Does your nonprofit website attract donors like a 20-year-old Geo Metro? 🚗 Here’s how to give it a sleek new upgrade without breaking the bank.
Lou Kotsinis of BCS Interactive shares his 20+ years of digital marketing expertise to help nonprofits level up their online presence. A beautiful website matters – it’s often the first impression funders have of your work!
We discuss common pitfalls in positioning, storytelling, user experience and functionality. Plus simple fixes that create a seamless, conversion-focused donor journey.
Lou also gives tips on choosing intuitive donation platforms, website content that converts, calls to action that compel without annoying, and more.
The bottom line? Nonprofit websites should make donors feel loved, not bamboozled! Put yourself in their shoes. Understand their passion points and perspective. Then craft an experience that makes them eager to engage with your cause.
“Love your audience. If you love your audience [and] understand what their needs are, that can’t help but be reflected in your website.” – Lou Kotsinis
Ready for website wisdom that’s equal parts strategic and practical? Have a listen!
Important Links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/loukotsinis/
Episode Transcript
RHEA 0:00
Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I’m your host, Rhea Wong.
Hey podcast listeners, Rhea Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown.
Today we are talking with my friend Lou Katsinas about whether or not your website is funder friendly. this is your billboard to the world. This is the first thing that people usually see. So we’re going to talk with Lou today to make sure that we are looking right and tight for the world.
Lou, welcome to the show. Forgot to mention, Lou is the co founder and CEO of BCS Interactive, which helps with all of the marketing needs. So Lou, welcome to the show.
LOU 0:38
Thank you, Rhea.
Thank you for having me. And you got the Kitsinus part, right? Which is usually the trickiest part. Excellent
RHEA 0:44
I got a little bit of a tutorial beforehand, I’m a good student. Lou, before we jump into the question of our websites and whether or not they are funder friendly, can you walk us through a little bit about yourself and how you got started with this particular part of the nonprofit world?
LOU 0:56
Sure. I should go way back. I started a company called BCS marketing way back in 2003 after leaving corporate America and having a pretty bad time with. My corporate life, I started the entrepreneurial journey in 2003 and then that business was pretty much successful until 2008 when the Great Recession happened.
Many of our listeners are probably too young to even remember that, but I’m aging myself here, but I learned a lot from that experience, but I realized at that point that I had to pivot. So I found a partner who was a website developer. And we decided together to go fully into digital and the development of websites in particular.
So we started to gain clients at that point, and I found that the most enjoyable, the most fulfilling clients were my non profit clients. There was a demand for that type of work, but I also have to admit that we, because of the amazing stories that these organizations brought to the table, as web designers and developers, we could do really interesting stuff with them.
We could really help to tell their stories. Yeah, it’s not to say you can’t do that with a law firm or a bank, but it’s just hard to find the Kind of beautiful human elements that every nonprofit brings to the table. at that point, the partnership split up and we still remain on good terms, but I basically took that business fully over and we went headlong into working exclusively with nonprofits, foundations, schools, and have built that up over the years.
Our mission it’s pretty straightforward. It’s to help nonprofits grow and to attract more funders through the use of digital. And we do that primarily in two ways. We do it through the building of their digital infrastructure. That’s a really fancy way of saying, websites, app development, custom software, but also then through the classic forms of digital marketing that you’re probably aware of, paid social media, email marketing, and just, we work to provide them with a digital strategy at the end of the day, because, digital changes so rapidly, it’s hard for us to keep up with it.
I can imagine what a, stressed out executive director or small nonprofit has to contend with. Rather than sitting all day and learning about digital. So I think we provide that value to them. That’s a long winded answer to a short question.
RHEA 2:49
But yeah, it’s very helpful. And, you and I could talk about all different aspects of it, because I’d like to know a lot about this kind of stuff as well.
But let’s focus on websites, because I’m old enough to remember the dawn of the internet and the ways in which we. use websites. And I have to say that there’s some exceptions, but for the most part, I feel like most nonprofits have not really optimized their website for what I would consider to be a great user experience.
They use it like an electronic brochure, if you will. talk to us a little bit about the ways that we should be thinking about how to use our website.
LOU 3:20
First, let me just say that I’ve noticed over the last couple of years that many nonprofits are starting to think more strategically.
