 So welcome to my talk on web press for nonprofits. But first a few words about myself. My name is pierget polyhawk and you can follow me on twitter With bph. I have a web development company Distributed web development consulting agency called poly Systems and I'm also the co-founder of an organization It's called NPTEC projects. It's a nonprofit helping nonprofits with technology And we blog about nonprofit technology in general about technology strategies And we talk about it also on our podcast So when you go to NPTECprojects.org you can look that up and follow along And subscribe to your podcatcher, as people say. We also have a program called wp for good where we offer nonprofits That are on web press education like video tutorials. It's the wp for good club. We also offer managed hosting if they need it. And we do one-on-one calls once a month as well as e-mail Support in terms of how do i do this? How do i do that? Kind of answers where we share our knowledge with it. So before we get into it, so who is here working for a nonprofit? All right. And who has built websites for nonprofits? Oh wow, thank you. And who wants to build websites for nonprofits? Yeah, that's the other part. So we have a mixed audience here. But before we get into the nitty gritty of the ins and out of a nonprofit website, I just wanted to bust two myths. One is nonprofits expect you to work for free. And the other one is their website needs to be about the nation. About the money. And so let's tackle the first one. I'm part of a nonprofit technology network. And for this purpose of the talk, nonprofits come in all shapes and sizes, Maturity level, but for this talk, let's talk about budget size and technology Adoption level. And the N10, and links is later on in one of the slides. N10 is a nonprofit technology network. And they do reports about the industry. And they published last year a technology staffing and adoption report. And they have four different sizes. Small nonprofit, middle nonprofit, large nonprofit, and very large nonprofit. And the small nonprofits is $1 million annual budget and lower. So they still have, yeah, when you think about what a normal website would cost, yeah, that's kind of not. They can definitely pay for it. But the more interesting part is the adoption, technology adoption level In nonprofit. And they have, N10 has identified four levels. One is, and then the nonprofits that answered in the report could Assign themselves to one of them. And the first one is struggling. And when you've seen struggling, they struggle with failing Infrastructure. They spend a lot of time creating Workarounds and duplicate tasks. And if any money is spent to replace Old equipment, then the next one is kind of functioning. And some of them would say functioning barely. They keep in the lights on. They have a basic system in place for The immediate needs. But leadership makes technology Decision based on efficiency and has no input from staff or outside Consultant. So the, that's a little fast. And then there is operating. Operating as a leadership Has a, makes decision, you know, makes a technology decision Based on industry sector information and gets input from Outside consultants and also from the stakeholders inside. And then the leading ones, they are the organizations that, You know, i'm on the wrong slide. Well, the bigger question is, do nonprofits hire consultant? And the technology report actually answers the question. Yes, they do. In each level, however, the Frequency raises, rises with the increased technology Adoption level, which is pretty self-explanatory. But even the struggling ones hire outside consultants to help them Over that struggle. But how do you know that nonprofits Are actually able to afford your web consulting business or Proposals? And so let me tell you from my experience, If they value the technology and if you make a good case about The website and they develop trust in you, they find the money. They might not find the money this month, they might not find it In a quarter, but they might find it in the next half year, In the next six months. Depending on the technology Adoption level, they might need help, though, with the Planning and the scoping of a project. And that would, for a consultant, a web developer, That also means a longer discovery period. Think of it, the leadership in nonprofits does not have a Business education. They don't have, some of them, some of The founders just kind of went in there because they had a Passion for something, for the animal rescue and arts Education of social services. And they don't have, sometimes The business processes are just kind of around the founder. So it helps when they have a professional make the plan. So when I work with businesses, my first question to them is What's your budget? And I get an answer most of the time, if they Have thought about it. That question is very hard to answer In a nonprofit. If they don't have somebody on staff, that is a technology person. Because they don't know how long things take, then they don't know what exactly they need until they talk to you. So in order to be able to fund a technology project, I need to go out for grants. And community foundations, Local community foundations have a fund for capacity building. So if you need to scope out, plan, and normally, I don't know How you work, but the time that I spend is, I think, of billable. So if the nonprofit can't pay for it, I need to find a way to Work with the community foundation