 Welcome to How to Captivate and Engage Constituents with Your Website. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for 6 years, and prior to that I spent about 10 years working for small nonprofits in Washington D.C. and Oakland, California. I was frequently the accidental techie, so I've been in the position of trying to develop new websites and come up with ways to engage my constituency with our outreach and communications. So I'm glad to be here with an expert presenter, Jay Wilkinson, who is the founder and CEO of Firespring, where he'll be able to share some of the tips that he's gleaned from working with nonprofits for a really long time, much longer than I have, and can share his experience and also feedback from focus groups that he's helped conduct and run to learn what makes the most effective websites and what makes these websites the most engaging for nonprofit audiences. You'll also see in the chat window Lori Cadovy from Firespring, and you may also see Ali Bazikian from TechSoup. And they'll be on hand to help answer questions or flag questions so that we don't miss them when it gets to the time for follow-up and Q&A. A quick look at today's agenda. I'll do an introduction of TechSoup for any of you who are not familiar. We'll spend a moment just doing a couple of polls so that we can understand where you're best situated right now and what matters most to you when it comes to web design. We'll talk about why the web matters, and then Jay will take us through the biggest mistakes nonprofits make, four attributes of an engaging web presence, five proven methods for promoting your website, five required elements of an engaging website, and some action steps to take home with you today. We'll have time for Q&A at at least one point in the middle and also then at the end. So as those questions come to you, please just chat them into us because we'll make sure we've got them lined up. We may not get to all of them. We'll have a big crew on here today, but we'll do our best to try and respond as we can and to share additional resources after. So quickly getting started, who is TechSoup? We are a 501C3 nonprofit working toward the day when every nonprofit, library, foundation on the planet has the access to the technology, resources, and knowledge to meet their mission. We've been around since 1987 serving more than 200,000 charitable organizations in more than 60 countries around the world. We do that in part by offering programs like this where we provide free webinars on a weekly basis to the nonprofit and library sectors. We also do it by expanding the product donation programs available in our catalog including things like consulting services, Windows 8.1, and QuickBooks 2014. You can find all of this and more at TechSoup.org. So getting us started with the poll questions, I want to go ahead and have you answer which of these website components are critical to your organization's website. And go ahead and click on the ones that you think matter most to you or to your organization. And this helps provide us a little bit of context for where your priorities are on your organization's website right now. And this will also help inform Jay as he gets started with his presentation. And feel free to comment in the chat. Thanks for letting us know also in chat where everyone is joining from. We have people from all over the country in Canada. We are really glad to have so many people on the call today. So take just a moment. I'll give just a few more seconds. Somebody asked if there is an all of the above option, and I obviously did not include all of the above, but that's a good note to point out that all of those might be really critical components in your view for your website. So that's great. I'm going to go ahead and close this out in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And it looks like 82% believe that the landing page is really critical to their organization's website. 59%, say search engine optimization. And then content management system and online donations are hovering right around half of you have voted for those and then event registration. We have a few comments in the chat. A couple of people saying that the landing page, not sure why that should be important. A couple of others commenting that they are hoping for a complete redesign for a sexier, more graphic appearance. We all are constantly trying to keep up with what's new. One other question, and this takes us into a question a bit more about your donors. And we ask this question because in Jay's presentation he'll talk a little bit about how a website can really help you retain your donors. So go ahead and click where you think around about your organization's donor retention rate. So from year over year, how many people who donate to you continue to donate to you? Go ahead and click on that. And let's see what people think or know about their donor retention rate. And then Jay will tie it all together for us in his presentation. And if you're just joining us I want to make sure that people are aware this is a 90 minute webinar today. So we hope that you'll be able to stay with us for all of it. If not, you will get a recording later today that includes the full presentation and the links to any resources we discuss for your review. So I'm going to give just another second for this. And it looks like so 23% say that their retention rate is 0 to 29%. The next highest is 70 to 79%. So that's really impressive donor retention if that's the case. So that's terrific. Let me go ahead and welcome our presenter today, Jay Wilkinson to the line, the founder and CEO of FireSpring who is going to share his expertise on how to captivate and engage constituents with your website. Welcome Jay. We're so glad to have you. Jay Wilkinson It is my pleasure. Thank you for joining me for allowing me to join you today. Jay Wilkinson Thanks so much. So I'd love it if you could take it away and tell us a little bit more about FireSpring and you and share your presentation with us. Jay Wilkinson Fantastic. Thanks Becky. Let's get rolling today. We are going to talk quite a bit today about a captivating and engaging constituents with your website. And I love the comment that someone made that they need a sexy more graphically appealing website. That's something we'll definitely be addressing today. I wanted to start by giving just a tiny little bit of background about our history in nonprofits and helping nonprofits with their web presence. That's me second to the left there with my three kids. They're three best friends and my father on a trek across the state of Nebraska. It sounds glorious I know doesn't it? A 10-day, 3,000 mile extravaganza and an RV cooped up seeing every corner of our state which we just did recently. It was a really fantastic trip. We do hail from Lincoln, Nebraska. We call it the Silicon Prairie out here. And FireSpring has been in the business of helping nonprofit organizations understand how to utilize the web and web tools way back since the middle of 1990s beginning around 96, 97. So we've been at this a long time. And Becky was very kind by not saying how long earlier but it's been a while. And in the last several years we've been focusing in on really understanding best practices, talking to constituents of nonprofit organizations, people who donate to nonprofits, people who are served by the nonprofits, people who volunteer for the nonprofits, people who sit on the boards of the nonprofits. And we've asked them if we were to build the perfect website for the organization that you interact with and go back and forth with in your role, whatever it is. What would that organization need to do to compel you to truly