 Hi everyone, this is Joe DiGiovanni with TAP Network, and I'm here with Kyle Barkins, my other co-founder from TAP Network. We're a marketing and technology company, and we just want to do a little housekeeping on the call today with us as well as Aretha Simons from TechSoup. So if you want to communicate with us during the live event, just go into the Zoom chat or raise your hands for talking or you can email us, but we'll use the chat for any questions and the event will be recorded. So at the end of the event, we can send the recording and we'll send the presentation as well. So yes, my name is Joe DiGiovanni, co-founder of TAP Network. My background has been in marketing communications and Kyle, his background is in marketing technology. We formed TAP Network as an organization 10 years ago that really served the nonprofit space. We've served over 600 nonprofits. We have a staff of around 40 people and we work directly with TechSoup. So anyone who comes to TechSoup and needs website development or marketing services, we're the exclusive provider on behalf of TechSoup. And yeah, as I said, we're a marketing technology company, purpose-driven, empowering organizations for good and we're excited to get started on today's meeting. So the agenda, today we're going to really look at website goals. We'll learn how to determine your organization's top goals and then how your website can be used to achieve those goals. On the front end and the back end, we'll look at what platforms we can use to execute that and then we'll also share some tools and technologies to get you there and really increase your conversion rates no matter what your goals are. So the importance of website goals. A lot of folks think of goals, they assign them to marketing, they assign them to a business, but a website, it's really the command central for your nonprofit. If you're going to achieve your goals, the website is 99.9% going to be the engine that gets you there. So the first thing you really need is to clearly identify your business goals and how do they align with your website goals. So focusing on that strategic part will really help you get there. So well craft a website that aligns with these goals will do just that. It will attract supporters, donations, awareness, and any other goals you have. When setting goals, we always look at these as smart goals. So are they specific? Are they measurable? Are they achievable? And are they timely? Can you do them in the time you're seeking? So let's pull that together. So first things first, how do we different goals for a website change the content and structure? So we're going to look at the content and structure of the websites and then see how they align with the goals of your organization. So what are the most common nonprofit website goals? Raising awareness, that's usually at the top of the list and then driving donations, but there's a lot that happens in between as well. Some organizations, their whole nonprofit relies on volunteers, volunteer recruitment and volunteer management. And then is the website using to being used to support the program deliveries that providing the information and resources that your volunteers are the people you serve need? Or is it serving to build the community? It's where people come to interact amongst themselves and really becoming an online portal per se for collaboration. And then is it used to advocate for change? Are you driving petitions and whatnot for your nonprofit? And then sharing news and updates. So all these pieces work together. Some will be more important than others. But really, when we design a website, we look at each one of these, look at the importance and how they're interrelated. So from the chat, just love to hear from everybody. Yes, the slides will be available. Love to hear from everyone. And you can just put it into the chat. Like what are the most important goals for your organization? If you could put the top one or two goals, that would be great. Just going to feel for what people are looking to do. Raise awareness, building community, attracting volunteers, donations. Here we go. Yeah, it's a nice mix. All the above, right? So yeah, we're seeing more and more people looking to build community. That's really been on the rise with a lot of different member tools out there. We can do that. And when COVID came along, we couldn't do live events. A lot of folks were doing things virtually to bring people together. So it's nice to see everyone's using technology to achieve all these goals. All right, let's move on to the next slide. Thanks, Joe. So building off those questions and answers in the chat, as Joe mentioned, we saw a lot of driving awareness kind of to be expected, but also driving community. So today we'll go through sort of some ways and how you can use your website to help get you there. So the first one being driving awareness of your cause as well as your organization. And some of the ways that we do that, we've got sort of a case study on the screen here of how this is laid out. One way is through content. So emphasizing storytelling and using a lot of your visuals and the media across your website so that you can show how your nonprofit makes an impact. So when someone comes to the website, they see the images you've chosen, they see the copy there, they can really understand how you connect to your audience, connect to your causes. And the other way, another way to do that would be through the structure. So how you can use different pages, but more specifically different sections like the blog or the news section to keep people updated, to give them something refreshing to come back to. So getting out of just the bro short style website that just tells about who you are, what you've done, and really use the news, the updates, the blog section through a website to provide content, constant updates through content. So that could be an impact you've had, that could be recent events that you've hosted and who attended and who was supposed to support and such as that. Another point of the goals would be to drive donations. So how do we drive donations to their website? Again, through content and same sort of things here, content and structure. So the content we use is going to emphasize the impact that donation is going to have. It's really important, especially as you're asking for someone's time or someone's money, or them to share these donations with their trusted friends, family, whatever it might be, you really want to emphasize what impact that donation is going to have. So if I give a dollar, where does that dollar go? If I give you my time, where is that time going? A great way to do that is through evolving content and creating content and showcasing the impact that they or other donors have or will have. And then from a structural standpoint, making sure there's clear calls to action that let them know that this is the impact that your organization has. Here's the impact that other donors have had and how they can actually get involved. So you'll see on the examples on the screen here, it's not always just going to be, hey, donate now, give me money, things like that. You want to have a combination of like soft and we'll call like sort of like