and the nonprofit to get a grant for that. And that's actually a good possibility because for planning and Scoping a project, that's the first step to actually not waste money. Right? Planning is everything. So they are very happy to Support an initiative that has planning and scoping in the discovery phase. But it's also important that you and your activity can listen to the needs of nonprofits Because of the scope, the technology adoption level. That what they want is probably sometimes with outside the budget. So finding out what they really need is the most important thing. And then phase it out. If it's not possible to do it in the first Two weeks or two months, phase it out. Okay, we do the first six months, we do this. And then next year, when you know what your fundraising success was, You can kind of, we can work on the second phase, but that requires planning. Right? So think about that way when working with nonprofits. So that's the first myth. Nonprofits don't expect you to work for free. But you need to find a way to get into, listen to the, what they tell you About the people that are involved in the nonprofit, what they tell you About the skill level that these people have and what their Processes are and what technology they are already using. You cannot take them from a bicycle to a Ferrari without going In between to say, okay, let's try this with a beetle first there Before we kind of go full speed. So that was the first myth. The second myth is it's all about Donation. It's not. And I tell you why. At least on the website, their whole Executive directors, boards, they spend a lot of time organizing Fundraising events and all about fundraising, but the Online donation is not the focus yet because of the numbers. So let's talk about the numbers. The total charitable giving in 2016 in the united states was $380 billion. Of that, 72% or 280 billion were individuals. Came from individuals. And of that, 27.8 billion were raised online. That's a mere 10%. In other words, 90% of their fundraising comes from other Activities. Being direct mail solicitation, it has a very high return on Investment for nonprofits still. Events, scalars and all this kind of golf tournaments, whatever. But it's not your website. So in terms of creating a website, there must be other Goals for it. And what are the nonprofit goals for a website? Well, for many of them, it's actually raising public Awareness, meaning be it in the community or be it Nationally. So they need a lot of content. It needs to be content rich. It needs to be storytelling. It needs to have a connection with the social media and The thought leaders. Another big goal is to increase donor retention. It's not much the online fundraising, but it's kind of Staying in contact with the donors and tell them what they Did with the money. What they planned with the money. What the beneficiaries talk about. Yeah, how they, what the impact is in the community. And you can, and the best way to communicate that is putting it Up on the website so they can find it. And have a personal connection via e-mail. So as a web developer, you also will come in, will have to Organize e-mail marketing for them or at least integrate with That, definitely. And another one is volunteer recruitment. Volunteers are the lifeblood of nonprofit organizations. So if you can help them recruit volunteers better or often, You probably make a larger impact than if you have a good Donation process going. Yeah, because they can recruit more people to help them with Their causes. And of course take the fundraising online. That's the first step to have a donate button on the site. And then the next step would be peer to peer fundraising Where a donor, a supporter can create a page on the nonprofit's Website and raise funding from their friends and families. So the minimum viable product in technology, that's a given term. Yeah, what does it mean for a nonprofit website? That would be pages. Yeah, about page, what we do, services, who are the funders, What is the history of it. And then a subscription via e-mail, e-mail marketing provider Set up with that and a donation button. So that's the minimum viable product. And if that is optimal size designed and optimal setup In the processes, you help already very much. If they are coming fresh from the 90s and don't have a dynamic Website, that's definitely a step up because their supporters Can find things and they can stay in contact with them. So let's talk about the donation button a bit. So the donation button would need to stand out. Yeah, and this is a little busy website, right? It's very hard to find it because it blends so in with the design. Another example would be this one. It's very hard to, if you want to go to the homepage, Where's the donation button? You have to really read every single thing to find it. The opposite is this, right? You see it in the header. You don't have to read anything more. If a crew has somebody on the phone and somebody asks them, Okay, how can we donate? Yeah, they can point them, go to our homepage, click on the Donate button. There's no question that they find them. And this one is enough. That's, I like that. This is very bold, right? Kill the bill. And you are tempted to use that take action button there. But it also has in the navigation bar a donate item Standout. It blends in and the navigation doesn't need extra space, But it has a different color. So these cultural actions can be very, very easily set up as a Designer, but we also