 So thanks again everybody for sharing what you are grateful for in this season and letting us know where you're zooming in from We're gonna start today's webinar. It's called nonprofit tools tips and Technology is presented by tap network. I'm a brief assignments. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup I'm just gonna show you how you can engage today. I think many of you Know that you are on mute and if you need the closed caption go ahead and tap on the bottom of the screen To use the closed caption. You'll see the CC button at the bottom of your screen. Some people already turned it on Also, this is being recorded. So you're gonna get the slides and the recording within the next 48 hours Probably about tomorrow. Maybe later today if technology acts right so be looking for that I want to share something new and exciting With you here at TechSoup is called quad if we can go to that quad slide. I want to share that with you Quad is something new that we have started here at TechSoup I'm gonna put the link to quad in the chat But what it is is a peer-to-peer community here within the side of TechSoup. We have exclusive events just for nonprofits You can get technical support One thing that I love about quad is that you can have access to the entire TechSoup courses catalog And 10 members of any organization can use it So if you've even taken a course here at TechSoup, you know, they can range from free to $10 to $90 But with that you get access to the entire Course catalog so that's something look forward to it. So I'll put the link for that in the chat But I'm gonna turn this over to TapNetwork and you'll get to hear from Kyle and Julian so thank you both for being here from TapNetwork. I'm turning it over to you. Have a great webinar Looks like I clicked on something. Oh, yeah, that's that's good. That's that's the quad membership It's good for a year. So I'll put that link in the chat. So that that's not a problem. You did the right thing Probably clicked on that hyperlink on the slide So while he's going back out to his slides, I just want to let you know that Quad is like he showed you it is a membership But again, it's exclusive community just for members and it gets you discount on products It gets you discount on other things in our catalog But while we are also waiting we've had some more people come and say what they're thankful for So if you're just joining us go ahead and type in the chat Where you're zooming in from and what you are thankful for and we're gonna start the webinar. Have a great webinar everybody Great. Thanks, Rita. Sorry for that quick Outlink as she said, my name is Kyle Barkins. I'm a co-founder and CTO here at TapNetwork I'm joined today by Julian Terashi on our team. He's our digital solutions manager I won't spend a bunch of time going through that through our bios and background But we represent an organization named TapNetwork We are an exclusive partner with TechSoup providing digital marketing web website Development and digital transformation services for nonprofit organizations. We've been around for Going on 11 years tomorrow actually and we've helped thousands of nonprofits Transform themselves digitally launch, build, rebrand, redesign their websites, manage their entire sort of tech ecosystem and marketing space So I'm really excited to be here today with you to kind of go through some sort of some of the best practices In the web and marketing space as well as answer questions you all have as we go through We do want this to be more of like a collaborative session So hopefully I'm not just speaking, Julian and I aren't just speaking the entire time We just ask that you put those questions in the webinar chat We'll be able to go through those probably as we go and then address more of them at the end And as Rita said we will share these this entire slide deck for you Following the webinar at that time There will also be links in there to get in touch with us reach out for consultations and kind of take these Like learnings or questions a bit further So just a quick agenda for today. We went over the the intro to tap We're gonna kind of talk about nonprofit websites what they are what we see some of the background here how to Building websites for a nonprofit or building websites in general We'll give you some high-level overview. I think of some tools and technology that we've seen That is sort of like best best and breed follow best practices for those And then we'll follow that up with more questions and answers as I said I would do at the speed of collaborative. So feel free to drop some stuff in the chat. We'll answer those questions in real time You'll hear Julian and I kind of bounce bounce some things off each other as we go And then at the end, you know, we'll kind of we'll show you guys an offer and give you guys the links and Access to reach back out to us Following this webinar So as I mentioned, if you go through tech soup site just you know a quick easy way to get in touch with us And to see some more of what we do You just go to the services drop down on the top of their homepage or any page throughout the site You'll see website service and digital marketing services. That's how you get straight to us You can see a little bit more about some of the packages and things like that that we offer and learn more about how we can Help some of the things that we do. So just as we said, you know, a kind of a Full-scale tradition marketing and technology agency covering everything from strategy all the way down through PR paid media e-commerce SEO and kind of everything in between to get started Stuff is important to you enough about us Why are websites important to nonprofits? So I think somebody mentioned they're thankful that we you know We've kind of come out of COVID but COVID really really shined the light on the need to to do more You know as as a nonprofit as an organization to be able to serve your communities your volunteers your constituents To be able to message well awful, you know online especially for the Organizations that were kind of traditional maybe brick-and-mortar or in person or in community and the website is really the place that you're able to Put your best foot forward and enhance engagement Around the clock right and from anywhere in the world really and then once you've got that you've got someone there You've got them engaging. You can do things like drive drive donations recruit volunteers Maybe you're an association. So you want to drive membership. Maybe you provide You know course courses and educational materials So you want to be able to to put like a learning management system or webinars or things like that in place But the website's a great place And probably one of the only places you'll you'd be able to do that and do that cost effectively and efficiently It's one nice one thing we saw, you know also coming out of COVID But in general is it's a very budget friendly location as well So, you know very limited overhead on an ongoing basis, you know, you're not necessarily you're not paying rent paying for space things like that On this website. It's a great way to get you know contextual real-time updated Information out there and to engage with that audience of yours on the backs on the back end of that It's also where you're going to collect data. So if you're running an ad campaign if you're you know using Google ads Google ad grants if you're sending email marketing out if you're doing blogging if you're doing anything to try to drive people Somewhere a website's a great place one to drive them But also to be able to collect the data and really see what what's happening. So, you know, I would say Nine times out of ten when we're talking to anyone not just nonprofit organizations They have this idea of who they're who their visitors are and who their audience is and we're able to put We put some some data collection tools in