Is your charity's website strategy failing? Louise Burgess suspects it probably is.

Is your charity one of the many that collectively misses out on millions of pounds in online donations? It’s a difficult question to answer isn’t it? Especially when you don’t know where you are going wrong.

Let’s start with what we do know: online behaviour of donors is changing as the British public increasingly depends on online resources and has high digital expectations of every organisation. Then there are the viral campaigns that can drive massive engagement and spikes in donations.

Despite this, too many charities fail to put digital at the heart of their fundraising strategies. There is a big chance that when potential donors reach your website for more information or to make a donation they are let down. Why? Because the site is difficult to navigate or doesn’t work hard enough to convert interest into support.

We surveyed 129 charities for our Charities are Missing out on £Millions whitepaper and identified four common website strategy failings.

One: The page title is the most important ‘on page’ search engine optimisation (SEO) signal, yet, 42 per cent of charities fail to optimise their homepage titles

Without an optimised page title and correct mark-up for the homepage, your site will be less visible to internet users by ranking lower or with irrelevant search snippets in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Non-optimised page titles often reference just the charity name or include the keyword ‘home’. So unless your charity’s name equals the search term, people will have trouble finding the right website. It’s easy to get it right: a bespoke homepage title that includes a description of the charity or creates an emotional connection with a potential supporter will encourage conversion and clicks to the site.

Two: According to Tagman research, every one-second delay in page load times results in 11 per cent fewer page views and a 7 per cent loss in conversions.

Let’s take the average donation size of £29 and average charity conversion rate of 3.96 per cent. Let’s assume that if your website takes one more second to load, for every 400,000 unique visits each month, you could be missing out on up to £375,840 in donations every year!

Check your page speed with Google as it assigns a speed score between 0-100 points, which it uses to determine search rankings. If you achieve a score higher than 85 then your site is performing well. Anything below that would require improvements. Shockingly, only 10 per cent of charities achieved a score of 80 or higher.

Three: Donation buttons need to be visible to work, right? Yet, 26 websites (20 per cent) did not mention the word ‘donate’ on their homepage at all. Of those that do facilitate giving, the donation buttons are often not prominent enough.

Every charity should make it simple for visitors to access the information they need and to donate. Yet too often, this dual requirement is not adequately reflected in homepage design. It is your responsibility to guide site visitors through the site and tell them what they should do.

Four: How often do you search for information or purchase an item on a mobile phone? According to Google, 36 per cent of all searches in the ‘donations and charitable giving’ sector are now on mobile devices. However, almost 70 per cent of the charities surveyed used the same template for their mobile, desktop and tablet sites.

For our own charity clients, on average 21 per cent of all website sessions are on a mobile device. If we again take the average donation size of £29, unique monthly users totalling 400,000, and average mobile conversion rate of 0.2 per cent, then mobile contributes around £58,000 in donations each year.

Charities that cater for a mobile audience and move to a responsive design will see conversion rates increase quite significantly, so ignore this at your peril.

By addressing the failings above, charities can future proof their online strategies and collectively, potentially gain millions of pounds in online and mobile donations. 

Louise Burgess is COO of equimedia Group