a harder call to action. The soft ones would be like learning more. So learning more about the impact other donors have had. And then you can get more specific and have something that says like make an online donation or donate now or contribute now and using those things. And then as we talk through this, as we go through these things, it's nice to funnel, it's a best practice to funnel people down to a single donation page. So you might have multiple things they can donate to on that donation page, but you don't really want to confuse the audience by having like multiple different donation pages scattered throughout your website. Create a common place where they can come to donate or to give time to volunteer or to sign up for an event. We're serving the community. An example we put here, we worked with a lot of 211 organizations in the United Ways and they're heavily emphasized, heavily emphasis on serving their communities and becoming and being a resource for their local communities or cities, whatever the municipalities, whatever they might be. So your content on your website, one way to reach this goal is using the content on your website, emphasizing the resources that are available for that target audience. So if you serve caregivers or providers of different age range children, different age ranges of children, the resources that are available to them either through the state or the local government or through those providers, those organizations, showcasing things like event calendars, volunteer opportunities, user generated content that can be provided as a resource is a great way to use content to drive towards that goal. And then as far as how we structure these things, making sure that it's very clear how someone navigates there and can get to where what they want. So if you think of this, in this example, this is, you can kind of see how you would drive someone through. So they select their category, they can start entering keywords, they can look for what the resource they want, they can drill down to either through a mat or through the form on the right. In this example, by their zip code, by their city, whatever, but you're giving them many different ways, but they know where they're trying to go, right? Same sort of thing with like a calendar, you know, if you've got a calendar or a website, yeah, it's great just to have a calendar list or a list of all your events, but you really want to give them a way to like sort, search and filter by the type of event they're looking for, or even the type of donation or something like that that they might be looking for. So adding those features like sort, search and filter another really great way that's that's becoming obviously it's been popular for for a while but becoming more and more popular through things like AI and the chat tools are adding a chat bot or a discussion forum right to your website, which can really help you connect immediately. If you have someone that's able to manage that chat bot and manage that chat bot or you can use the AI tools to kind of create what we're going to call sort of like smart, smart chatting where you can engage with your visitor without you actually being there. So have a series of prompts and questions to guide them down their path to direct them to where they should be going to get to better serve your community. We want to kind of so we talked about a few of the different different goals but looking at some ways that we can make some of those goals work together across your website. So we do this by prioritizing so making sure that we understand what those common goals are. You don't just throw everything on the homepage, for example, and identify how you're going to highlight those throughout the site. So what are the most important calls to action? Where are you going to show your impact stories? But coming up with that plan in the beginning and prioritizing those goals. So is our main, think about from an organizational standpoint, is your main goal and do you want to showcase yourself as someone who's trying to drive donations or do you want to showcase you as an organization who is in this example creating leaders. So lead with that, whether that's recruiting leaders or using donations to drive more of those leaders, and then have, like I said, the secondary calls to action to do things like make a donation or get involved, whatever that might be. Also being able to integrate multiple goals into like a single user experience. So as I mentioned, like having one donation page, but then the opportunities for people to donate to different causes, different pieces of the causes or even volunteer so that you've got them there, but now you're able to use that same page, that same system to drive more value to them. But this is a place where you've got to be a little bit careful here going back to prioritization to be sure you're not confusing them on that page. So again, don't just throw everything there, make sure you've got a priority for how you want it to do that. And then segmenting your audience. So understanding that a bunch of different people might be visiting your website for different purposes and making sure there's a clear user experience for them to follow. So if it's a first time visitor, you might want to just give them a background on who your organization is and give them an opportunity to learn more. So understand that's a first time visitor, or you might have a donor or a repeat donor or something like that. They might be more interested in seeing where the money that they donated last year, last month or whatever is going. So you want to drive them to like a news updates or impact page. To help prioritize these goals, it's important to start to map your goals to the website functionality. So how does your website work? How can your website work and how are you building this out? We do that through calls to action, through the content and the messaging we started to talk about, through navigation and site architecture, and then ultimately through data collection and reporting to see how that's working and to make improvements over time. So mapping your goals to your website functionality through calls to action, calls to action, you'll hear us call them CTAs are typically just a lot of times you'll see them as a button or like an image where you're asking someone to take a next step. But these are, this is the whole piece. I can't probably show you on my screen here, but if you see where it says like Lucy outreach, lifting up Camden's youth donate now, that whole section is technically to call to action, but we're speaking more specifically to the, usually the headline and the button. So what do you want them to do? These should be tailored towards your specific, that specific audience and fit the look and the feel and design and things like that to your website. They can be as complex, you know, as like a video with a button over it or they can be as simple as just like a headline with like a short description and then maybe you'll see like a link that says, you know, learn more or, you know, read this blog post or something like that. But all of that is built to drive someone to take that next step versus something that's more