place for them and we would actually show them Okay, maybe you're right, but but more than more often than not they're actually not like they're either not Attracting the right audience or actually or they're attracting an audience that they didn't think of that They're not messaging for but they're still getting to their website So being able to track that being able to see some of that insight is very very valuable and important And then it's also a great place and and very important to focus on accessibility inclusivity With more than a I think one in every four people in the United States has I didn't been identified as having some type of disability whether that's like visual text, you know touch actual physical like physical disability so the website is a great place to Meet those people on their terms and be able to provide value for them without having to have that barrier of a physical location or a Non-accessible location or one that's not as inclusive Yeah, and Craig asks what obvious error do we see most often when first entering a nonprofit's website and we see quite a bit But I think one of the ones that sticks out and might be relevant for a lot of people here It's just that they don't use the website as a tool like Kyle mentioned. No these These websites they can do a lot for you. They can drive donations and you know prevent present these opportunities For engagement and when you're not taking advantage of that You have these very passive sites that become you know more mature to use or even you know might confuse the users So you want to be able to provide Tools and engagement opportunities for those users But also can help you by reducing a lot of administrative clutter and sort of our work that you have to do You know a lot of the stuff you're doing just hey send us an email and we'll reach out to you You know you have all that administrative burden needing to reach out to that person get the information you need Rather than having integrations with your services or structured forums that capture that data at that first touch that allow you to be You know more efficient and focus on on a lot of the stuff you do day to day Versus doing a lot of this administrative work that you know might be solved by a lot of the stuff that's available for websites right now Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Julian Also on this call, you know, we heard a few people earlier on say that they're thankful for their funders thankful for their donors And so it's super super relevant here to talk about some of the the online fundraising statistics with with that website being a place Where you're trying to drive that funding We saw this is I think this data is from 2022 so we'd have it updated. We'd have updated information this year But online giving made up 8.7% so probably more like more than likely over 10% this year of all Fundraising so when you think about these large corporate gifts eat these large Family gifts some of the traditional fundraising to see this jump to that high of a percentage is pretty incredible When you think about like the average size of an online donation versus, you know fundraising donations in general and then 63% so getting close to two-thirds of donors would rather It would prefer to give online with a credit card or a debit card. So instead of writing that that check You're sending it in the mail or something like that being able to giving them away to quickly donate to your organization through, you know a website or online And then what's what I think is important is we'll talk through some some of the the other steps here today is 28% so almost a third of all online contributions are coming from a mobile device and we've seen that tick up your year after year as more people are are visiting from a mobile device and And accessing you, you know, your your organization probably maybe through social media or your throat email or something like that They open online You want to grab a quick grab a question here as we go through these slides. So Larry asks how should a homepage differ from an about page that tells viewer what the organization is and does and This is something we deal with, you know a lot whether we're helping people with existing websites or Building a new one for them. The home page is really The the main landing page for the entire site should give an overview of of what you're about all the different audiences You're speaking to should have a you know pieces of content and calls to action specifically for them if somebody lands on your home page the That page and all the content on it should guide them towards all the other areas of your site and contrast the about page Tends to be more about, you know more detail about the organization itself Maybe that's where you include things like your your team members Or other things that that maybe you're bored, but the home page really is is a is a functional item That says okay, here's all the here's all the programs we offer here sort of where you can make donations Here's this information and it presents that all as an index for people to get through the entire site That mean they go up to the menu and you know find the relevant page They're not quite sure having that that home page there allows you to build these calls to action that allow Whatever audience you're trying to talk to whether it's volunteers or donors or the people you're actually trying to help They can say okay. This is you know what I'm looking for. This is what's geared towards me And then you know You have an easy way to find them and send them towards the relevant information rather than have them search through everything manually themselves Yeah, and then I think that that's a great lead into this to our next slide talking about the different like how how website fits But how you're sort of your digital presence fits overall into the overall marketing funnel so we think about this starting at the top with the Attract stage when people don't know who you know who you are don't know what your organization does and are out there looking for For something whether that's like, you know after school care for a child or you know help with a certain disability or you know raising awareness about a certain Cancer disease or something of that nature or you know food sensitivity So you're out there you're interested you're trying to find out more about this You don't really know where to start and that's where things like search engine Optimized websites Paper-click ads social media and blogging really help drive awareness to that. So that's the things you'll see that That kind of pique your interest when you're when you're browsing Facebook Or LinkedIn or when you're certain when you're doing a Google search for something like that those results that are showing up These are people in the attract phase of this as you Go further down Towards the middle of the follow These are where you're seeing people that are sort of ready to support your cause and and the mission of your organization So they're looking to opt in in some way. They're gonna say okay I like what you know, I like what your organization is doing tell me more They're not ready to have a conversation with you. They're not ready to you know Sort of in the traditional way They're not gonna come into your your building or come into your office come into your organization But they're starting to learn more about you. So like okay This seems like a good cause for me to donate to or this seems like a good organization for me to volunteer I might be interested in volunteering with tell me more and that's where they'll do something like opt into an email and say You know send me blog updates or send me your newsletter or they might you know fill out a form to Maybe attend a webinar or or you know Download your annual report to see where if they made an investment where their money might end up And then from