Setting your sites on target

Professional Fundraising

September 2007

Back to Press coverage

The average Briton spends 2 hours and 44 minutes on the internet every day. What makes them visit your site? Better still how can you use your site to encourage donations? GEMMA WARE finds out that charities need to get nosy about their donors’ online behaviour if they are to make the best of their websites.

CRUK's Run for Life website You have 42 seconds to grab a donor’s attention. This is the average amount of time a person spends on a web page, according to Jason Potts, director of digital activities at THINK consulting solutions. And the luxury of high-speed broadband has made us impatient. If a web-user is kept waiting for more than 10 seconds when carrying out a online task, such as buying a product or downloading a document, their attention will stray.

Fundraisers cannot afford to let their own attention stray too far from the web. While the day-to-day mechanics of a website is rarely the responsibility of the fundraising team, the web is fast becoming a major tool for acquiring donors. According to Charities Aid Foundation, which runs its own e-fundraising service for charities to outsource their online donations process, £325.6m was donated online through credit card donations in 2005-06, compared to just £65.5m in 2002-03.

The big guns can afford to pour money, resources and job titles at online fundraising. Yet while charities such as Cancer Research UK and the NSPCC have set up their own e-business departments to take responsibility for all money raised online, many charities still aren’t getting the basics right.

Lining pixels with gold

Donate now button Kim Strudwick, design director at charity web consultants Jamkit, provides her top tips on how charities can increase the appeal of their websites to donors

Get rid of your‘donate now’ button Most successful fundraising campaigns are advertised through content and very little money is raised through donation buttons, although charities would be reticent to admit it. Instead, try advertising a campaign through images and small boxes on the homepage.

Don’t use small, detailed images They don’t work well on the web. Go for large, good quality, clear images without too much detail. Images are what make people buy or sign up to donate so you need to allow them space to have an impact.

Use vibrant colours Use colour positively to motivate users and get them interested in your campaign. Vibrant fundraising colours can sit well alongside more sober brand colours, but make sure they don’t take over.

Strike a balance between information and fundraising There’s nothing worse than a cluttered homepage that’s trying to do too much. Draw the eye to fundraising items but retain a sense of balance on the homepage, or you risk alienating people who just want to get information quickly.

Retain a consistent look and feel It’s possible to give your fundraising section a completely different look from the main site, but often it works better when you’ve got sub-branding. Retain the organisational brand through the site to give it some consistency and use fundraising campaigns as a secondary brand to complement it.

Big is best Use larger headings to draw the eye. This allows users to differentiate content and scan it easily. Keeping content to bitesize chunks means people are more likely to read it than an entire page of dense copy.

According to Virtual Promise 2006, a report by not-for-profit researchers nfpSynergy, which benchmarked charities’ use of the web, only 49 per cent of charity websites provided donors with the ability to donate via credit or debit cards, and only 40 per cent offered the facility to sign up for a regular donation.

Yet even those charities without a dedicated e-business team are seeing some startling results, without much investment. “We’ve seen a quite dramatic shift to people choosing to support us by giving money to help our work on the internet,” says James Kliffin, head of fundraising at Medecins Sans Frontieres UK. In 2005 Kliffen discovered that a third of all MSF’s new regular gifts by direct debit came online – 31 per cent in number and 35 per cent in value.

MSF’s homepage is a busy, colourful one, allowing visitors to learn more about the work and impact of the organisation by offering podcasts from doctors volunteering in medical hotspots such as Ethiopia or Somalia.

However, due to the charity’s international make-up the site’s structure is slightly complex, and potential supporters are directed from the international homepage to a fundraising site specific to their country of origin. Despite this ready-made filter for UK donors, Kliffen says the charity is still in the early stages of understanding what impact, if any, these design elements are having on who is donating and how much they give.