need to talk about the challenges that You would have because nonprofits have plenty of stakeholders. And they all get a voice. It's a community, right? So it's sometimes designed by a committee and you need to Have some patience going through the process that takes a little Bit longer when decisions come back. And i know from our designer, there's a little bit of, Okay, if i don't get my momentum going, yeah, i kind of Fade in what was i thinking, yeah, three months ago. And now we're coming back because there was some other things That needed to be done. I'm embracing in the design sometimes sliders, although, Yeah, there's a lot of things to say not to use sliders. But when you have multiple stakeholders, you can appease them Very easily to say, okay, look, it's on the home page. It's in the slider. And, yeah, i kind of have that discussion deferred to Another later date to say, okay, can we make something more Useful to that. Yeah, kind of how you get around it. There's also multiple calls to actions. I said different goals that someone has. How do you organize that? And that's always a challenge. It depends how they do marketing. It depends how they talk to their supporters. And one other challenge that's there is, did i put it up there? Yeah, no time for content production. Yeah, there is blogging once a week. That's highly unlikely that they do it out of their own. Unless you help them. So what we do, we change the, oops, sorry, i went backwards. We change the discussion a little bit. Because when they say they don't have time to blogging, They don't have time on top of the other things. So we talk about processes. What do you do now? Can we remove things a little bit? So the staff doesn't have time for blogging, But they post on Facebook. So the communication part is in there. And they sometimes spend hours to put a newsletter together. With wonderful stories about beneficiaries, about the founders, About where they're going, about the impact on the community. You find this all either in a paper newsletter, Or you find it in an email newsletter. But then you go to the website and nothing is there. So to change that would need to kind of spend the same amount Of time but get them online. There is something out there that's called rss2email. So if the non-profit staff would blog, then you could say, Okay, once a week blog, then at the end of the month, You have four blog posts. We put them into an rss2email campaign, comes with a picture Or not, but with a headline with a teaser from the blog. And they click to go to the website and read more. So they have pretty much the same process. Maybe it takes a little longer to implement. But it's something that they get much more search engine visibility. The people that they connect on social media can read up on The other stories that they had. And they have a little history. So that enables them to actually do a deeper dive on thinking About content strategy. They're all, so rss2email is a feature that MailChimp can do. A-weber does as well. And some ifttt, even if you want to go there. So that's one thing. So I have an example from npc's group. It was a hard time to get them blogging. It's a club of writers that doesn't write. It was kind of a... So now they publish that newsletter, npc's group. And you see, these are all headlines from their blog. And then they have the clicks. And they go out once a month. And the next part is we looked at the google analytics for that. And all of a sudden there are these massive spikes. When the newsletter goes out. All of a sudden the members go to the website. It was really an eye-opening for them. But it was very hard to get them started. So stay with it. It really, they appreciate it now. And what it also gives you, when you have it an email, You not only get the open rate, you also get the click rate. And the supporters vote with their mouse. So they will tell you by what stories they clicked on, What they like to read. So your content team can then kind of adjust to do more of the other thing. And stop doing some of the content that was never read. And the open rates really were high. They are about 60% of that. Some open it because they want to read their own story again. So it was, and we kind of reproduced that through a few of the nonprofits That had a story to tell. And I wanted to introduce the constituents. How are you doing on time? But of course we need to talk about online fundraising. The theory a little bit quick. All the e-commerce practices that you heard yesterday and today Applied to that to keep it on the site. Don't go off the site. If you have a donate button that goes to PayPal, The organization loses up to 70% of the people. It's called abandonment pretty much. Because they don't either want to do it on PayPal or they get Distracted by something else on the way to it. Also figure out how to make the donations check out page Distraction free. Remove all the links. All the sidebar, all the navigation. They only do one thing on that page. And that is hit the pay button. If they change the mind, they always can go to the logo on top And go back to the homepage and go there. There are donation pages out from the early 2000s and mid-2000s. Huge donor management programs would provide forms that can be Embedded into websites with asking everything including shoe size And the name of the firstborn. And it looks like this. This is a donation page and i actually hit the next step to see Which are actually required. If only two were required, i