flat. Like if you just had like a listing of your services, there's really no call to action and telling you, you know, what your organization provides. So think about what that action is you want someone to take and make sure it's clear, concise and fits within the design looking feel of your website. Some examples of calls to action would be driving donations. So in this example, from Vatuity Cares with Assam Minhaj, we're using a celebrity endorsement to grab attention. You can see the donate button really stands out in that area below. And then we have like the tagline that shows, you know, United Against Health Equity. So it draws your attention. It tells you what the organization does and asks you to take that next step. There's also awareness type calls to action. You'll often see these where someone asks you to subscribe to a newsletter or, you know, sign up for blog updates. This just, this is like a really top of the funnel way to get someone to give you a little bit of information, but knowing that they don't have to give you anything as an organization yet. So you're not, maybe they don't know who you are yet, but they want to see, you know, learn more about, you know, how your organization is providing services within the community or how they might be able to get involved, but they're not ready to take that next step. So you want to give them a way to encourage them to give you a little bit of information, like their email address, maybe they want to opt into text messages, or this could be something like a chat, like a chat bot where they give you a little bit of something, you give them something back. So you're asking them to give us your email address, we're going to send you our newsletter called CTAs for Engaging Volunteers. So think about these, it's like a volunteer now button, things like that. And as I talk about, talk through all these things, I think it's really important to highlight that just dropping a button on your website usually won't drive the action, the engagement you're looking for. In the thousands of websites you've done, in many cases, we have people, you know, our executive directors, things like that, a different organizations who just want to plop a donate now button in the header of their website. And they expect that to drive the donations. And across the board, more than 90% of these, we don't see clicks on those donate now buttons. It's nice to have it there, it kind of reinforces that your organization is looking for donations that someone is able to make a donation. But the bulk of the donations happen in contextual cross-actions. Same thing for volunteers, same thing for join now, stuff like that. People are, especially for first time or, you know, sort of strangers coming to the website, they're not just going to come there and click that big red button at the top right corner, you need to give them some context. And that's especially important for things like volunteers and community service. So having like a volunteer button on the home page, header, photo, like we said, to show that that's what you're looking for, but then using that call to action to ask them for more information to reach out so that they're not just, you know, again, you're not just popping a button there hoping they click it. Same thing is true with what's for calls to action for serving the community. Give them, these often will need some more context behind them. So tell them why they should serve, why they should join your community, whether that's to like have their questions answered by other community members, whether that's to engage with, you know, your core audience, and then make sure you're providing resources for them to help them connect with those partners, those audiences as well. From call to action, we can jump into using content and messaging to map to your goals. So as long as your content, your messaging is tailored to your, should we tailor to your specific goal? It's a little bit less important to think about just creating a ton of content. So we're not talking about like, you know, you got to create multiple pages, you got to put multiple blogs. It's important to make sure that you're the way that your website is organized, especially your home page is organized is tailored to that specific goal. And then you want to allow evolve that content out over time. So if the goals for like raising awareness, you might think about using more educational content, but focus on telling a story and following that story, you know, throughout the pages of your website, versus if you're trying to drive donations, you might want to think about shrinking these shrinking this content down and being very specific and having like an urgent call to action to say, you know, we need help now, we're raising money for this cause, especially if you think about organizations and like her disaster preparedness, like food security, things like that where it's a very urgent need, nothing, all needs aren't urgent, but the more specifically urgent needs, having that urgent call to action is a way to use content messaging to drive that behavior. Great. Thanks, Kafe. Yeah, content creation is probably one of the trickiest things to do. You have to really know, know your different audiences and you're creating content for each audience. And you're also creating the content at each stage of their conversion path to achieve those goals. If you want them to become a volunteer, you're going to have to create content that in the beginning raises awareness about your organization, gets a little more detailed and who you are, what you do, who you serve. And then when you make that ask to volunteer, it needs to be crisp and concise and upfront. So we usually have a rule of thumb of these five points. So know your audience for each nonprofit we work with, we create personas. So we understand that whole audience or user journey, whether they're coming in to volunteer or to donate or you're serving them within the community. What information do they need at each one of these stages? And then clearly articulate your mission that that needs to be first and foremost upfront on the home page, and especially on the donation page or on the volunteer page. Any of the pages, once you click that call to action, and they come to that landing page, what are you clearly articulating you want them to do? And that relates back to the mission, then use data and evidence. You know, there's so much clutter out there with so many different nonprofits. If you could use data that you're making an impact and have testimonials and evidence from real folks, that's going to really help elevate you above the crowd. So that's super important anytime you're creating content, back it up, and then be authentic and transparent. That goes right along with the data and evidence. Have start to form your voice within the community and then optimize all your content for search engines. So on the back end of WordPress and other platforms, there's different plugins we get discussed at the end of the questions, but how do you really optimize for search engines so when folks are searching for you, you're popping up. So they're kind of the main five tips for creating content and then we'll dig in