Part of the problem, he says, is at the moment, he can’t figure out how to measure the cost-effectiveness of spending money online. “The enormous challenge for somebody who is used to the traditional form of direct marketing and fundraising is how on earth do you evaluate success and failure in internet fundraising? And most important, above all things, is how do you do more of it, more effectively?”

Getting geeky Web analytics, the art of spying on web users as they move around a site, is a growing preoccupation of clued-up e-fundraisers. There are a myriad of tools available to e-marketeers to help them monitor effectiveness, including Google Analytics, Red Eye and Intellitracker, but for fundraising knowing just what to measure and what to do with it is not clear-cut.

“You’ll find that the bigger charities will be using four or five different systems to actually make sure of web-trends,” says THINK’s Potts. “The trouble is that none of these systems are 100 per cent accurate and they rely on you doing some technical stuff your side to actually make sure they’re integrated. There’s some joining up that needs to be done behind the scenes to make sure you’re recording all the right things.”

So what are the old-hands looking at? Cancer Research UK (CRUK), which has had an e-business team in place for five years, looks at a whole range of trends in online giving, as Roseann Wilson, the charity’s director of e-business explains.

“The kind of analysis we do includes how much has been donated, average donation, Gift Aid take-up, email opt-in, return rate, method of acquisition channel, frequency of donation and demographic analysis. We also look at the year-on-year increase for each period and do occasional more in-depth research of our audiences via surveys, phone interviews and focus groups,” she says.

In Kliffen’s experience, qualitative research can confound an organisation’s hypotheses about why people chose to donate online. MSF carried out discussion groups with people donating online and found that the people who supported online did not in any way, shape or form, appear to be different to those that supported us offline.

“Universally what we found is that they all say the same thing – ‘I came to your website with the express intention of supporting you, of making a monthly donation or making an individual donation’. So they found us, it was their discovery and they’re in control, ” says Kliffen.

Keeping existing supporters engaged with the web is equally important as attracting new ones. CRUK has invested in the development of micro-sites to aid its fundraising, both to drive sponsorship for events and create separate sites for its online shops.

One of these micro-sites, www.raceforlifesponsorme.org, an online fundraising community for its Race for Life event, came second in a list of the most visited ‘community and humanitarian’ websites in the UK in 2006, according to online monitor Hitwise. It beat the charity’s homepage, which didn’t make the top 10.

Cementing fundraising into a site's foundations

Christian Aid Logo Christian Aid is planning to re-launch its website this summer. Nick Burne, the charity’s head of interactive marketing, explains how fundraising is a major part of the website redesign project

“The current Christian Aid website (www.christianaid.org.uk) was launched in 1999, and although it has grown organically and performed well, doubling the money raised year-on-year for the first few years, the design needed an overhaul to become more dynamic and engaging to be able to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

One of the main priorities for the new design is fundraising. But this has had to be implemented in a way that does not limit the other site objectives, such as asking visitors to take a campaigning action on trade justice or climate change, or encouraging them to adopt a more ethical lifestyle.

A member of Christian Aid’s fundraising division has been involved in the project from the outset, to help develop the online fundraising strategy. The initial phase included thorough research into the target audiences, which helped to build a business case for the site, based on the potential for increased fundraising. The current Christian Aid website accounts for almost four per cent of Christian Aid’s total annual donations, with the average individual donation currently at around £100. The strategy is to improve on these figures, and the site’s conversion rates, in line with industry averages, so increasing the number of visitors signing up to email communications (currently at 36.5 per cent), and the percentage of people who donate (currently at 0.36 per cent). By improving the user experience and information architecture, and featuring real-life stories from developing countries, video and stunning photography, it is hoped that more people will be encouraged to donate and become more engaged with the issues.

Another phase of the website redesign focused on the process of how content is published. The new workflow considers fundraising objectives and campaigning calls to action from the start, and will only publish content that has been commissioned by the editor.

The site is due to launch in the summer. We have high expectations and ambitious targets for this key component in our future fundraising strategy.”