wouldn't be so bad about it. But it's kind of every single field is a required field. I don't think that a whole lot of people and i know that not A whole lot of people finish this form and that's not even Entering payment information. That's just personal information. And there is one thing that says appeal. The drop down box that you see there. And it gives me six choices. And as a supporter, as an outside person, this is all inside Lingo. I don't know what giving tuesday is. I don't know what the education fund is. And i don't know what a golf tournament is. But it's kind of that's necessary. I'm in decision paralysis pretty much. I don't know what to do. So i move. I go away. I do something else. And here's an example of these are actually two steps of the Donation process on this side, on the right side. There's a field with a default value of $50. Click on the donate now button and you get this little form Where you put in your credit card information, your email Address and you could even do a remember me. And then you pay the $50. And that's it. You can do this on a mobile phone. Have you thought about doing the other form on a mobile phone? So the easier you make the process, convenience is key for Profits. And how can you do this? So in wordpress you get a few choices. You can do that form. So this process was done with a form plugin. Plus the stripe integration. And i think they used contact form 7. But you can do this with any of the forms plugins that are out There, like caldera forms and gravity forms. I have not all linked when i publish this slide deck and i'm Going to publish and tweet it out. I put all the links in that are missing right now. And then there are plugins that give you a little bit more Of sophisticated donor process, donation process where you can Add in memory of or have more choices on the buttons kind of Thing. So gift wp, there's a supporter here. At work in miami, thank you very much. They have a very robust donation plugin. Then charitable is another name. And another name is paper donations. They go through the behind the scene process of paper and the Donation. The non-profit doesn't. The supporter would not leave the website to pay with paper. All right. But that's not all that a non-profit. So once you get the online part, there are other needs. There are events registration and people go and go to event Bright. Then there is a membership administration. People go and get another plugin. Or they do donation, a contribution network. Then they have event marketing. And sooner or later, you kind of can ask the non-profits how Many extra spreadsheets do you have with contact? Every department has their own spreadsheet that they work With. And if you want to bring them together into one system, it's Going to be a nightmare with data accuracy and data cleanup. But sooner or later, they would need that. So they have data management problems, of course. There is duplication of records. They cannot make the connections. So wikimedia, wikimedia, we all know wikipedia, right? There are volunteers editing the articles there. Wikimedia did a survey and they found out that the biggest Donors for their foundation are actually volunteers. And I bet your donuts to dollars that there's in a lot of Non-profit the case that the army of volunteers that run a Botanical garden that run an arts education program that The volunteers are also the biggest donors, not only for Their time but also money-wise. Are you talking to them like other people? Donors don't want to be talked to like other people. So you want them to have the history. You want to know the history when you next contact them. Another part is that the segmentation of your e-mail Messages is not as accurate as possible as it could be. And the other one, sorry. And the automation that you kind of dream of will always sound A little bit like a robot because you will know that that's An automation because sometimes it applies and sometimes it Doesn't in terms of how the copy is written. So and then there is another system that you can put up on Top of your wordpress site. It's called cvcrm. Cvcrm is out of, it's also open source. It's written in php. It is, was founded in 2006. Used by 11,000 non-profit organization. And it's available to be on top of your wordpress site. And that's actually an invaluable feature of that. Because what you can do now is you know when an e-mail goes out And someone, the don't, the record is completely there. You know when they click on it what they did on your website. They could, you could know what they do on the website. It has, you can't see this probably because it's also Small because there's a full screenshot there. But it has contacts there. It has events there. You don't have to go out to do e-mail marketing. You can do it all in one system. So you have all the history as well. Of course it's technology that is not like completely set up Like a plug-in and go and do it. Yeah, there are a lot of things involved. But it's definitely worth looking into as a non-profit and As a consultant to offer that or know about it so you Can work through it. These are just some numbers of CVCRM. So i think we are almost, we are all there. How much are we? Okay, that's good. That's excellent. So there are organizations that do non-profit technology Apart from np-tech projects here locally. But there is N10. I mentioned them with a report. It's a non-profit technology network. They also have online communities via e-mail. Where you can