Memberships Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tendenci Blog

2012-08-302014-11-02

Make Your NonProfit Website a Donor Magnet Part 2

In part one of this 2-part series, I talked about the problems with many nonprofit websites that are driving potential donors away. In the second post, I’m going to give you 5 changes you can make to your website to increase your online donor conversions.

5 Minor Changes You Can Do Today

1) Strengthen your Call to Action

The last thing you want is for a visitor to come to your website looking for a way to get involved and not being able to find the information. Your site needs a clear call to action that asks visitors to become members, donate, or register for an event.

metro learn more call to action — “Learn More” CTA Button from Metro.org

Here’s a great article by the Copyblogger on the common mistakes that marketers make with their web site call to action. Are you making any of these mistakes? If you are, today’s the day you’re correcting them!

2) Make it Easier for Visitors to Sign-Up

Make it as simple as possible for your visitors to convert into supporters on your website. Identify the actions your site visitors take on most often and least often. Then, log out of your site and go through each of those actions from a visitor’s perspective.

As you go through the sign-up process, ask yourself, “How easy is it and how long does it take you to complete a transaction?”, to help you figure out how you could make the process better

Test both the most and least popular actions and then compare the experiences. Sometimes, this activity reveals ways that some actions are complicated and time consuming for visitors and that’s driving potential donors away.

3) Move Your Email Newsletter Sign-up Above the Fold

“Above the Fold” is a term for the portion of a web page that you have to scroll down to view. Think of “the fold” as ending about where you might fold down your laptop screen.

According to another study by Jakob Nielsen, content below the fold is only viewed by about 20% of your total site’s visitors. This means that any content you place below the fold is only going to be seen by 1/5th of your visitors. Important items you want to have above the fold include: your email newsletter sign-up form, a clear call to action, a strong headline and links to find out more about your organization.

4) Give Donors What They Want

cmhouston outreach menu to give donors info — The Children’s Museum of Houston Gives Visitors 1-Click Access to Information.

Donors want to know more about your nonprofit before they donate. They also prefer to go online to research information about your organization themselves before making a decision to support your mission

Donors want information that communicates what your organization does, how you spend donations and who you have helped.

If you also have memberships, then you want to also consider that new members want to know about member benefits, costs, and find out about programs and events you have for your members.

Learn more about creating engaging content for your website in the presentation Writing for the Web by Katrina Esco, Account Executive on Schipul’s Creative Services team.

5) Use Digital Media to Create Compelling Stories

You know you should use storytelling to share your NonProfit’s Mission and Vision to attract new donors. Crafting great stories can be a challenge. Take photos and videos from your events, of your volunteers and staff, and of the people you’ve helped.

For example let’s look at the homepage for Camp For All, a camp program for kids with a variety of different health problems:

The Camp has a photo of a kid swimming on their homepage and just look at how happy this kid is. This photo shows new visitors that Camp For All is making a difference in children’s lives and that’s far more powerful than if Camp For All had used text to say the same thing.

I’ve written about how to incorporate your nonprofit’s stories with your website. Check out Grow Your Members and Donors with Photo Albums and NonProfit Storytelling with Videos for more examples and tips.

2012-08-302013-06-10

Make Your NonProfit Website a Donor Magnet Part 1

Tendenci websites include all the tools your nonprofit organization needs to create a website that will attract donors, volunteers and members and make it easy for them to get involved.

According to a study published in the NonProfit Trends, 34.8% of last year’s online donations occurred after October, November and December. For most nonprofit organizations, the Holiday Season are when you generate the majority of your annual online revenue from donations, holiday gala fundraisers, and membership renewals coming due.

Is Your Website Ready for the Holiday Rush?

If your nonprofit’s online fundraising isn’t performing as well as you’d like, you aren’t alone. A recent Usability Study of nonprofit websites found that it is 7% harder, on average, for someone to make a donation than it is for them to make an e-commerce purchase.

In this two part blog post, I’m going to share the research on which elements are frustrating and driving away potential donors who come to your site and can’t find what they were looking for. The second post will give you 5 minor changes you can quickly make that will get your website ready well to attract new donors just in time for the holidays.

Nonprofit Site User Experience is Falling Behind

missing and outdated content — Over half of all NonProfit Websites have missing or outdated content.