So thankfully we’re starting to see a more appreciation. Of focusing on digital and especially websites. I think this probably comes back to First of all, I always view websites as the ultimate storytelling device, right? As I mentioned before story is a huge part of carrying the non profit mission and attracting funders the beauty of having a really well optimized website is that you’re able to basically craft a donor journey.
So from the time the user arrives at the website Hopefully you’ve positioned yourself properly, you’re able to, on your own terms, bring that user through to I’m gonna say conversion, but the actual term is a donation, hopefully at the end of the day. So what we advise clients to do to optimize their sites is really to focus on four pillars, let’s say four focus areas.
And you and I have spoken about this in, in, in the past. And then once you have those four areas addressed in general. Then all of the other granular details and tools and tactics come into play. So let me just sum those up for you. the first thing you want to focus on is your overall positioning, right?
When a user comes to your website or donor comes to your website, do they understand what it is that you do? And you’d be amazed how many nonprofits missed the boat on this so we can talk about that. So there’s positioning, and then the second component is storytelling, right? And I see that as the design and content and the story that the nonprofit is portraying on their website.
Is the user engaged with your mission now that they have come to the site, right? Can they see the humanity in what it is that you’re doing? Are you connecting emotionally with them? So that’s the storytelling component. Once you started to work on those, Then it’s important to focus on user experience, and that means a lot of different things.
But in short, when they’re on the website now and they’re starting to get immersed in your mission and your story, can they find what they’re looking for? Basically instantaneously and intuitively, are the links working? Is the page loading fast enough so that they don’t have to sit there and wait because users have a very short attention span now?
Is your site accessible to lots of different, differently abled individuals, right? That’s a big component as well. Is your mobile website optimized the way it should be? So I know I’m giving you a lot here, but we can delve into any one of these components, as you like. So there’s positioning, storytelling, user experience.
And then once you have those three core principles squared away then you want to start to think about functionality. And what I mean by that is, are you providing the proper tools for your specific audience? So if your non profit, let’s say, sells courses and that’s part of their revenue model, or sells some kind of information, are your e commerce tools, in place?
Are they working properly? If you’re a grant making foundation, when you have programs coming to you from all over the country to apply for funding, is your application process in order? Do you have the tools to be able to vet that information? Those are the four. And the thing I like to emphasize to clients is that it’s not a one and done proposition.
It’s not, let’s build the site, let’s focus on these four areas and then it’ll take care of itself, or we can call a team like BCS interactive in a year ideally in a strong operational nonprofit, someone is looking at these four areas. All the time. And there are, you know, there are ways to do that efficiently.
So let me just pull back from there. And yeah, I’m sure
RHEA 6:19
I do. I have so many questions. one of the things that I have an ongoing debate with my digital marketing friends is when I consider a website, who’s it for? Because as we know, People might need their website to talk to their clients to talk to the people that they’re serving certainly I have a bias I think it should be your donors like who’s there for
LOU 6:41
Yeah, that depends on the organization But I think the executive team or if it’s a smaller organization, you know The key decision makers need to really sit down and say look What is going to sustain our organization for the next three to five years, right?
Who is that individual or individuals? Are there, is it a group of large funders? Do we receive state or, community funding? Are we writing grants? or at the end of the day, is it the kind of grassroots donors that most of us think of when we talk about nonprofits? That’s a key decision to be made.
Indeed, you can have more than one audience. We have many clients that have five and six audiences. But at the end of the day, you’ve heard the phrase, if you’re talking to everybody, you’re talking to nobody. And I believe that. So one to two audiences at the most really should be the focus of the site.
But you hit on a key issue. If there’s one thing your listeners take away from what we’re saying today, it’s all about understanding. Who your key audience is or who is sustaining, as I said before, and building the entire experience around that. Understand these individuals. What are their likes? What are their dislikes?
What are they prone to be interested in? And you can do that through, different types of research or even just asking your best constituents and then building everything around that. This is what our image is. This is what our brand is going to look like. These are our images. This is what the story is going to be.
This is what we want the donation page to stack because this donor reacts this way. That’s an idea in an ideal world. I realize it’s aspirational because not everybody has that much time or resource, but that’s the ideal way to go about it.
RHEA 7:59
lEt me ask this other question because I think it’s interesting.
