A professional charity website builder is the individual or organisation who is going to make your charity shine online. Most charity website builders will identify themselves as charity web designers or charity web developers, some might even be quite specific, but in the end from your point of view it all boils down to the same thing – these are the people who will help you take your message to the world.
Identifying Success
The first thing a charity website builder should do is to identify what success looks like for your organisation. Are you fundraising to provide equipment to impoverished hospitals? Then success looks like donations and is measured in pounds and pence. Are you raising awareness about the dangers and signs of a particular disease? In that case success probably looks like people reading and downloading your literature or becoming advocates for your charity. What about providing confidential services to those that need it? Success could look like receiving contacts from people in need. Then there’s research, gaining volunteers, supporting mental wellbeing and many other ways to define success specifically for your organisation
In many cases success is spread across a few different areas, most often, donations, gaining volunteer support and fulfilling your charity’s purpose. Your charity website builder should help you think through what these are and also which are most important. It’s no good receiving a large amount of donations while having no visibility to those who can use your services and thus fulfil your purpose as a charity.
Building for Success
Once you’ve identified success this is where your charity website builder really earns their keep, by designing and building you a charity website that doesn’t just put your name online but drives your mission forward. It can be very easy to have a specific idea of how your website should work, what pages you should have and how it should all link together. A good charity website builder should help you refine or even rewrite this so that every page supports your mission and drives towards those successes that you’ve already defined.
For example, if your organisation is about supporting people with mental health disorders then having a top menu that starts ‘Home, About, Volunteer, Donate’ isn’t driving the real success of your charity, helping people who need your particular help. Instead a first menu item of ‘Feeling Down?’ or ‘Where do I turn?’ immediately provides a place for those who need your help to go.
Tracking Success
Once your website is live your charity website builder should give you ways of tracking how successful your website is. Sometimes this is easier than others. With donations (dependent on the technology) we can measure the number of donations and the amount. We can also count the number of people who have contacted the charity via an online form. Awareness is much more nebulous; we measure things like number of page views on your information pages, how long people spend reading them, how many downloads your booklets receive, how much your site is shared on social media.
Tracking success is important to see where you should be improving and where you should be spending your money. Always looking back to those successes you defined at the beginning of your project and working towards them.
Start Your Success
If you want a professional charity website then drop us a line at hello@thecharitywebsite.com and we’ll help your mission succeed.
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