a little deeper. On the next slide, see if we can move this forward. Yeah, so the next slide here, content and action. So when you're creating your mission statement, it's super important to get that nailed down right on your homepage. And the formula there, it's PSS, the problem, the solution, and then what does success look like if that problem is solved. So on the left here, we have Rally for Vets, Helping Veterans in Need. That clearly identifies what they do and they help pay for medical and mortgage bills for veterans and they do it through these car rallies. On the other side, we have Marley's Smile. They're committed to changing the world for kids with cancer in two ways. The first is they get a custom fairy friend, a stuffed animal, for the cancer patients, and then they're donating their funding and the donations to pediatric cancer research. So right then and there, you're seeing the problem, you're seeing the solution and what does success look like. And that success can be through the verbiage in your content or even in imagery, which is super important when you're asking for donations as well. We see so many nonprofits that have this highly aloof mission of saving the world, bringing peace, but we just need to get a little more specific on how we're going to do that and then we can really make an impact. On the flip side, with the next slide, if you're a nonprofit, let's say it's an association. We have a lot of associations or you're serving a community with information. If that's the case, then you really need to know your audience. This is for the Inter-Society Council for pathology information. So it's for pathologists and people who work in pathology. It's a member-based organization. So the way they look at content and achieving their goals is completely different. So their goals are like a lot of nonprofits or associations is to increase membership. And there's usually a dollar sign associated with membership, so that increases funding. And to make more members come and to pay that, they need to show value. So from a content standpoint, you're providing resources and access to events and it's almost like a library in terms of the content, but you're getting them what they need when they need it. And if your members are happy and you're providing member value, then sponsors will be attracted because they want to sponsor these types of sites who have a lot of members. So in this case, you're talking about pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies that want to support the needs of pathologists who may ultimately buy their equipment. So anyhow, two completely polar opposite ways to use content, but they're really both being used to achieve the goals once through donations. And the other on this side is more around membership and sponsorship. Great. So the next piece that's really important when we look at achieving your goals, we've gone through all this. And what we'll generally do with a lot of nonprofits is do a site map. So if we're going to create the website, this is where we'll build the schematic to kind of show the user journey for each one of these audiences. This will be completely different for the pathology association where people are coming in and they're using the website as a resource center. Whereas if it's a nonprofit around diabetes research or cancer, folks are coming in to learn how they can support people in need. So we'll map out. And it's always a great, great way to map out, even if you're just doing it on a napkin, but map out that user journey and your website. So you know how all these different, these different pieces work together. And as someone takes a step from the homepage to the about page or they're reading a blog, if the goal ultimately is to drive a donation or a volunteer, if you could increase the conversion rate at each one of these steps, because you have the right content, you have the right messaging, the CTAs are in the right spot. And you're clearly articulating the next step or what they need to do. If you increase those conversion rates along the way, 10, 20% at the end of the day, you could be doubling your outcomes. So super important to map all this out as well. Thanks, Joe. So after we've mapped these things out, as Joe was mentioning for the navigation and the site architecture, so tips for effective navigation would be one, keep it simple. So, you know, not over complicating it, not having way too many drop downs, not, not overwhelming your audience when they get there, give them a concise path that they should take with that, that different levels of hierarchy. And we'll show you some examples on the following slides and some of those, those in action. Organize the content strategically. So making sure you have like categories and subcategories that make sense for your audience. So don't go overboard on the categories. I think a really great example that we're probably all familiar with on this, on this webinar would be TechSoup's website and how their, their blog is categorized. So if you go to the blog, you can see the different topics. Sure, there's subtopics and things like that that might exist. But they, they've done a great job of keeping it, keeping it clean, keeping it easy to navigate between like common themes, common, common topics and categories. Used descriptive labels. So this means like having navigation items that really tell you what the content's going to lead to. So if you just keep it very vague, it just says about and someone clicks there and it's like very specific, they might, they might feel like they've kind of gone the wrong way. So just making sure that they understand like what they're, where they're going to go and they click that button, click that link. In fact, a cost action, including cost action in your navigation. So thinking like we talked about like using that donate, that volunteer that can take them right to the donate form. As I was mentioning, like, this is not going to be the common path that someone's going to take. If you look in your Google analytics, like you probably see the same for yourself. Someone doesn't come to your homepage, just click on donate now. Likely what they will do though, what they, they, they may do is go through a few other pages, then end up on that donate page, whether that's from a link in one of those articles, or because, you know, you kind of reinforce them, that action that they can take. And then always optimize this for mobile. So make sure that you, you know, if it makes sure that the navigation can work across mobile devices. And isn't, you know, too long, it's not too many layers, too many drop downs and things like that. So if you do have a very heavy navigation on desktop, think about how you can reduce that for a mobile device to drive someone to where they're trying to go faster without having them to because on desktop, you can hover or mobile, you can't mobile. You have to click every single time. So if you've got like two, three levels of drop down menus, that's two to three more clicks that that person has to take in different scrolls that the person has to make on a mobile device. So use those responsive design techniques so that your navigation is easy to access across phones, tablets