So when we look at the for profit world, we look at, website tracking and pixels and lead magnets and all this sort of thing. Could we apply some of these concepts to nonprofit names? What could that look like? So I’m thinking specifically about the use of, for example, I’ll look at a nonprofit website and they’ll say, sign up for our newsletter.
Frankly, no one’s signing up for the newsletter. Like I don’t need more stuff in my inbox, nor does anybody. In the for profit world, we might offer something free to our website visitors, like a checklist or a training or a white paper or something like this. Is this something that we can think about in the not for profit world?
LOU 8:34
I Think that’s a perfect parallel and it comes back to understanding what your audience is. And what you want to do then is provide them with value. I’ll give you an example. So one of our clients is the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, and they work to do just that, to spaces in New Jersey, so for outdoor enthusiasts and people that just believe in preserving public space.
Now, that website was built specifically for that audience because we knew that audience would not just enjoy the site as a resource, but would also fund at the end of the day. The idea there is to provide as much value so that user continues to come back. when you said before that you’re not going to, I know you just, it was tongue in cheek, not sign up for newsletter.
you’re an outdoor enthusiast or if you enjoy conservation and you saw the content that this organization is putting out, you will sign up in a minute. And I was, I’m someone that, that hikes, that enjoys the outdoors. I actually read this newsletter every time it comes out.
So my point is that every nonprofit has that particular audience member and, they know better than anybody what their mission is. So it’s a matter of understanding how to unlock that mission. What does my potential donor, potential follower want to know about? What can I provide them that will get them to come back?
And every non profit has that, it’s just a matter of locating it. I don’t know if that answers
RHEA 9:45
your question directly. Yeah, it does, and I think that’s really important that I want everyone to really hear, is what value am I providing to my potential donor, right? Because it’s value for value, and I think so often we jump to let’s do a donation without thinking about it from the perspective of what?
Value my providing for my donor, whether it’s information, inspiration, being part of a community. I think we really need to think about that. Let’s talk about consumer behavior a second, because I’m just curious as we live more and more online, like back in the day when I was.
Running a non profit people weren’t necessarily donating online as much as they are now. We weren’t buying stuff online as much as we are now. How has donor behavior changed the way that you think about non profit websites? Because, like, traditionally, I would say, non profit fundraisers are taught you should ask for a meeting, And the fact is more and more people don’t want to talk to anybody. They will make decisions based on their own research, go to the website, maybe ask some friends and whatever. But, It’s increasingly a purely digital experience.
LOU 10:41
yEs and no. I think you need to cover all bases. think there’s something to be said about the direct mail piece that reaches a certain audience.
I think there’s something to be said about, and you know this better than most, Rhea, about the major donor that really needs the face to face ask. And then we can get into the whole Gen Z, or I should say, millennial thing. Gen Z, I have it right? The ones that are younger than me, which is like everybody.
Gen Z and millennials. they are… Digital natives. So they definitely are not looking for anything else other than a quick usable experience. So I think a healthy nonprofit is again going to know their audience. There goes that theme again and then build those components around it.
That being said, you said it yourself. We live in a digital world, so it behooves you to do what you can with the resources you have to build out again your digital infrastructure so that it touches on all those things we spoke about before, right? Quick loading pages, optimize website with a good story because you don’t want to introduce friction into the process.
One thing that we all know about donor behavior is that with the fact that we have these phones in our pockets, they just want a quick way to address what they’re looking for. So that’s something that needs to be part of any component that you build out.
RHEA 11:46
question. What is your thought about having simply a one page long scroll versus the website that has multiple pages with multiple drop downs? Because I see some of those and I’m like, Oh my God, I’m like, I’m going to click out just because it’s way too overwhelming.
LOU 12:00
I don’t have any problem with it.
there’s not one size fits all, you have to understand what your mission is all about. I’m going to say it again. You’re going to kill me, but you have to understand your user as well, too. If you think about it by definition, a mobile website, which we’re all on as a single scroll, right?
The thing to consider, there’s a technical concern there as well, too, is that when you have a single page website, you have a single web address, and if you’re interested in web search and SEO. What Google looks for is multiple pages to a website. So the more content you have on the website, Google will view you as more authoritative or having more content, bringing more value to your search to your user.