there on you know Use utilizing tools and use utilizing a strategy We're trying to drive them to to activate to to do something to actually support your organizations That might mean coming to an event right that might mean volunteering for an event that might mean donating or at least you know Jumping on the donation page. So you're tracking them through this entire funnel We see where they came through and now see that they're They've got some sort of intent to engage with your organization And then finally we want to turn them that person that donor that volunteer that attendee whatever that is into a supporter So they can tell more people about your organization and drive those people back up into the top of that funnel So that would be a way that would that's where we would use the website for like relationship building So, you know, if they become a membership now a member now you're now you're guiding them through there by giving them Some of the benefits of membership. So giving them exclusive content or something like that or if they become a donor you're telling them where Where their donations might be going You know, like let's say say I donated $500 to a call as you buy by engaging back with me and saying Thank you Kyle for your $500. It's gone to provide, you know Coats to children or you know like jackets the children in need this this winter so that they're not, you know Cold or or something like that This is where you would do that and then what you want to do is give them the ability to tell other people about them So, you know share that you donated I'm sure many of you on this call have either done this or seen this where you, you know Contribute to a cause and it's like one of the options it gives you is like to tell your friends or share with a friend So just giving them that that capability that ability through your site is a great way to continue to kind of keep this this marketing funnel full another question we have here is Chemica they ask do we work with Squarespace websites? We typically don't there's a lot of things we do that can integrate with any website regardless of the platform You're on whether we're taking a look at your search engine performance or helping you, you know report or or integrate with the donation tool We do tend to prefer WordPress and a little bit of Wix in here and you know also very custom work This actually ties into a second question that you know might be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit But John asks, what's CMS platform? Do you normally recommend WordPress or Drupal when a nonprofit organization has to manage its own back-end for ongoing content blogs meta tags SEO and various performing Management of donor management integration so dealing with you know contacting your donors I heard that Drupal tends to offer better solution in regards to accessibility and different languages. Is this true? So, you know like I mentioned we are a WordPress shop here for the most part You find that's you know one of the most popular and supported tools out there So, you know a lot of nonprofits integrate with you know, they may have a specific donation tool They use there may be you know other things they want to tie into it WordPress tends to be a fairly universal connector We're able to do quite a lot then in regards to accessibility That's not necessarily something that's a specific site is going to be better or worse It's just where those tools are located. So adding your alt text to images Making sure that you're structuring your content with header tags Making sure your color contrast isn't too low. So people with you know impaired vision. Can you know still build that? So anything that you can do on one platform for the most part you can do on another one of the things You might run into is this one might have a module that has a certain styling to it So you have to you know use a slightly different look to it But all the core aspects of websites are going to are going to be found, you know across many many tools I'm in the different languages They really depends on whether you're trying to translate a webpage whether you're you know manually writing the content each language of that So, you know to answer that question you really need to get into specifics But just to sort of stay on the top level we do like WordPress here Yeah, I'll just add to that just just for some like this This is the recent one but for some cloud like NASA just put their website on WordPress And I think if it's like good enough for a rocket scientist, it should be good enough for it's definitely good enough for us as Julie mentioned We've we've done WordPress websites for the last 15 or 20 years 62% I'll share these stats with you all as well 62% of the 100 fastest growing company in the United States use WordPress for their website. So these companies like New York Times Sony BMG BBC America They all use WordPress for their websites and then you know, you think there's there's a number of different of different Examples there like different colleges and universities like White House gov is on WordPress for example Like the official website of like the country of Sweden is on WordPress and what's nice about About something like WordPress is it has such a large development community and never growing development community So, you know, if it's something if there's something that you might get stuck on as you're going through Building or or if it's been put in place for you and you know, you know 80% of it, but you can't get this yourself the rest of the way there. There's this this massive community of like something like 40 million Developers of sorts people that can work within WordPress and this this entire library of plugins that can do things For you kind of bolt on pretty quickly, which makes it a very scalable platform if it's built the correct way For something like Squarespace, you know, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, things of that nature. Those are a lot. Those are good really I like to kind of call these like the first website So this would be sort of like a minimum viable product or something like that So maybe you don't want to bite off more than you can chew and we'll talk through some of that like in the Through the rest of this this presentation So we thought to that point we follow what we call a growth-driven design So we were taking like Looking at like the big picture, you know, where are you trying? Where are you trying to go? Not just where you are now, but planning for that for that growth what we've seen what you see traditionally is a website will be this massive project massive undertaking very expensive and very time-consuming and You're making a and typically you're making a bunch of assumptions around what's what's actually needed You know back to my earlier point without understanding who your actual audience is without without understanding what they actually need and what they're What they want to what you want them to do on your website what they want to do on your website and what they're actually going to do on your website So we take this growth-driven approach which allows us to iterate over that and improve over time Without biting off more than we can chew up front. So that starts with a strategy phase That's us taking a big look at everything looking at the data you either you might already have or looking at like benchmark and industry data And then we take that develop a plan for Something like what I what I mentioned like the Wix or the Squarespace type of website But we would build it on WordPress so that we can scale it up as we grow And that's what we call the launchpad website So that might be something that's like high-level very brochure specific brochure But specific where it talks about what your organization is who they serve and give some key things that you can do on that site So that we can drive people to