactics, and, if used effectively, will ensure that not only are the right people visiting your website, but you are converting more of them into donors, too.

These considerations should inform and underpin everything from your branding to which services, case studies, or fundraising campaigns you highlight on your homepage.

2. Social proof is your biggest ally

It is a universal truth in sales circles that word of mouth is the single most influential form of marketing. In a study that occurs every few years, most recently in 2021, Nielsen reported that 88% of consumers trust recommendations from friends over all other promotion channels.

For a charity, this is even more significant. You don’t need us to tell you that the charitable sector is ultra-competitive, marketing budgets are limited to non-existent, and there’s a tighter squeeze than ever on people’s disposable income.

Compared with commercial organisations, however, charities possess the innate ability to tell a truly compelling story. An emotive case study or positive outcome driven by your organisation has the opportunity to pull at the heartstrings of your audience, and demonstrate the immense community value of the cause your charity is the champion of.

At Altitude Design we strongly recommend placing positive testimonials or case studies front and centre in your digital marketing efforts.

3. Accessibility is key

Digital accessibility is a human right, and charitable organisations often provide the catalyst for policy and societal change. That philosophy should absolutely extend to your online presence.

Aside from accessibility and inclusion online being written into law in many jurisdictions, depending on the purpose of your organisation, it is likely that a proportion of your website visitors will directly benefit from a more accessible website.

Making your website accessible probably sounds like a daunting task, but implementing at the start of the development process will save you a lot of time in the long run. To assist you, there are also many smart pieces of technology that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, like UserWay.org.

Embedding UserWay’s plug-ins into your website code allows the software to address accessibility issues at source. There is a free plug-iin that implements user-generated accessibility changes, and a robust subscription service that ensures that your website leads the way in the inclusion and accessibility space.

UserWay’s pricing structure scales based on web traffic, and is affordable at $490 a year for up to 100,000 page views per month. If you want to try before you commit, a time-limited free trial is also available.

4. Don’t ignore SEO!

Search engine optimisation, or SEO to the digital geeks among us, is a critical tool in ensuring that your charity ranks highly on important traffic sources, such as Google.

We’ve already discussed a lot about how to make your UX shine once your visitors arrive on your website, but effective SEO optimisation increases the likelihood that they visit your site in the first place.

Why is this important? Well, 68% of web traffic begins at a search engine, and it is as likely as not that a visitor is seeking a specific service or charitable support (say, for example, dementia cafés in London), rather than looking for your charity directly.

By placing high on a search engine, you open your website up to more traffic, which, in turn, leads to greater opportunities to raise awareness of your charity, increase service uptake, and enhance fundraising efforts.

The Altitude Design team are working on a beginner’s guide to SEO to share in the coming weeks - and we’ll update this page when it drops live.

5. Cut your copy, and then cut it again

In our experience, there is a tendency for organisations to bombard visitors to their website with walls upon walls of text, outlining in painstaking detail every single element in a given process, or terms and conditions.

We understand, particularly in the charitable sector, you live and breathe your organisation - and you want your visitors to understand how deeply important every piece of information is. However, it’s not necessarily what they want or need to hear.

At every step of your web development journey, continue to ask yourself a simple question:

“Is it relevant to the end user?”

If the answer is no, or not at this stage, delay it to the relevant point in the visitors’ journey. Use your success stories, testimonials, and striking imagery to tell the story of your charity, and remain disciplined on the levels of copy on each page.

You want your website to be memorable, generate attention, and be easy to digest at a glance, or a quick scroll through.

There will be time for the detail later, for the now, you’re focusing on piquing interest - which leads us to our next point…

6. Calls to action

Available data varies on the length of time users spend visiting a particular web-page, but there is unanimity that the average visit duration is under one minute, and, according to some research, it can be as short as 10 seconds.

That means, if you consider your website homepage as your shop window, you have just a few fleeting moments to convince your visitor that your charity is worth their time, and then you have to direct them to the virtual checkout.

A common mistake we often see in do-it-yourself websites is a lack of clear calls to action, or contact us pages.

Our advice? Make them prominent, make it as easy as possible for visitors to sign up to your mailing list, volunteer, or even provide donations.

7. Little and often goes a long way

Finally, and this is a habit that all organisations without a dedicated marketing and communications function can be guilty of neglecting, keep it updated!

You don’t need to pour hours and hours of content into your website every week, but a regularly refreshed and updated homepage or news section lends important credibility to your charity’s efforts, and reassures the would-be collaborator that you’re an active and thriving cause in the community. What’s more, regularly updated websites fare better in search performance.

Taken some great pictures at an event? Received a fantastic new Google review? Take 15 minutes out of your day to ensure they take pride of place on your website - that’s often more than enough.

Applications for Altitude Design’s Good Business Fund open later in 2024. Click here to find out more.