It’s a trade off, so a single page site can be beautiful. It can get to the point. Some people like that, but you are losing in terms of SEO value.
RHEA 12:44
Interesting. What are some of your pet peeves? Because I spend a lot of times, as I’m sure you do, looking at non profit websites and there are lots of things that bother me on non profit websites.
one is bad photography. Sure. I hate looking at bad photography, which is such a missed opportunity because good photography now is cheap. Yeah. And the other thing is. Vagueness? What is this mission statement? It either uses a lot of very technical jargon that I’m like, I don’t know what this means, or it’s generic, I could cut and paste that onto any other website.
Curious, what are some of your top pet peeves?
LOU 13:14
But pretty much in line with you. First of all, let me backtrack and just say the pet peeve I have is when, I guess it’s a naivete, but when you speak to any client and they say, Oh, yeah, we need to update our web page that’s a term from, when the web first came around, because it’s not a web page.
It’s a website. We’re not, there’s not a clicker on the screen now that counts how many people are coming to the page anymore. it’s just that kind of general naivete that kind of, at this point, I laugh at it, but you’re spot on, Photography is so important in conveying that mission video as well, too. So to see lousy or blatantly stock photography is problematic for me. The second thing that you mentioned goes back to my point about positioning. I’ve seen so many sites where the organization is a worthy organization.
They’re doing well offline in terms of their fundraising. They have a strong board, and then they direct people to a website where you arrive, and it takes five minutes to figure out what it is that they do. And that’s really a missed opportunity. I will say one other thing that. I view as a problem, and this is a whole separate conversation for us to have, is the idea of brand and logo and how a person perceives what your brand is.
And this is also a controversial topic because many organizations, including for-profit businesses don’t feel that this is a thing, but it absolutely is. When I come to a great, let’s say a great website, and I see this. Logo that it feels weak and antiquated and poorly designed and it doesn’t convey any emotion.
That’s something that’s a big disconnect to me and maybe because I do this for a living, but it makes me think that I don’t, they don’t really value how they’re presenting themselves to the world. So I think that’s an important component as well, too.
RHEA 14:38
okay, wait, can I add another pet peeve?
Please. Way too much information. Yeah, I think you and I have been on websites where it’s like you have the thing and then you have these subheads where it’s like these blocks of text, which frankly, I’m not going to read.
LOU 14:50
can tell you exactly what that comes from. That’s either. And again, this is not knocking anybody.
It’s very, challenging running a nonprofit at any level, but that is either a board member. Or a member of the executive team saying, Oh, we’ve got to get this out there. We’ve got to, they need to know about this. it’s more satisfying their own kind of concerns as opposed to what did we say before?
Does your donor really want to, you know, so that’s, by the way, that’s a point for a multi page site where you can take some of that information, streamline it, put it elsewhere. And if the user is interested as they should be, because you should be guiding them through. An entire process. Then you can put that on additional pages.
But yeah, absolutely. People have a very short attention span
RHEA 15:29
right. One thing that I have my clients do, which I find to be really interesting is have them observe real time people on their website.
That’s great. And then to give them feedback because I think often we think that something is landing, but when we see it actually being tested in the real world and realize it like, Oh, it’s not clear where you’re supposed to click because this person that I’m watching can’t figure out where to click.
LOU 15:49
Absolutely we’ve used heat maps in the past to show them that the part that they thought was so important wasn’t really that important. One thing we emphasize is looking at analytics, for your audience members that may not know. About Google Analytics. It’s a free product it’s an absolute must have that someone or someone like ourselves or even internally, you can install it on your site.
It’s a dashboard to show you the activity that’s happening on the site. this annual appeal that you put out or this online annual report that you thought so many people looked at. And then you go to analytics and realize nobody really showed up to it. that’s another good way to determine, what’s happening on your site.
There’s usertesting. com is a great tool to use. It’s pretty affordable. And if you have that kind of self awareness that you want to get others to look at your site to critique it for you, those are great tools to use. But that’s a great tactic. I have to admit.
RHEA 16:27
let’s talk about calls to action. when I look at websites.
The good ones have the donate button on the upper right hand side, which is we know, hot real estate. Talk to me about what other calls to action we might have throughout the website. Should it just be the donation? Should there be other ways that people can engage if they choose to?