it We can see how they interact with it and we can admit we can start to not make assumptions But look at the insights and the data to say okay people are coming here to donate people are coming here to do these things one example I like to I love to give is a website. We built for the boy one of the boys and girls clubs years ago They wanted us to put a donate button in the top right corner of the website They're like you need to put this up there people are gonna they're missing the donation Section of our site we put we said sure we'll put that up there It is important to see that you can donate on a site But I I you know It's pretty sure that no one was going to click that button and we left it up there ran for six months one person clicked it It was somebody at their organization But in tandem we built a better user flow for people to donate through the website So we where we put you know on their homepage slide or another place on their homepage Which talked about a donation and how they could donate how they could get involved and where their donation went So it gave some context and we saw that boost three three X like 300 percent their donations from just well We saw their donations drive up 300 percent after we put that in place So nothing to do with this button the top of the screen which you know was kind of an assumption But looking at the data and looking at what people were doing and updating that user flow for them So when once we launched that once we have that launchpad in place Then we go through this iterative process of like continuous improvement where we plan So like okay, what do we learn from our launchpad website? What should we do next? We launched that we developed that stuff out We add those features we track You know the analytics and we learn from that and we transfer that data back into that plan and just kind of keep This going and growing over time. So you might start with like a five page website You know a couple months in and then by the end of the year You've got 17 18 pages that are all driving driving traffic all converting all adding to your SEO and And adding to the engagement across your website Yeah, Roshani asks what themes and page bullets do you prefer and then asks what do you think of Elementor and we love Elementor here Is it's one of the things that we we try and use as much as possible? With it, you know something that I think in my opinion contrasts Elementor to a lot of other sort of themes in there Is that you're not necessarily, you know using Elementor to provide you like a theme that you can use across the entire site A lot of those purchasable themes, you know, they might work and then somebody stops updating them Or there's a new version that you have to rebuy or something Elementor allows you to really customize the theme exactly, you know, how you like whether it's fonts and colors and you know Any other sort of style like that? It's very user friendly and very flexible So a lot of other tools that you might use not only integrate with WordPress to integrate with Elementor as well Which makes you know developing and adding things and sort of keeping the site updated and functional over time Very very easy So once once we've got this plan in place and we're starting to think about design and we're building on this this launchpad website Across the board and this doesn't just go for websites. This goes for emails. This goes for social media posts This goes for anything you're designing You want to always make sure you're designing with the user in mind and optimizing for the user in mind So you can just some quick tips on this I'm not going to run through all these and like I said, we'll we'll provide this after the call but like using white space and making sure that You know using like alt tags and things like that. So if it doesn't load on someone's browser They can still see what's supposed to be on that page Giving it creating a way that the user can quickly engage with your con engage with your content and follow your content Or your site throughout their their browsing experience and one way to So really to fine-tune further on that is to Design for responsive and design for mobile So responsive web design is like this this idea that you can create a website that Dynamically changes depending on what size the screen they're on so whether that's a web a laptop screen or a You know a large format screen like the maybe the one behind me if I'm trying to share this with a group Or something small like a mobile device you're creating a responsive design So you don't have to create multiple different designs or multiple different websites And this allows you to kind of write right once or design once And use it many different places so back to the question enjoying its point about Element about Elementor when we're designing things we're designing them for Elementor We're designing these elements there which will be Sort of responsive by default and then it gives us the ability to To tweak small things here and there to say like okay, you know on a desktop Maybe this these three things are side by side on a mobile device We stack them top to bottom, but we don't have to create you know different content for web and mobile And the benefit of this is you get you know more mobile traffic if your website's optimized for mobile back to that earlier Stat about donations from mobile devices. I've got more mobile traffic The site's going to be faster because it's just it's still the same code It's just different for whatever mobile And it's you're going to see higher conversion rates and a lower bounce rate and better seo Because you're not you don't have duplicate content and things like that that exist out there that you would if you had You're trying to manage multiple sites Yeah, and I think this next question is going to uh fit really nicely with the next slide So rashani asks tips for how to use hot jar or other tools to understand how people are using the home page so hot jar for people who aren't familiar sort of like uh Uh a heat map on your website I find that while it is useful a lot of the same stuff Uh, you can get done by just being really smart about how you use google analytics So, you know after you've spent all this time designing the site Now you want to see how people are actually using it and you can't go ahead and you know Call everybody who's ever used your website and say, you know, what'd you think? Where'd you go? You have to have these tools sort of collect this data It's it's free and it's very powerful And so when you're sort of having these conversations of you know, what should we change? You know, how are people using this this can provide you a pretty objective You know, uh database backing for for all those those future efforts So it allows you to see, you know, what pages people are using where they go before Where they go after that where they were before that you also track Uh conversions like when people start a form, but don't submit it when they actually submit the form They download any of your files with your resource sheets or or annual reports You can also create custom events So, uh google analytics comes with a bunch of pre-built ones, you know When people play videos or how far they scroll, but you can also create ones where it's like Yeah, I want to see how many people click this button on this page You'll be able to create, you know a custom event and you know track all the uh single donate buttons across your entire site Be able to track um those when you combine that with a tool like google search console, which is also You know free tool from google you really get a lot of insight into how people are getting to your site and what they're doing on it So really in order to uh To understand how people are using the page, you know set up The things that you want to track is most important. You want to see when they get to You know