ask questions. It's about data. It can be data security. It can be digital marketing. It can be wordpress. There's a wordpress community. There's also it. Sorry. It planning and decision makers are all in there. And they have the reports. And in april, there will be a Non-profit technology conference where the technology people from Non-profits and vendors come together and sign up. It's pretty much like a word camp just a lot broader, not just About wordpress. Then techsoup is a very Useful organization. It has been around for a long time. And they are the clearing house of software donation for From microsoft, google, semantec. Hardware, software as a service. And not only for the united states. Also around the world. So they do the checkup on the Eligibility for the donation packages that they get from the Vendors if the non-profit is eligible for it. For a small fee. So a non-profit that has Microsoft and needs a new license can get 45 license for $50 administration fee to be in that program. Let's check that out. And then idealware has also reports Where they compare softwares. Like if you need a board Collaboration tools or donor management system or cmss, they Provide some reports about that. So if you as a consultant Don't know so much about that particular area, there's a lot of resources where you can kind of get help and connect with Other people. And some of the organizations like N10 and techsoup, they also have local groups. Like in verpress, you have verpress meetups. Those are also in various locations. We have one in south Astroia. We're trying to find one in Miami as well. And there are mostly Meetings where non-profit staff and technologists from Organizations consultants come together and talk about topics. They are from data visualization to social media Surgery to non-profit make up. It's a very interesting kind of thing. So that's my talk. Go out and help others to make the World a better place. Thank you so much. And we can certainly do questions now for nine minutes. All right. Yes, sir. The question was is that an add-in or plug-in or what? It's a plug-in. So it kind of goes, but it's also A whole set of modules behind it. Yeah, it needs a little bit more robust hosting than your Normal website hosting because it has really some powerful Modules and can handle a lot of databases behind it. A lot of data behind it. Yeah, so you wouldn't... If you're not technology savvy or have a consultant at Hand, it's probably hard. It takes you quite some time to Get it figured out because there are some things that you Need to do on server side, like smtp for the mail. Yeah, and if that doesn't say anything, it's kind of, yeah, For that or, yeah, some other things when you do the Events registration pages and these kind of things. Yes, ma'am? The paper donation, yes, as far as i know. Yeah, that's the one that was here. Here, this one. Yeah. There's a question all the way back. Yes, it's going to be... You said about the technology, non-profit technology Conference, yes. It's on April 11, 12, and 13 in New Orleans and it has pre-conference days. It has a WordPress day on the 10th as well as a C-C-R-M day and a drupal day. So it could be, if you want to invest, it could be four days. Yeah, New Orleans. And go to nten.org Slash n-t-c. Yes. Bless you. Well, how that came about. Well, how much time do we have? The short version is when i immigrated to the united states 20 years ago, i had a period of time where i wasn't Allowed to earn money and i started volunteering for the Local, for the local napers free net. The internet service provider that helped in 98, it was, Yeah, there was a lot of free nets around the country. The napers free net is still around. And i was, yeah, doing education there. I helped people set up, yeah, how to do the internet And how to search and these kind of things. And one education program was how to get nonprofits on the Webside. And we had a program where we Actually called the nonprofit, gathered all the information With 30 volunteers and put the html websites up. Yeah, but that got very un, that wasn't scalable. So we said, okay, maybe we need to teach the nonprofits How to fish instead of giving them fish. I don't know, that didn't work out well. But anyway, so we tried a lot there. And i kept the connections with the community when i started My business 15 years ago and it's something that i'm, Yeah, they helped me out in the first four years. I learned at the napers free net, i learned how to program. I learned how to, yeah, my english, although it was good. But i kind of, yeah, it was my family away from family when we Immigrated, so there's a lot of connection there. Yeah, did i answer your question? Yeah. Okay, all right. One more question. Oh, we have five more questions if i keep it any Question for a minute. Yeah, nonprofit wp is, that's a content site that Gives you a lot of this one, yeah. Non-profit wp is from a web consultant who is also one of The leader of the n10 wordpress group online. He has a whole site of what nonprofit could do with Wordpress. What is a bad, what about domain registration, Through hosting, through design element themes, which Plugins are good and also how to get help, what's the Security, kind of a lot of education material that is geared towards nonprofits and not towards web developers. Yeah. So it's a really good site. Another question? All right. Well, thank you so much. These were fabulous, fabulous audience. And it was great to meet you. Thank you so much. Bye.