And at what point does it get confusing?
LOU 16:51
I’m a big fan of I’ve used the word before immersion. Okay. And in an ideal world, you are really courting your donor. You are really honoring them and giving them multiple ways to interact with your organization. At the end of the day, donate is a must have, but you don’t want it to be the only thing there.
You think about it strategically, right? Let’s say you’re feeding your email list over time and your email list becomes a funding channel for you. What interesting ways can we get individuals to sign up for our email list? I’ll go back to that Conservation Foundation, right? Their content is so good.
If you’re a hiker or a conservationist, you don’t want to miss that. So you put that in key areas throughout the site and you have to think it through. It shouldn’t just be in the footer because everybody puts it in the footer. Maybe you have a page that talks about your perspective on hiking. Let’s say we didn’t do that, but let’s say that’s there.
And then somewhere embedded in that you have a carefully placed, kind of solicitation to sign up for the email newsletter. It really depends on what information you’re trying to gather to your point about when does it become too much? I apply common sense there. If it’s just over the top.
It should be obvious to you, or at least if you’re giving it to someone else to review the site, it should be obvious to them. It should be appropriate calls to action based around what your goals are and done in a transparent, but kind way. So you’re not hitting the user over the head with solicitations.
Nobody likes that.
RHEA 18:03
No, absolutely not. there’s a fine balance here because there is. something about not asking enough and there is something about asking too much, right? And I don’t think that there is a clear, threshold of do this, don’t do that. But I think you have to put yourself in the shoes of your donor.
Like If you, I get 15 solicitations in a row, yeah, I’m going to maybe find that somewhat annoying,
LOU 18:22
And I get it in the sense that, at the end of the day, this is the lifeblood of a nonprofit. So they so desperately want to make sure that they’re getting themselves in front of a potential donor.
Another kind of guidance we like to give clients is that this is a marathon, right? It’s you don’t get a great website overnight. You have to iterate, right? You have to start with those four pillars. You have to invest some time and some resources and your website. It’s a living, breathing thing.
Just as your audience changes, your mission may change over time. Some global event happens that change, so all of that’s changing. Why does your website stay stagnant? So you should be working to address and making it better and improve it over time. I laughed a little bit when you said, hitting people over the head.
We at one point We never got this client, but it was an animal welfare organization, a smaller one. I saw that the executive director showed us her website. She’s what do you think? And I swear on that homepage must have been six asks of different forms. And it was the first thing I called out to her.
I hope I haven’t seen the site since then, but I hope they made that, that update. But yeah, you can’t ask too much.
RHEA 19:16
let’s talk about story. you said storytelling is a component and I think I’d like to break that down because I think storytelling means a lot of different things to different people.
how do you define storytelling and what kinds of stories should we be sharing on our
LOU 19:29
website? I would define storytelling as the kind of the practical application of your mission. So whatever your mission is, what story are you going to tell that reinforces what that mission is. I don’t know, off the top of my head, we have a client called Pillar Care Continuum, and they’re in the special needs industry.
And they work with severely handicapped or disabled individuals. The idea there is to unlock the humanity of what this organization is doing. They’re transforming individuals lives. They’re reducing a great deal of stress in the families of these individuals. They are facilitating improvement in their lives, right?
So all of these things feed into their central core mission of improvement. So The idea there is to capture the stories of those individuals and where they came from and how they’re benefiting alongside great design and good photography so that, someone that has a family member that’s affected or someone that’s interested in supporting that type of organization.
Can relate to that. I think relatability is a big thing. So whatever nonprofit you’re talking about, the donor has to see themselves in that mission, right? And they have to know that the story is supporting that mission all throughout the website. the stories you can think of them in terms of, vignettes of individuals or case studies.
Case studies is a very technical word, so you don’t have to use that, but you want to show individuals where you’re making impact. Impact is a huge component as well, too, of playing that story.
RHEA 20:44
let’s get into some of the other things. So we talked about positioning and actually now that I’m thinking about it, I want to go back to positioning for a second because I think sometimes there is this belief that rebranding is simply.
rEvamping the website or getting a new logo or getting a new palette. let’s talk about the distinction between a rebrand versus simply changing your assets.
