Benchmarking research finds charity websites not up to scratch

Finance | 7 Apr 2008

New research has found that even the few charities which have blogs negate their impact by making them too hard to find. iConcertina released the findings as a result of a three month benchmark study, comparing the websites of 110 UK charities on criteria including usability, accessibility, quality of information, and transparency. The project came about following the agency’s surprise that so few charities were using blogs, a technology which could provide an effective, simple and cheap means of communicating with stakeholders.

The worst performing criterion was accessibility, with no website gaining full marks and only two charities rated even ‘somewhat compliant’ with standards for HTML coding. Transparency and communication were considered to be below average, and usability rated average. A quarter of home pages did not explain what the charity does, while half did not indicate when the site was last updated, a useful tool for ensuring users visit regularly.

WWF-UK was judged to have the best website, outscoring its peers on usability, transparency and integration (supporting and working with the charity’s offsite and off-line communications). Even so, it only met the basic accessibility requirements, and only fulfilled one communication criteria, that of up-to-date information.

The top five was completed by Oxfam, Barnado’s, WaterAid and Cancer Research UK reflecting the importance of charities being able to put sufficient resources towards web development.

Directory: WaterAid | Barnardo's | Cancer Research UK (CRUK) | Oxfam | World Wildlife Fund UK (WWF UK)

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