page xyz Maybe you want to use one of the path tools that will show you, you know How many people started on the home page? Then, you know, maybe 10 went to this page 30 went to this And i'll give you a whole spider web to track these things So it allows you to uh Visualize the data in a lot of different ways, but just getting this on here and collecting it I think it's going to give you a lot of insight into maybe what needs to be improved What's working well You spend a lot of time on this one landing page and you're seeing that people aren't able to Or aren't landing on that page or they aren't filling out the form on that page That can give you sort of the uh, the reason to say hey, let's let's take a look at you know, where we're linking this page from What we're doing it for uh, what we're doing To get people here the copy we're using on this page It can really help you understand, you know, what the most efficient use of your time is going to be so all that kind of bundles up into the need to you know Be optimized for every user and that includes, you know, make sure the website is accessible So as i mentioned earlier, uh, according to the cdc up to one in every four americans have one or more disabilities And a lot of those people with the disabilities Uh rely on like assistive technology to get on the internet So that would be things like screen readers So if they're visually impaired, uh, they have a tool on their computer that will read The entire that basically the web page to them And if the page isn't structured correctly if it doesn't have the right alt tags and things like that in it It can get very confusing as it wouldn't make a lot of sense So when you see pages that have a nice hierarchy and structure So even something like when I go back a slide Um, but something like this where you see like, you know, there's a header on here and then there's bullets And then there's sub bullets things like that are the hierarchy that that should exist within a website So that it can be accessible. It can be read well by these screen readers. Um, similarly Saying that same vein making sure like that the design is is such that it is accessible So there's a good contrast ratio. So there's it's not a strain on someone's eye Um, when they're trying to read maybe like white text over a lighter background or a dark or like a blue background or something like that Um, that's that's that has a high contrast ratio So there's a bunch of best practices and things like that that are really important to follow to keep your site accessible and in compliance um, and then you know the other the reverse stat of that is um If your website's not accessible you could be basically excluding part of that that that audience And this is where it's really even more important to really understand who your audience is Because while this is relevant for everyone, you know, you need to it should be accessible It should be one of the primary concerns of your website This might be a big chunk of your market, right? This could be a big this could be your Who you're influencing who you're working with who you're who you're geared towards who you're trying to engage with Uh, so it's just very important to keep that in mind as you are um As you're building the building these sites out and building out, you know, your digital assets So going through this we'll give you guys some some ideas on like tools and technology and how to keep these things aligned One of the things that we we focus on is integration And this a lot this is just kind of the concept of of connecting your different platforms and technology to each other so that you're not Manually moving things from one place to the next and so you can share data across these different systems So very basic example would be, you know, if you have a form on your website and it's collecting Information about donors you want to make sure that integrates with your donation management system And you want to make sure your donation management system integrates with your email marketing system That way you're able to collect data from someone Push them into your donation management system and then use your email marketing platform to Engage with someone who has who has or hasn't donated to you in the past right to be able to pair those things down And if you have this integrated well that information runs right back Kind of runs back in this nice circle to each other where you send them and let's say julien comes into our website We see him fill out a form He's interested in learning more about donating but he doesn't donate and then I come to the website And I do donate well julien and I should receive different messages in the future from our email marketing platform And if we don't have these tools connected, we can't do that But the value of having the tools connected is think about all the time that saves and the efficiency that gives you as a as an organization So you don't need a person in there like sorting through spreadsheets or or you know Coming up with all these different things if you if you integrate and automate these things well so We like to look at like the entire sort of ecosystem. So just some of the questions Earlier on like what platforms and things like that we recommend we want to break these things and these different buckets, right? so We look at the platforms that you might use these aren't some of these are either or some of these are are in addition to each other but we want to look at stuff like Putting tools together And making sure that you're integrated across that whole ecosystem So these are sort of some of the best best and breed best practices types of tools that we recommend Starting with content, you know, you need a place that's going to Allow you to speak to your audience, right? So that could be through wix or a wordpress website And then using tools within those websites like woofoo for forms optimizely for for different digital campaigns And then then you want to be able to message them So my earlier example, you know use taking someone from your website pushing them into your email marketing platform like MailChimp Or or something like that that you're going to be able to to messaging engage with them over time And then move that into to some type of automation platform as well So there's some basic automations and something like MailChimp But some of these plot these tools like HubSpot You know more keto zappier allow you to do more advanced advanced automation So if this happens do this thing if this doesn't happen do this other thing And and take out and limit some of the the manual work your team has to do You could do the bet you might be the best at at the first half of this But if you're not reporting on this you're not collecting and tracking this So as Julie mentioned earlier like the importance of something like google analytics You're not going to know you're not going to be putting your best foot forward You know going forward to say okay. Well out of this campaign work You know you might anecdotally say we got a lot of donations But you want to be looking at the analytics and make sure the tools are in place to say How can we improve that? What could we have done better? What you know? What did work? What didn't work? What did we try and what didn't we try? That allows you to set that strategy So back to our earlier example on growth driven design to plan and iterate things over time And then what we're seeing you know what we're starting to see more and more of Is looking at data like how do we consolidate all this data in one place? You know we're getting data from different platforms So we might have these things integrated, but how are we looking at data? So data is separate from reporting that could be things like all of your donor data All of your offline donor data or internal donor data your donors in mail and champ your donors in these different