LOU 21:05
So the way you look at it, so let’s talk about the definition of what a brand is, right? So a brand, at least in my estimation it’s the summation of all the feelings and associations a donor and a follower has towards your organization.
So if you define it that way. It’s much more than just the logo, isn’t it? It’s really a series of principles and values how you’re going to be operating and how you want people to feel About what your organization is doing. if you look at it that way, that’s a hugely important component So it’s not a matter of just saying well, we need a new logo and throwing that up on the website although You know if you feel that your brand is doing a good job of conveying what you do.
It just needs a little bit of a freshening. That’s an opportunity as well too. That’s definitely a thing. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but I feel I’m deviating from your question but in terms of the importance of the brand, it definitely takes more than just, overhauling it or printing up the
RHEA 21:54
colors. we’ve talked about positioning, we’ve talked about storytelling, let’s talk about functionality. So one thing that I’ve heard recently, which again I have not personally experienced, I came from a very reliable source is that there are folks who go around and look at nonprofit websites and threaten to sue over ADA compliance.
I know, which is like just another thing we need to worry about. But, when we say functionality, A, let’s talk about, basic functionality, and B, let’s talk about ADA compliance, because I do think we, we do, to your point, have to be aware and sensitive to different user
LOU 22:26
needs. Let’s take the second question first, since it’s on my mind as well, too.
So there are a series of guidelines that every organization that has a website, which is really everybody, should be aware of, right? And they’re called, the acronym is WCAG, so they’re called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and you can look them up. they’re an offshoot of the People with Disabilities Act, so it’s something to familiarize yourself with.
But they’re really aspirational because there’s no way everybody and every website is going to be able to address all of these, but you should be made aware of it. And sometimes clients come to us and say, we want to be fully ADA compliant. And can you do that? And we basically tell them, look it’s not possible.
We do the best we can, we have the right developers in place. We have a good understanding of what it means to be, accessible and compliant, but there’s always that gray area. And that gray area is what you’re referring to about it. I’m not going to say attorneys, but individuals going around trying to locate sites that they cannot.
my first piece of advice to clients that come to us with that is you have to start with your attorney, They know best in terms of related to what your site looks like and what you’re looking to deliver. They can give you the guidance and then you come to an organization like us that can help implement that.
So it’s definitely something to be aware of. In particular, I don’t know which ones you’re thinking of, but there was a museum, I think, in the New York Times that I read about that got sued. Quite substantially because they didn’t have the proper tools for I think visually impaired individuals to use.
So it’s something to definitely be concerned about your previous question about just basic functionality again. The principle there is to think through what you think you want your users to do. And every nonprofit is different. Every nonprofit has a different, programmatic approach. what tools can you provide your clientele, your donors so that they can have the most useful experience with your website?
RHEA 23:57
we’ve talked about positioning, we’ve talked about design, we’ve talked about the user experience. Let’s talk about technology, because as we know, often with a website, we’re adding additional things.
What comes to mind for me, obviously, is the donation platform that you use. What are the things that we need to be thinking about as it pertains to, I’ll call it add ons to the core website.
LOU 24:16
Let’s start with the donation platform because that’s so critically important and every nonprofit basically requires one.
There’s two considerations that we look at when a client’s considering a donation platform. So the first is, and this is really important. I’m surprised sometimes how clients really miss this one. Is it’s an internal consideration of what data are you trying to collect?
What information do you want out of the donors that are coming in and the amounts that they’re giving? And so from the beginning the director of development or in a smaller organization executive director should really be thinking through This is the data I require. This is what I have to present to the board This is what we need, to sustain ourselves and then understand the functionality you want behind that And we’ve had clients that, they would go on a product tour with us because that’s what we do.
We take them to a particular provider and say, this is what they offer. And they say, Oh yeah, great. Install it. And then three months in, they’re like it doesn’t do this and it doesn’t do that, and why doesn’t it? And so it’s really important to think long and hard about that consideration. So that’s the first one.
The second is more a design and a user experience consideration. The ideal donation experience is that a donor will come to your website. They’ll be engaged in the story. You get them to the donation page and they stay on the website. They don’t have to be sent to a third party page where it’s a different design and they see a different web address and they go, my God, is this secure?
a lot of nonprofits fall into that trap. I’m not blaming anyone. Some of the products make you do that. we look for products that both have big reporting great reporting capabilities and ones that allow us to take those forms and buttons and things and put them right into a website.