and things like that. So an example of effective navigation. So this one is, is I would call this, we call this a mega menu style. So this is what you're looking at here is someone on this website is hovered over the our work section. And this is a way to really cleanly break out sub navigation in there, but still giving context to what's happening. So on the left, you'll see that the sub menu items under our work, which would be, you know, agriculture and food, clean renewable energy, coal, as well as like another kind of top level navigation item, which would be legislature, and then like the bill tracker and directory, and then they give some space for them to add more in the future to the right. The way that this actually works and someone hovers over something on the left, it actually changes what shows up on the right. So you might see, you might see a different description of that. So this gives you like a way to give like an excerpt of what they, of what they can expect. So driving back to what we talked about, you know, making sure we're using descriptive language and labels. This is, this reinforces that even further by showing that you click on like agriculture and food. This gives a description of what to expect when they go to the agriculture and food section. And you'll see this also includes that, that Donate Now call to action button right up in the header. As far as organizing content, so you can kind of see how this, this sort of, this all drives to the same place. As you see these little, crazy little arrows going, going throughout this, when you click on different places throughout the website, if you were to go to northernplains.org, you kind of see this in action, but the different subsections there and that top left corner of this, this slide will drive you to the map and the map can kind of drive you back there. The map has a, goes both ways to, or that, that, that user experience goes both ways too. So you can see the left of that. We've also got like a listing of these things. So two ways to, to see visually how to get to those different communities. And then once you're there, it drives you to, to more information about that community. So if I follow this through from the top, from the top, I can go from Barak Creek Council, see where that is on the map. And I can also take that right through like that, that the content about Barak Creek Council further down the, the user flow basically. As we talked about keeping the website mobile optimized. So the navigation being mobile optimized, but also the website being mobile optimized is going to help, you know, drive more for your audience and keep that consistent user experience across all different devices. So as you see how this changes from the desktop so that the image on the left down to the mobile, mobile device for the image on the right. And as I was mentioning about, you know, multiple layers and clicks. So on the desktop, you've got who we are, our services, events, that type of thing. On the mobile device, you're going to have that little, it's called a hamburger menu. There's three little lines in the top right corner by the search icon. When someone clicks that, they would be presented with that same, that same menu. And if you notice the difference on the desktop and mobile, how the actual screen itself works. So we moved the contact us and then donate. We kept the contact us and then donate now called actions there on the mobile device. You'll see how that changes and resizes to fit on that new screen. From a website functionality standpoint, as we talked about once we've gone through, we've added all these features. You know, you want to start with the data collection reporting. So if you've got Google analytics set up and things like that now, you want to look at how things are performing. And you're going to make these changes based on what you see, but also based on assumptions that you hope to see once those changes are made. And then having a, having these data reporting tools in place are going to allow you to iterate over that and opt continually optimize across your site. So Google analytics, you know, if you don't, if you don't have it on your website, it's a free tool. It's pretty, it's very easy to get set up. There's a number of of course materials and content webinars that are available straight through TechSoup that'll help you help show you how to do this, how to get it out of your website. So you can at least start there and see what users are doing currently, plan these changes, implement these changes, and see how there's, how those changes are performing to update these to identify like where there's rooms for, where there's room for improvement where something you've, you've changed has, has really made a new impact across your organization. But what's great is if you tie this into, to, to more specific tools, something like HubSpot, you can also, you can then further track when someone comes to your website, what are they doing? And that'll mean just like the pages they click on, but like, are they converting? Are they converting, like filling out a form? You know, where do they come from to get to that page to sell that form? What are the most popular pages of the highest converting pages on your website? You know, what's the, what are the, what's the content areas of interest and things like that? And then you can even draw that out to, how does that convert to donations or volunteers or engagement? So some examples of how we collect data for these non-profit goals, we collect data on driving donations or attracting volunteers. So things we want to look at, like number of donations received, total amount of donations, where these donations are coming from. So they come in from like individuals, corporate sponsors, average donation amount, and then conversion rate for donation forms. So the conversion rate is just the number of visits versus the number of people that converted. So like, you find the percentage of those. So like, if 100 people come to the website and two people convert, the donation, the conversion rate is 2%. Right? And then you can, you can, having these things, you can calculate or report on other things like average, like we said, average donation amount, the total amounts per donation, you can get like a cost per acquisition and things like that from those numbers. Once you have, once you start to collect this and collect that information into a, like a data tool. Same thing, you can look at the similar things for attracting volunteers or, you know, converting new community members. So number of volunteers signups, the type of volunteers that activities that were, that they were interested in and actually converted them. And then you can get more granular and look at things like number about volunteer hours, log, you have a system where the volunteers can come in and either sign in or they can, they can log their time. And then look at that over time. So the same thing from like a calculation standpoint, that's a bunch of data collections standpoint. Once you've collected it, you can start to see like retention rate of volunteers. So how many do we get last year? How many of those carried over into this year? How many