systems So there's some tools we've laid out here as examples That allow you to to look at that at like a more of a macro level and then be able to slice and dice down into that actual data itself So kind of make sure to think about that separately from reporting And Audrey asks sort of More specific to WordPress. Yes. Are there any specific WordPress plugins or plugin types that you recommend as important for nonprofit websites? So if you look at how all these sort of icons are organized, you can see that okay Each company does something specific and I would would suggest that you think of plugins that same way They're necessarily look for a certain plugin to add it because you want to add it You know, they're you know with WordPress being so popular there are plugins in there that will add like a funny joke to your dashboard You know every day when you log in don't don't install any of those But sort of identify the functionality you need and see, you know What's out there some things you might want to look at or a form plugin You know, maybe your theme has a built-in one or you want to use the the WordPress form option But a tool like wp forms or we really like gravity forms Now gives you the ability to Have multi page forms, you know, even collect donations or stuff through it If you want to customize who gets response emails and stuff, you know, that can really Reduce a lot of the administrative burden on you just by using a form tool like that another thing might be a cache So for WordPress sites, you know, something that can really speed up the performance is is having a cache available So there there's lots of things that you you can do on a WordPress site But I really evaluate, you know, what you're doing on the site What you're trying to do on the site and then sort of bridge the gap with those plugins So there's not necessarily a lot of ones where you're saying, okay, install this right away But just really take a look at what you're trying to do and map your your plugin needs according to that Always rely on, you know, there's a plugin that maybe has three people who've downloaded it ever Maybe stay away from that one But sort of with that you're going to find lots of options that are available for you that That's depending on what you're trying to integrate with or connect. Um, there'll be quite a few Quite a few options. Yeah, thank you Uh, and then now everybody's favorite and new buzzword for 2023, uh, is is AI I know this is like kind of the the wild wild west, especially in the nonprofit space, uh, and It can certainly become like the shiny object like what should I be using? What, you know, what can I be using should why am I not using it? And if you join some of our other webinars, we've done a few so far on AI and some specifics We've got a bunch more coming up in 2024. Um, but AI is a great tool if you're using it, you know, Breckley efficiently effectively it can also be a major hurdle and a major drawback if you're not like, you know If you're just being very reliant on it and letting it do everything for you Not proof checking not, you know, not not making sure that The information is accurate, you know, we read more and more and see more every day with what they what's called Like hallucinations, which is kind of like where AI just makes something up Because it makes these generalizations based on the large language miles and the things it's using or the The the data it has so it's important to kind of keep keep it in the lane But that doesn't mean you can't use it for some great things like brainstorming. So we love it for like ideation Um for you know, audience like growth and background So there's a bunch of different things you listed out here I'm not going to go through every single one of these things in detail, but using something Like notion to to allow teams to to collaborate together and work on like automating tasks So using an AI Agent or an AI bot to do things for you to consolidate things So back to the the data earlier like you can load some data into AI or into an AI platform And say okay, I want to see all the donors who donated more than $5,000 last year And then you can ask it to do that and you say, okay, you know create a create a Create email for me with a subject line that's gonna You know ask them to to donate more in in 2024 and give me three paragraphs that that highlight the the key read the key Learnings or key things, you know that our organization did that did well this year And then you give it like your your URL and you give a little bit of background And you let AI kind of summarize that stuff for you and now you've come up with you know I mean it maybe takes you five to ten minutes to To prompt it to put that information in there and obviously it gets it's more complex than that But now you've taken like ideation stage out of it You've taken the the time you have to sit down and think about writing this thing And then if you create a nice little formula or template there That's something you can reuse and repurpose in the future Again relying on the on the reporting and the data that you're collecting to see how that's performing and iterate over that Over time There's also things like canva and you know these some of these different like mid-journey pools Dolly like the ones that allow you to also create like these these kind of compelling graphics or visuals From with front from From like an ai prompt to be to get the same thing there make sure you're taking a look at these You know, you see these these things where you ask it to create you people doing things And then people have seven fingers on one hand and three fingers on the other hand or Three eyeballs or their t-shirts have like really strange writing on them So you got to you got to keep an eye on what it's what it's creating But it's a great way to to to do some brainstorming and do some some content creation And on the other side of that is all the all like the remedial tasks and things like that that ai can do for you so think about like voice tools for like dubbing videos For translating different things for transcribing different videos Or like using video ai tools to to you know, put an ai avatar You know in a webinar or something like that for you I promise you i'm a real person But I could we could write this this this webinar today and give it a script and we could have someone sit here that You know, it kind of looks like me probably talks a little bit less robotic Since I seem like I think I talk about your robot sometimes but we I could I could quickly have like another version of myself so to speak So if you have a small organization, you don't have the time, you know to create video content You don't have the time to create these webinars. This is a very viable alternative to that You know if it's used used correctly. So a great way to sort of scale capacity For you and your organization or even scale expertise Yeah, uh before we jump into uh all the other ones rashani has an ai specific one She asks any ai tools help the google analytics and search console reporting um a lot of What's in google analytics and search console already search console to a lesser extent, but definitely google analytics is ai so a lot of the ways that they're sort of Building reports and suggestions is through artificial intelligence Then to sort of like to help with the actual reporting and stuff like that There may be things where you just want to look at at exporting the data from one of those tools And importing into different visualization options I will say that once you start exporting google analytics data That does get quite large quite fast is there they're they're capturing a lot one of the benefits of the platform is just how they make it available to you So it's not necessarily the uh the raw data. That is the the biggest help in google analytics Is that raw data combined with the different views and tools