CRUK has also just launched an alternative gift range micro-site called Send and Give. Wilson says the decision to continue developing micro sites came out of feedback from supporters and usability testing with potential site users. “By creating micro sites we have more freedom to deliver the user experience that we feel supporters want – the overall navigation is simpler, we can offer more tailored content and the design is more geared towards the particular offering of the site,” she says.

Yet according to John Foster-Hill, chief operating officer at Panlogic, a digital marketing agency whose clients include Save the Children, World Vision and the British Heart Foundation, if all charities took the same route donors would soon suffer from “innovation fatigue”.

“Anything that cuts across the clutter of marketing messages and gets the charity to the front of people’s minds is likely to be successful,” he says. “Each new type of approach, first micro-sites, then virals, then Web 2.0, is innovative to begin with, but very quickly becomes tired and a ‘me too’. Charities suffer from this in the same way as other brands and soon fail to get their message across.”

Going commercial Foster-Hill thinks a commercial approach to design and usability can make a huge difference, but that many charities aren’t quite there yet. “There still isn’t, as yet, the detailed user journey analysis that you might see from an eCommerce player. We are starting to see a more commercial view emerging, but this is often tempered by internal resource constraints and budgets.” To tackle this, he knows of some charities who are looking to team up to pool resources and save money.

Potts agrees a business-like approach is crucial. He advises charities to study payment mechanisms on websites such as Amazon which process millions of transactions a day, to look how it structures its online systems. He adds the charities that are seeing the best results are treating the web as a “business tool” rather than just as a portal to provide people with information about their work and cause.

Where to recruit this bank of new specialist e-business fundraisers that appear critical to the development of charity websites is another matter. “There aren’t those people kicking around with those skills already,” Potts admits. “It’s hard to attract people from the commercial sector, given you won’t be paying them as much.”

Budget is certainly an issue when it comes to website development. nfpSynergy’s survey found that for charities with incomes of between £1m and £10m, the average online budget was £22,680, with the majority of these funds being spent on functionality or hosting. Compare this to charities with an income of more than £10m – whose average budget is £101,000 – and it’s no wonder they are spending most of their resources on design and creativity as well as functionality.

Rather than shouldering the cost of taking donations in-house, many smaller organisations outsource the processing of donations to external payment providers such WorldPay or Charitites Aid Foundation (CAF ). Nick Jackson, online communications manager at CAF, says his team monitors the user pathways to establish if and when people drop out of the donation process. “At the end of the process we do see a bit of a drop-off before people commit; in the region of 10 per cent of people don’t actually commit,” he says, adding that CAF is currently undergoing a review of all its online offerings to look at if and how it can enhance the service it offers to the charity sector.

Using the data The measurement of web trends is something many charities find tricky to get their heads around, but fundraisers also need to be given the responsibility to act upon the information they collect. Wilson says that at CRUK, where the e-business team carry out usability testing on donation forms and monitor the point at which people drop off, they also have editorial control over the donation forms so that they can change the content, format, wording and images on the site where they see fit.

It would be helpful for the sector if charities shared data on web trends and analysis of donor journeys, however they are currently reticent to do so, with most treating it as commercially sensitive information in a competitive marketplace. However, a group of charities and leaders in online business are hoping that a European Online Fundraising Congress, scheduled to launch this November, will help spark debate and knowledge-sharing among web-fundraisers. Led by US-based fundraising expert Ted Hart, founder of the ePhilanthropy foundation (more from Ted Hart), other organisations involved in the early planning stages include THINK, Blackbaud, Microsoft and MSN, plus Greenpeace, Amnesty International and MSF.

MSF’s Kliffen thinks that understanding how online and offline work together will be key to calculating RoI in order to establish how much fundraisers should invest their time and effort into their websites. “Somewhere along the line we are going to have to create a new model, a new paradigm for how we evaluate the success of fundraising because if we don’t, what we are going to see is, bit by bit, it becoming more and more difficult to justify what we’re doing offline.”

Back to Press coverage