of those, you know, are, are volunteers for, you know, year over year? Some of this platform we already touched on, but Google Analytics said free. It measures website user traffic, common user behavior. You can get very granular and set goals and things in here, but just at a high level, it's a great tool to put in place to see where your users are coming from, what they're doing on your website, what the popular pages are, how much time they're spending there and look for opportunities to improve things like bounce rate, time on page and things like that. With HubSpot, it's a marketing automation platform, also like a sales enablement tool. So like a donation enablement tool as well. You can track website traffic, your leads and really manage in a CRM and a contact relationship management system, volunteer and donor data, as well as other, you know, website visitor data across the board. Razor's Edge is great for tracking donations, very donation heavy and specific, manage donor data, generate those reports, survey monkey, great for collecting feedback, data about donors and just getting sort of, I would say right now, it would be, when you think about a survey tool, I wouldn't use that so often to track it to a specific donor, but just to take, like to get, take the temperature sort of of your activity and your engagement across the donors, the volunteers, whatever. And then Tableau gets a little more detail. That's a business intelligence tool that'll allow you to visualize a lot of this data and actually pull in information from these different platforms and let you kind of slice and dice and show things over top of each other. So I see, you know, what does my website look like as far as, you know, over donor traffic or donor information? Great, thanks Kyle. So yeah, to summarize all this around goals, it really comes down to, you know, a three-step process. It's identify, improve and implement. So identify your top goals for, for the website, whether it's donations, volunteers and awareness. And when setting those goals, always important to start with the baseline, where you want to improve to in timing. So if the website's generating a hundred thousand dollars a year, we want to increase donations by 20, 20% to 120,000. And we want to do this within six months. So set those specific goals with a timeframe around each of these different goals. And that'll really start, start you in the right spot. And then improve where, where can you improve? So if you're trying to increase donations, what can you improve? Is it being more clear in terms of the messaging on the home page in your hero section? Is it educating your audience a little bit more and building that trust through testimonials and blogs? And then are the call to actions timely and in the right space? And if the call to action is to donate, does that donation page, is there an image of a person that could be served by your donation? Is that pulling at the heartstrings? Can you relate to that person? Is the messaging clear about the benefits of what will happen if you donate and how that person's life will, will improve? All these pieces, if you look at each one, and it can improve all these, you know, you can, you can start to hit the, to hit those goals and then implementing them. You want to implement them, you know, might seem like a big task, but if you could knock off one piece at a time, which is great, you can actually measure each, each change, you know, through Google analytics or HubSpot to see how, how those changes are working. But that's really where the analytics come into play. So as you make these incremental changes, measuring to see the percent increase in traffic or, or conversion rates, that'll really help help as well. So anyway, that's, I mean, it seems like a lot, but if you tackle one of these one at a time, I think you'll be in great shape. The next part we just want to roll into is, you know, some of TechSoup's service offerings that, to help get you there. Tap, tap network through TechSoup. We offer two services through, through TechSoup. One is website development, and the other is digital marketing. So if you click on the services tab in TechSoup, and you'll see the dropdown menu, website services, digital marketing, that's us. We've been a partner with TechSoup for over five years and built close to a thousand different websites. So we're excited to help you out. We'll just go over a few of the services that we offer. One is a custom website development starting at $10,000. So if you're a new nonprofit, and you're looking to get out of the gates strong, that's something we can help you with. A lot of nonprofits we work with have a website that was built on Wix or Squarespace, or even WordPress, and you're looking to take it to the next level. So we'll use all the different tools in SEO and marketing automation to get you there. As far as our process, whether you're doing it yourself or working with another developer such as TAP, you know, really look at the strategy that'll be phase one. We'll do discovery, a content audit, a technology audit, see how everything's pieced together to really map out, map out that plan. And then it comes down to content development and design. And then ultimately, once all those design pieces are there, the contents there, we know where everything's flowing, then that's the development phase. Generally, we'll use WordPress. If you're into, you know, evolving into marketing automation, we'll integrate HubSpot into WordPress as well. And then it's really a growth driven approach of, you know, quality assurance and testing and retesting and measuring. So we're constantly improving your website and hitting those goals. So that's kind of the four part process. With other nonprofits, if you're, you know, in great shape and you're just looking to improve on a monthly basis, we have retainer services starting at $4.99 a month. And we're basically served as your outsourced CTO or chief marketing officer. We have a whole team that would be dedicated to your nonprofit with a select amount of hours to take all the requests that you need and work with you to set these goals and achieve them. Great. So I know we went over a lot today. It's more around, you know, strategy and in terms of setting your goals and how you can use your website to achieve them. We could dig a little deeper if you have technology questions as well, but we'll open up the floor to any questions that you guys might have. I'm going to read a few off here, Joe. So I'll just kind of go in order that's in the Q&A and go to the chat as well. So someone asked, how do you recommend integrating social media news feeds into a website? So the story summary is clear, draws attention on the website, but the amount of space taken up is minimized. It's a great question. I mean, it's really dependent on what those stories look like. So having your own social media feed on your website is a great way to show content that's refreshed without you having to repost it and put it right on your website. It's important not to duplicate that though. So like, let's say if you have a website where your blog auto posts to social media, then you have your blog post on your homepage and you have a