The usability study, led by noted web usabilty expert Jakob Nielsen, tested common activities that a visitor to a nonprofit website might do and found some surprising results:

Making first-time and repeat monetary donations on nonprofit websites – on average, online donations tooks 7% longer than a typical e-commerce site’s shopping cart check-out. 17% of the nonprofit websites made it extremely difficult for visitors to even find the online donation option.
Donating tangible items like furniture, canned foods, and used clothing online – this received the lowest user experience rating of all the tested activities and in nearly all cases, site visitors went to multiple nonprofit websites before finally finding an organization with clear and complete information on how to go about donating.
Researching how to volunteer online – communicating Volunteer information was the one thing most nonprofit websites are getting right. The study gave this the highest user satisfaction ranking and reported that the one item most nonprofits forget on the volunteer pages is way to contact the organization.
Researching nonprofits on Facebook – the study found that people don’t like to donate on Facebook and that visitors except a nonprofit’s website to have far more content than your Facebook page does. The report explains that potential donors go to a nonprofit’s Facebook page to read the stories of the people who benefit from the nonprofit’s work.

The study showed that over 53% of the nonprofit websites had missing and outdated content and 47% of the websites were not designed to be intuitive and user-friendly. The report states that you could increase your online donations by 10% or more just by making some minor changes to your site’s usability and improving your content.

A 10% increase is almost $14,000 if you fall within the median online revenue earned from first time gifts*.

*The average online revenue earned from first time gifts in 2011 was about $136,625 according to Nonprofit Marketing Guide *

If your nonprofit site is chasing new donors away, this means you’re missing out on thousands of dollars in online donations.

Is Your Website a Donor Magnet?

If your nonprofit organization’s website is one of the roughly 50% that is unknowingly chasing off site visitors, then we’re going to fix that starting right now. You can use the study’s recommended best usability practices with your Tendenci website to give your site visitors a great online experience and increase your donations, memberships, and volunteer applications.

The key is to have content on your site that potential donors are looking for that is easy for visitors to find and tells the visitors how to donate and why they want to donate to your organization.

Crafting the elements within your site that will attract new donors requires time, research, and lots of creativity!

In Part Two of this series, I’ll give you 5 seemingly minor things that you can change on your site that will increase your online fundraising efforts and get you ready for the holiday fundraising rush.

2011-08-032014-11-02

Membership Management Module for Tendenci 5.0 Launches

Tendenci Membership Module Dashboard Icon

At the end of June, we announced the release of Tendenci 5.0 – the newest version of the Tendenci CMS platform that helps businesses, non-profit organizations, and associations manage memberships and events on their websites. We have made some big improvements in the core membership module between Tendenci 4.0 and Tendenci 5.0 (T5 as we like to call it here at Schipul) and we think you are going to love them!

T5 Memberships are Customizable

Our membership management tools enable you to customize the membership titles, membership applications, reminders and renewal notices. Once you have set-up membership types and imported and approved members then you can also customize your membership directory (listing pages). The T5 membership module enables your organization to easily create and update the levels of memberships, your communications to your members, and more!

T5 Memberships are Flexible

You now have the ability to set-up a variety of different membership types/levels, different prices for the membership levels and for renewals, length of memberships, management of expirations, grace periods and renewals. A few examples of how we have increased flexibility in Tendenci Membership Management:

You can create a student membership level that costs $25 and is good for 1 year, and also create a corporate membership that costs $150 that lasts 2 years.
You can set-up a membership to expire in any number of days, months, or years that you would like.
You can have a membership expire with a 30-day grace period, a discount for renewing before the expiration date, and more!

T5 Memberships are Selective

Want corporate members to receive discounts on job board postings and regular members to be able to apply for free? With the new Tendenci membership module – you control what content your members can access, can update, and what price they pay for things like events and job board postings. Members can pay a reduced fee to register for an event and you can control who is allowed to update event photos to a gallery or view and contribute to content on the website. Having more control over what members can and cannot access allows you to offer more members-only benefits to increase sales of memberships.

T5 Memberships are Unlimited

The different ways you can customize and manage memberships for your organization on your website are virtually limitless and best of all – Tendenci 5 allows for you to have an unlimited number of membership types.

We also make it easy for you to import membership from your Tendenci 4 website when you call us to migrate or if you are not on Tendenci – we can import your members and memberships from a CSV file.

Beginning in August, we will be holding free online webinar training on how to use Tendenci 5.0’s membership management tools and if you would like to find out more about upgrading to Tendenci 5.0 – give us a call and we’ll schedule a live demo just for you.