they have to allow you to to visualize that But there are you know a lot out there if you just want to you know create different graphs or have interesting queries into How some of this data overlaps There's quite a bit out there But now we have a little bit of time left I see you know one question in the chat if you would like to put any questions in the q and a here We're here to help. So, you know throw it at us and we'll definitely answer it to kick things off Emma z asks What online donation payment system do you suggest? I've seen paypal and square, but if i'm thinking correctly they take a percentage of the payment So there you know, there's quite a lot out there depending on the platform you use there may be things like WordPress has give wp Uh give butter bu tter is also one that you know If you have a certain badge on the form they don't collect a fee and they also You know have an option for the users to cover the actual transaction fees Depending on on what tool you actually use one of the things you are going to run into Is uh a percentage for payment processing So, you know a lot of these tools they aren't building their own payment processors They're using something like paypal or square or stripe on the back end Which carries their own like 2.9 1.9 percent whatever whatever that's going to be So a lot of it doesn't necessarily come down to you know a specific free one So give butter is the best sort of low cost close to free as you can get option A lot of it comes down to hey can we tie this into maybe a donor management platform Can you know if you're going to you know Pay for use of a tool Can you get additional features in it to be able to you know capture that donor information send it to your email lists Send it to maybe a different CRM So there's quite a lot out there. It really depends on on what platform you're using But there's there's plenty plenty out there One isn't necessarily better than the other until it comes down to those additional features You're going to get everybody will be able to process a credit card Not everybody's going to allow you to maybe email users directly from the donation management platform or create different lists Or allow people to donate to specific funds depending on on what you want to do. There's going to be Better options or worse options for you Great any other questions we've got a few more minutes here and a couple more slides just to Share some offers with you all but definitely make sure we cover anything we All keep going and look for look for some more questions in the chat one thing we wanted to offer you all is We we put together a a book of 80 or more Chat gpt prompts specifically geared towards nonprofits So we offer this as to you all in the webinar today. There will be a link in this In the slides that you'll get either later today or tomorrow that'll take you right to that that ebook Where you can get that kind of the prompts the prompts are really a lot of the building blocks that are necessary for getting Chat gpt or these different Ai tools to do what you needed to do. You can't just say hey build me a website, right? Or, you know, right right my content for my website. You have to give it the right The right background you have to have it you have to answer the correct questions and things like that So that there's a little bit to it And we've we've put some of that stuff together for you to really help drive these outcomes for your nonprofit organizations We do have a question here from uh john who's who's asking about tracking he asks Getting the conversion and tracking is very important It informs the machine learning for google ads when you set up a website How do you know the difference when you are setting up the conversion tracking for google analytics 4 or google ads? So google analytics 4 and google ads are two separate products made by the same company And and they they can work together but not don't necessarily by default So when we talk about a conversion in google analytics 4 We don't necessarily do anything to the website to say hey, this is a conversion What we say is hey google analytics These are the things that I want to count as a conversion you can say when somebody goes to this page and just views it That's a conversion. So you can set that up However, you'd like you can use all those those event types we talked about Before for this downloading form downloading Files starting forms things like that you can set any of those up as a conversion You can then use those to build audiences that you target in google analytics. I mean in google ads We were talking google ads sort of a bit of of the reverse So, you know, you have to set up the the correct landing page Hopefully when you're setting up these google ads You're not just sending somebody to the home page of your website You're sending them to landing pages that allow them to convert on a specific action You don't just want to send somebody to the general, you know front page of your website To have them go there as any other user they're clicking on the ad You've probably really got their attention on something and she want to make sure that attention is rewarded By, you know being efficient with what you're providing them sending them to one place where they can understand, you know What you're trying to do who you are and make that conversion option whether it's donating Signing up for an event downloading a resource So, um, those are going to be two separate uses of the word conversion and they each could be very platform specific We also have One from kate here a website is already hosted on squarespace and our payment system is square You've been having trouble integrating the two Have you ever worked on that? Do you have a third party platform suggestions for that or an easy way to integrate? So it really depends on the issue you're having I know a lot of you know payment systems, uh, you know might have the ability to embed an iframe Which isn't the most responsive or greatest option But you know if you're looking to sort of get something up quickly or just patch it You can always just create an iframe, which is basically like a window that you know, uh square can fit in You know their own contents I haven't personally connected the two kyle. Have you ever worked with square space and square together? uh, I have in the past and I remember it being Annoying I I don't remember exactly what what the um, what we ended up doing to over kind of overcome that it might even actually been moving moving it off of there Or using something like I think zappier to to integrate the two Yeah, that's another a good tip a lot of times been two things don't necessarily work together by default a tool like zappier can really bridge the gap Um, and you know turn something that might be you know incredibly complicated And you know might have you trying to change your entire tech stack to something that you know Allows you to unlock even more potential than you thought was there in the beginning Um, valoria asks for the not-for-profit with not much budget and no in-house experts How can we get started in making progress with the various things mentioned in this webinar? updating or upgrading the website security on the website using AI Uh, moving strategically to the next stage accessibility. It's overwhelming And so you know, there there is quite a lot there a lot of it comes down to prioritizing and seeing you know What work can you do now that won't sort of either need to be duplicated or made irrelevant? By the stuff you plan to do in the future So the first step to sort of taking all this sort of stuff you've heard here Is really sitting down and and prioritizing it. So if you're thinking, okay, well, you know I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to You know update the security on this site and you know working a lot on that if I know That I need a new website too. It might