social media field on your homepage, you're going to have duplicate content on there. It's just going to look distracting for the visitor if they see the same thing twice. So making sure that those things are related on brand, but not the same, not just repeated. So you can use one of the, either if you use something like WordPress or Squarespace, something like that, that is a social media feed. You can use one of those tools to feed that stuff in. Sometimes that's the difference between having an Instagram feed feed into your homepage, but having the blog on the homepage as well so you don't have that duplicate content. From as far as a newsfeed, same sort of thing there. If you're going to pull an RSS feed in, you can pull in, like you can use one of the plugins like an RSS reader and just resize it. So it's in a place that's not distracting to your website users. A lot of times what we'll see is these will be put in either the footer or in a sidebar or something like that. So they're there, but out of the way, they're not distracting from the main content across the website. Someone asked if we're looking to have a website for securing grants and provide membership, how would that look? That's probably something that you can reach out to us. We can talk about that more specifically, give you some more direction on that. Somebody asked, isn't Google Analytics ending? If so, what options will there be to collect this data? So Google Analytics isn't ending. They're changing their support to what their new piece, which is called their new tool called Google Analytics 4 GA4. In fact, if I believe it's July of this year, they will stop. If you have an existing Google Analytics property, it will stop receiving data and you'll have to move that to Google Analytics 4. If you have any kind of customization, they're not going to follow over automatically. So you'll have to make that upgraded in advance so that you can start collecting the information now so that you don't have this big gap for month-over-month data or year-over-year data. Those properties will still exist, but they won't get any new data. So like say August 1st, if somebody comes to your website and you haven't upgraded your Google Analytics 4 yet, you won't see any of that traffic showing up on there. Someone asked if we only work with nonprofits, we're a consulting firm that works with nonprofits. We're not a nonprofit. We work with enterprise-level businesses, small, medium-sized businesses. We focus very specifically a lot of our marketing towards nonprofits and through our partnership with TechSoup, that is nonprofit-exclusive, but we aren't nonprofit exclusive as far as an agency goes. Somebody asked any idea on creating a website just for members and no marketing or sales associated, such as a community or church. Done a number of these. Still filing these same best practices. A lot of times you are going to have a marketing front end of that in some way to drive them into there, to get them to come there, to join, to be part of your community. So filing these practices is going to be very helpful, but once you've built that on the back end, then it becomes more about that repeat user experience. So same sort of thing, keeping clear, concise navigation, calls to action, content, messaging, structure, things like that for them, and then just selecting the tools that are going to best fit you or your calls, your organization. Our questions or actions better for call to action messaging. For instance, interested in volunteering versus volunteering with us. Like interested in volunteering. Question mark versus volunteering with us. I mean, I'll take this one too, but I think it's good to have a mix of those two things, but you want to be sure that whatever that message is, that it's clear that that's eliciting an action, right? So there's things like, I see this pretty frequently where it's like, have you heard our nonprofit is now doing this, right? Learn more, right? So using that, have you heard question mark to guide them into there. For that, the example you share which says interested in volunteering question mark. That's great as long as you follow that with like the action that you want them to take, like interested in volunteering question mark. You could say something like, hear from other volunteers or the impact they've made, click here to volunteer now or hear from other volunteers. So you're still going to want to have like an action after that question. So you might just be in some cases over complicating it if you were having adding too much content there. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, Joe. Yeah, generally what we'll do, similar to emails, we can A, B test, call the actions and if you're using something like HubSpot, you can do that in real time and it will serve up. It'll rotate that call to action in there or you can leave one up for a few days and then swap it up for a different one and mention what's got the highest conversion rate. That's one quick way to do it and really test it out. What do you think of JobFormer's volunteer acceptance form on a website? JobFormer's a great option too as long as you track the database. Sometimes having that, it should be connected somewhere you can use like a CRM2 because you don't want to just look at forms sort of one dimensionally to see like how did this form do? You want to be able to see how did this person, like this donor, what did they do across my website? So if you're looking at that just on a perform basis, you want to be able to see at a more global basis, like let's say Joe visits your website, builds this format, that format, and some volunteer form, you want to be able to engage with Job across all of his actions or contextually from his actions. So making sure it's tied into a common database like CRM would be helpful if you're going to use that, but it's a very viable tool for information gathering. Somebody earlier on asked how many website pages are ideal. This is very specific to your organization, your need, and your capacity. I think there needs to be enough that it's clear what your organization does, the impact you have, and it's the kind of thing that will likely grow over time. But if you're one person working in that organization, limited budget, don't go overboard just trying to create a bunch of pages and a bunch of functionality. Use what's mission critical and iterate over that and improve that over time. And then if you have a lot of resources, or you're going to be building a lot of resources, making sure that that stuff is kept up to date clean and concise too if you have the bandwidth for it. Sorry, just trying to go through some of these questions here. Make sure we cover as much as we can at the time we've got left. Can you create backend dashboards for different volunteer positions used that can be visible to administration? You certainly can. It depends on the platform you're using. I know on WordPress you can do that. You can create a user backend on some of the different websites and portals. You can do that as well as using different BI tools. You can provide access to different reports based on user levels, user roles. You can also have custom software built or something