That’s for the donor management platform. There’s, a lot of other tools we could talk about. let’s talk
RHEA 25:42
about. technology and how it changes. I’m listening to you and I’m like, Lou, this sounds great. Probably sounds expensive. I could go on Squarespace or Wix or WordPress and create my own.
What’s the value of working with someone like your agency versus a do it yourself job?
LOU 25:56
fIrst of all, there’s no shame in a do it yourself job. You have to approach each organization for what they can do, the resources that they have, and you want to give them the best solution for where they’re at.
The challenge with the do it yourself it’s just inherent in that proposition that, you’re an executive director, you’re a director of marketing, you are not a professional designer. You don’t understand the psychology of color or what one person is going to think when they see this image versus that image.
You’re not a professional developer if you need to add on technology. As much as Squarespace has revolutionized the industry, it can’t do everything. The advantage is that you have expertise in all of those, all those four areas that we spoke about. You’re hiring an expert to come in and based on having done hundreds of websites in your field.
be able to say, okay we’ve experienced this problem before, this is how we address it. Oh, you have this strategic challenge. We’ve seen that before. This is how that client did it. there’s really a lot of value to it. You’re correct. It’s not inexpensive. An organization has to find the right agency or at least the right freelancer, but there’s really a lot of, I’m, obviously I’m biased here, but there’s a lot of benefit into working with an agency that kind of knows what they’re doing.
[00:26:56] Rhea Wong: Okay. two good questions, but let’s just start with one. If you’re stretched thin financially and in terms of time and can’t necessarily do a whole website overhaul, where are the best places to focus your attention? What are the highest leverage places you should be focused on first?
[00:27:09] Lou Kotsinis: you’d start from a very basic approach.
Is the site functioning operational, Is it hosted properly? Are all the pages firing off the way they should. So some of a very common sense structural, is your donation page, quote unquote broken. do first aid. That’s really what you’re doing. What is preventing my donor from coming to the site and experiencing it properly?
After that, you can start to work your way up in terms of the more cosmetic Elements and that really becomes a matter of personal preference and budget. Donation page is working properly. What’s the homepage experience looking like? does it make you as the member of that nonprofit kind of cringe because it needs an update?
So maybe we go and update the homepage. I would start with that kind of bottom up approach where you’re doing dealing with the most essential things first and then working on it. The cosmetic and then you can get the very high level things like additional functionality or, adding more pages to enhance your story.
RHEA 27:55
I’m curious too from a resource perspective, as we know in the nonprofit, we’re all understaffed and overworked. How much time or what kind of time should we be putting ideally into the website?
LOU 28:05
It really depends how much time you can allot, but I would recommend At the very least, set aside an hour each month where you are focused exclusively on that website and you’re doing the kind of review that, I’m advocating here, soup to nuts, the whole thing, make assessments from that.
And you can bring people in to assist you. You don’t necessarily need to hire anybody. You probably got volunteers or interested donors and just, ask their opinion. What could we be doing differently here? What you like, what you dislike, hopefully bringing in your analytics as well, too.
So look at Google Analytics and see where, potential donors are spending the most amount of time that’s in minimal environment. Ideally, you want to look at it once a week, We haven’t touched base on this yet in terms of functionality, it’s critical that you have a content management system, the CMS, which is really just a fancy way of saying it’s a piece of software that allows you to make updates to your website without having to know code, WordPress is the major one that comes to mind.
So assuming you have one of those, you should be going into your, CMS once a week, what ideas do you have for new content? How can we freshen this page up? It’s a homepage still resonating with the users that are coming here based on what we’ve heard of is the donation Capability still up to par is our mobile, you know view working the way it should so just a general common sense assessment of the website that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel and if you’re doing this once a week or a Couple times a month you’ll find that you’re not going to have to do a comprehensive overhaul anytime soon Because as much as I love doing that, I love building new sites from beginning to end, it’s a blunt instrument, right?
And it’s really for organizations that realize that strategically the site is completely holding them back, but that usually happens because they haven’t been spending the adequate time along the way to look at the site.
RHEA 29:35
Okay, I have two last questions before we wrap up. How can we do A B testing?