be better. Just sort of get that website up as quick as possible And then make sure it's set up, you know, well security wise there So you can always, you know, contact us and we can sort of help you prioritize and give you more context on things But if you're just sort of doing this on your own, we work, you know, the not much budget and no in-house experts We work with a lot of organizations like that It's really just coming down to prioritizing that and making the plan that you can then take down step by step by step I'm on the board of a small nonprofit. That's had a fairly simple website on host skater for many years But it's frustrated with their support They're looking at moving to dream hosts and the astra theme Any quick pieces of advice or warning before they pull the trigger? Um, I don't have anything specific. I know if you're moving a theme as well that might involve a lot of sort of like, uh, Page edits and sort of, you know, you have to mess with stylings and you know, re-adding content So, you know, it may be a bit of a bigger project than you want If you're changing the theme and the host Maybe see if that's something you can combine to a full website rebuild and make sure that You know, a lot of the stuff that you're trying to do actually serves your website and think that as an opportunity Sort of break it down and plan it out really build build a nice house on top of that Uh, joellen, uh asks can I ask what the average cost is to set up a website? Small not for profit, etc And so that really depends on what you want the website to do So, uh, you know, kyle, I know we work with a lot of you know, uh, different Organizations depending on their size and sort of the needs of their website. That's really going to you know, uh Determine exactly exactly what the final cost is going to be whether it's a basic site or or a, uh, You know a very intensive set like we might do for one of the uh, the state departments here Um, what do you think a good range would be? Yeah, that's a great question So I'll I'll say kind of what I mentioned a little bit earlier like looking at Maybe an mvp or like a proof of concept type of website first. So Um, if it's a small nonprofit that doesn't have a website or has something that's kind of that's very outdated It's probably In your best interest to try to try something that's almost like off the shelf And then having a really strong content strategy around that so, you know One website versus the not versus another might not look that much different They might have more, you know, different colors different photography and but just have different content, right? There's a lot. There's a lot of different templates and themes and things like that out there that exist especially like when you look at stuff like wix and Like web flow or something where it's going to have it you have a template that has that takes best practices into account That is mobile responsive and all you kind of need to do is drop your stuff in there and make it work for you That would be like the the first approach. I would I would look at if you have the bandwidth You don't you shouldn't have you shouldn't need the limited Techno technical expertise to do that to get something out there that's that speaks about your organization But content is going to be the big the big hurdle the big lift That is Whatever time it takes you to do that as far as outsourcing it having someone else do it You know, there's certainly things like fiber and up work or whatever you could go find someone else to to do like the actual build for you, but then you're going to really have to kind of like Con general contract it so to speak and manage that whole project and that could be very Time-consuming and inundating that's going to be where you're but that's going to be the lowest cost But it's going to be a pretty big time suck. I think for you and you're probably not going to get what you want at the end of it Our websites when we do websites for nonprofit organizations But they usually start in like the $15,000 range, but that's like over a period of time So it's not just like a one, you know, this is it whatever Those are also typically the websites that are, you know, we're going to do a custom design We're going to do we're going to work work with you on like the the whole content flow and content architecture We're going to look at what you have now Actually, it's actually on the screen right now. So you can see what it says So we start with this strategy We do like a discovery content audit in the scope of work to really say this what we're going to do for you We do like the site structure recommendations and the website design We develop it so we you know, we we Follow best practices and build it on WordPress. Uh, and then we qa test it and launch it. So it's really the full the full package um And that's like I said, usually starts around like $15,000 It's not, you know, it's it's a good chunk of time that it takes on our end. It's that there's a lot of of like, you know customization and and specific like learning specifically to you all to you or your organization that that goes into that But you know the package on the end of that is going to be it's going to work for it's going to You know work for your audience is going to fit your audience. It's going to follow those best practices It's going to use our you know years and years of experience Um, and it's going to be, you know, secure optimized accessible all those things And uh, so the last question I'm seeing right now is a which a WordPress hosting platform. Do you like the best and why There's quite a lot out there We like site ground one of the main things you're going to want to take a look at is sometimes you feel like you might be Getting a really good deal But you might not have a lot of space or bandwidth on there or you might be, you know Package with other sites that can make the site really slow to use so um, uh, there's there's plenty of options out there some people even, you know Build their own servers and host it out of their basement. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that unless you really really really really know what you're doing Um, but just take a look at the actual sort of services that you're provided There's also two types of WordPress hosting you have sort of passive and managed So passive hosting is where you're basically providing uh, you're you're paying for access to a a A computer somewhere that you're going to put your website on they'll hook it up to the internet Then there's managed hosting sort of like we do here where we're taking a look at your site You know, we'll be able to respond to issues. Uh, you know update plugins keep things up to date You know if there's any sort of uh security issues getting those patch and stuff right away So really take a look at at sort of uh, what's being provided You know, and also if you wanted to talk to us about it, I'll be more than happy to sort of go through all that Thanks. So we have about a minute left. So I just want to wrap up wrap this up. Um We have as we said, we'll have a uh, this will be linked in the PDF slides, but you can also find it on on tech teams website again if you go to that services tab at the top of the screen and pull down either web development or Or digital marketing you'll find access to to book a consultation with us And you'll see that here as well. Um, our emails will be in this too, I believe Uh, so you guys will be able to reach out to us following this webinar once we send this the the PDF slides and everything else like that out to you all today Or tomorrow at the latest So I just wanted to wrap this up by saying thank you to you all. We appreciate you kind of Engaging with us asking these great questions And sort of taking the step forward to To hopefully optimizing and improving your website and your web presence as a nonprofit organization