like that on there as well. Following up for the social media newsfeed question. Do you recommend integrating Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or something else? Which one is the most effective? That's contextual to your organization as well. It depends what you like. A lot of times we'll see organizations that just want to create every social media channel that's out there and then a lot of them will stay stagnant. They won't be active on that. I would pick the channels that you can keep up to date that are appealing for and reach your target audience. You have to know who your target audience is and who you want to follow you. It's great if you have your friends and family follow your organization, but if that's not your user, that's not your audience. It doesn't really have the impact. You want to make sure that if your audience is on Facebook but not on Instagram, you should be active on Facebook and not really worry about Instagram. If your audience is on TikTok, be active on TikTok and not on the channels that they're not active on. Then having that feed across your website just reinforces that they can go there to stay up to date with you. They don't have to keep coming back to your website, so showing that they can follow, they can like that kind of thing. But again, back to that earlier point, if you have a YouTube channel and you've never posted anything on there, you should probably take the YouTube button off your website because you don't want them to go there and see that there's nothing expected to be something or they think it's like a dead link. Only what you can handle and only what is relevant to your audience, to your cause. Cut time for a few more questions. What is a realistic amount of time dedicated to website development, updating, is practical and recommended for most nonprofits? I hate to keep saying this is all contextual or specific to your nonprofit, but that really is. If your nonprofit is very active at larger nonprofit, full-time website person is not out of the question or full-time website team is not out of the question. Then even then, bringing an outside agency who can take on some of that work or take a strategic view is important. But if you're a small nonprofit or one person in an organization or working as part of a larger department, it's allocating the time that's relevant to what you expect to get out of it. If a lot of your, like Joe mentioned earlier on, we saw a lot of nonprofits that had to pivot during COVID that were serving people in person, serving people in their communities, a lot of Boys and Girls clubs, YMCA's and things like that to do these programs that now they're left with no way to reach their community and they had to quickly pivot to online only to be able to reach out to the community. In that case, the time spent changed drastically versus what they should spend on their website to building out their website, to building these programs on their website. I think we'll continue to see that as we grow and as organizations become a little bit less, a little bit more location agnostic, so they don't have to be specifically in person to serve someone. But it's the effort that you need to put in to get whatever is out of that. If you've traditionally done a lot of donation events and drives and things like that and your effort is typically focused on that and that's not paying off, but there's an opportunity to shift that online, you're going to want to shift that same effort to online, to marketing, to the web development. What's nice about the website development, taking the growth driven approach that we recommend, if you plan well, you start to execute that and you start to test and you start to optimize, it'll take a little bit more upfront but a lot less on the back end and you'll get to market faster than if you have this grand plan and you have to build this large system or website before you're ready to launch and then you've lost all that time that you could have been testing, that you could have been optimizing, you could have been growing your website. I'm trying to talk as fast as I can, so I hope you guys can still understand me. Just trying to get this in for the end of the hour. Would you prefer WordPress or HubSpot over Drupal? I hate the word Drupal. I hate the system Drupal. I don't, we don't love working on that for a number of reasons, especially because they have large upgrades that leave everything else in the dust and they're very complex. But it is a great tool for more complex websites and sometimes like user platforms. So in most cases, we would recommend WordPress. More than a quarter of all websites across the web are on WordPress. It is enterprise level if you need it. So I would take a look at that. There's a much larger group of developers and people out there that are familiar with things like WordPress and then HubSpot, especially from a marketing standpoint, but it's also budget specific from a website standpoint. I still typically lead towards WordPress for websites, but HubSpot for marketing for automation, for, you know, lead landing pages for forms, especially for CRMs and definitely for non-profit organizations as they offer a 40% discount for you all through TechSoup. We're HubSpot partner, Platinum partners. If you have any questions about that, reach out directly to us. We can get those answered for you. What's the best way to get in touch with you to have my questions answered? Through TechSoup, you can go to their website and go to services, find marketing or digital marketing or website, whatever that might be. Go through that. They'll put a form on that webpage. You can reach out to us. We will send this deck out to you all as well. It's got our contact information in it. You can probably just reply right to that to get in touch with us and we're happy to have time to go through any questions in more detail. I got time for probably one more. Do you recommend having all your blog pages stay on your website? I was thinking about using a link to Medium for my website to the blog post in Medium. That is yes and no. I recommend, a lot of times we'll use Medium as a way, as an outlet to drive traffic back to your existing website, but I would often keep the blog on your own website or on a blog platform attached to your website. You might have a separate website and blog, but the blog would feed through your website and the website would be prominent on the blog. I'll do that. I will do one more. Do dashboards on WordPress deprecate? Can they be used over time or do they fail? It depends what you use for the dashboard and the system that you use for that, how you embed it. It can, but a lot of we've got websites that have been updated, but using the same data and updating the dashboards over time for 10-plus years. That will be all the time we have today. I think there's probably a few more questions out there, but I actually have to jump for another call. I thank everyone for your time today. We will follow up. You will get these slides and this recording once it all compiles. Then you'll have our information to reach out to us directly for any additional questions we couldn't cover today. Thank you all very much for the great questions.