Because I think this is a step I see a lot of folks miss, which is you think that you are saying a certain thing and yet it’s not landing the way that you think it will. what are some easy ways that folks can A B test their messages?
LOU 29:51
Sure. This is the one curveball you’re going to throw me today because I have a senior project manager that does all of the A B testing for us.
So if there’s any way I can follow up with your audience, if they want to shoot me an email, I’m happy to give technicalities here. But there are products that you can purchase relatively affordable. I think Google still makes a product. Let’s say you’re working off the home page and you’re able to take that home page and use that as the test page. And then you can make a duplicate of that page and tweak the messaging just a little bit. And that becomes your B. So that’s the technical components. But your specific question is related to how can we judge what’s working and what isn’t?
RHEA 30:21
Both things. Yeah. what are some ways that we know that our messages are landing or are resonating with our audience in the way that we
LOU 30:27
intend? So first of all, this is a long term approach because there’s multiple elements to a page. So it could be anything. It could be that you didn’t put the form in the right place.
It could be that audience a likes this image versus that image. it’s a matter of continual testing over time. In an ideal world, you’re running an A B test permanently and just updating your site based on what’s working. It can be numerous things. And again, that comes down to speaking to your audience.
And it doesn’t have to be this big research project. You can put a brief survey up on your social media channel, or you can reach out to four or five constituents whose opinion you trust and understand. And have them as your test audience and just say, okay, we tweaked our messaging this week.
What do you think of that? And then you’ll start to see results in terms of your analytics. More people are coming to the site, more people are engaging with it. And potentially you’ll start to see obviously more donations, you’re doing something right. So work with that component and then just keep tweaking it along the
RHEA 31:13
Yeah. And I think a really helpful idea around A B testing is test one thing at a time, because I think if you make a bunch of changes and improvement, you don’t actually know which of those changes are actually the thing that made the difference. Okay. Last question coming in from Erin. Erin, do you want to unmute yourself and ask, or I could ask on your behalf?
Yeah, I can ask if that’s okay. Yeah, please jump in here. we’ve spent a
LOU 31:33
lot of time cultivating our website. It’s beautiful. It looks great. You actually touched on this, but we use Blackbaud all true as our donation platform, which does take you off side. It’s not as beautiful or clean or user friendly.
do you have any recommendations on like donation platforms or management systems that do integrate right into your WordPress site? Yeah there’s a lot. The problem is I don’t want to take you away from Blackbaud because Blackbaud As much as they still haven’t caught up in terms of user experience.
They still haven’t gotten the message they’re reporting from what I understand. I’m not a development person is outstanding. don’t have a recommendation for working within BlackBowd to solve that problem but in terms of third party products that you can use, I should say donor management platforms you can use that address that user experience, there’s a lot.
We like Virtuous, Classy is a good product Bonterra, which has now taken over, Salsa, and EveryAction, both of those products do it. So there’s a lot out there. In fact, it’s hard for me to even keep up because so many are coming on the market. I think the best way to define this, Aaron, is that the one that does not do it, unfortunately, is BlackBaud.
And I’m sure maybe they have a side product that does it, but the major ones… Still seem to be the third page type
RHEA 32:39
[00:32:39] Rhea Wong: solution. All right. Thanks, Lou. We could talk to you forever cause I could nerd out about all the marketing things, but I really appreciate your being here. We’ll make sure to put all of the information as far as where to find you in the show notes.
Any last thoughts as we’re signing off today?
LOU 32:53
Yeah, if you want a one phrase mantra to all of your listeners out there who, want to understand how to approach website development for their nonprofit, love, love your audience. If you love your audience. Understand what their needs are that can’t help but be reflected in your website when you think about it.
RHEA 33:08
I love that so much. I’ll just add this last piece to you. Doing a little something is better than doing nothing. I think it’s very easy to get overwhelmed by all of the different things that we could do in the analytics and the rebrand and the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, this. Just do one thing at a time.
Lou, thanks so much for being on the call and we’ll make sure to put all your info on the show notes. Is it okay if folks reach out to you on LinkedIn?
Absolutely. Great. Folks, thanks for listening. If you like this show, please like and share on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast. Have a good day.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nonprofitlowdown/support