engage with them in a meaningful way through their website? And so during the course of the next hour I'm going to be sharing that information with you. We'll start with why the web is so important in the first place, why it matters. The three biggest mistakes that nonprofits make when we develop our web presence, the four attributes of an engaging web presence, that's the 30,000 foot view. And then we're going to tunnel in and get really specific with the five proven methods that we can deploy to really promote our website in substantial and meaningful ways. And then the meat and potatoes of today's content which are the five required elements of an engaging website. By the time we're done today you're going to be an expert. You're going to know everything you need to know to take your website to an entirely new level and exactly what you need to do to make that happen. We'll wrap up today with a few specific action steps that you can begin working on this afternoon or tomorrow morning. One final reminder that if you are going to be tweeting today we would encourage you to use the hashtag Firespring and TechSoup in your tweets that way others who are tweeting can follow along and chew on your salient thoughts and really get the most out of the session today. So if you're tweeting we'd appreciate the use of those hashtags. My handle on Twitter if you'd like to refer to myself during the course of the presentation is J-WELC, J-A-Y-W-I-L-K. Alright so let's start again with this issue of why the web is so important, why it matters. We know that 87% of U.S. citizens between the age of 18 and 65 today are using email or access the web at home or at work on a regular basis. And we know that the vast majority of those people prefer email and web-based communication over all other types of communication. It's not a question of if our constituents and our donors and our volunteers are online. It's a matter of how we're using the tools to connect and communicate with them. That's really what it's all about. And we know that nonprofits struggle substantially more than our for-profit counterparts. In fact, of the 88% of nonprofits today who have a website, nearly three-quarters of those are designed in-house or we're using something that was donated by a volunteer or public agency. And that leads me right into my very first and really important point here that I want to make. And that is the single biggest mistake that's kind of the overarching thing. And I'm going to get into three very specific things as it relates to this, is that so many of us are building our websites. And when people come to our website through all of these different ways that they get here, all the different ways that they find us, we end up turning around and sending them right back off of our website. We send them over to say for example Eventbrite, to do event registration, or we send them to a tool like Volunteer Spot or whatever, all the volunteer tools, or WordPress for our blogging, or PayPal to make a payment, or some kind of social media. We're sending them somewhere else to engage with us in any kind of meaningful way. And this is largely the result of what's happened in the last several years as we've evolved the web presence of our organizations to use primarily WordPress as our platform. And before you get me wrong on this, I'm not going to make this about a WordPress bashing session. WordPress is a fabulous tool. In fact, it's an awesome tool. It's really intended in the beginning stages as a blogging tool, as a way to really publish content and make it easy to get content out there. But then we started using all of these modules and plug-ins and all these things. Even if you go out and you pay a developer $3,000 or something, someone up the street and they develop a website for you in WordPress, many of us paid or whether we're developing it free or charging the organization, we use these modules, these low cost or no cost modules and plug-ins to build websites for nonprofits. It's just what we do. And then what happens when it doesn't work? If the event registration, for example, if the event registration tool that you've plugged in isn't working quite right, who can you hold accountable for that? That's the problem. There's really no one to hold accountable for it because it's free. Whose feet are you going to hold to the fire when something is free? So we end up just kind of dealing with it and having to use whatever works. So this is fundamentally the biggest issue that we struggle with in the nonprofit world. We're always focused on that age-old mantra in the nonprofit space. And we all heard this before, have to do more with less. We've got to find a way to do more with less. Must do more with less. How many times have we heard that mantra? And I would argue vehemently that we need to stop thinking that way as nonprofits. We need to start thinking about how we can really focus and maybe in some cases even do less with less, where we're really hyper focused on being able to make a substantial impact in whatever way that we can, but focus in on doing it with the tools and technology that's available to us and using tools like your website as a point of leverage. And I'll make this point up front as we get into our three biggest mistakes. I believe that websites and donor database tools, those two tools are the two most important things for a nonprofit in terms of ROI. The two types of technology that a nonprofit can utilize that will have the maximum return on investment. I know nonprofits that have spent, and by the way, I'm not recommending you do this. I'm just using this as an example, but I know nonprofits who have spent $50,000 developing their website who have doubled or tripled the return on investment because they've increased their contributions that much as a result of having something really powerful and amazing. I know other nonprofits that have spent as little as say $50 or $500 developing a website and they come out with really a glorified online brochure that has really no functional use or purpose other than just showing the mission statement of the organization that ended up being a waste of that $500 because there's really very little or marginal return. So it's not about how much you spend. It's about how much leverage you get out of what you spend and how much you get back for what you spend. So let's talk then about the three biggest mistakes that nonprofits make when they develop a web strategy. And we're going to start with number three and work our way up to number one. And number three is the do-it-cheat mentality, striking right at the heart of what I've just shared with you about this, do more with less scenario that we all tend to subscribe to. We often refer to this as the executive director's really smart 14-year-old nephew with a computer syndrome or that we've got a volunteer working on a syndrome. Let me share an interesting stat with you. The average nonprofit organization in the United States today has to restart the development of their website every two to two and a half years. They start over. They start completely from scratch every two to two and a half years. And this is largely because these, I affectionately refer to them as go-to geeks that we work with, these go-to geeks in our world. Are people just like us? They have things happen. They have a child or a third child or they graduate from college or they have a new job or maybe they get a reassignment or maybe their spouse is relocated, but whatever, things happen in their life and they have to pay attention over there now for a while and they can't help us as much as they used to. So then we end up having to go out and finding someone new. It's kind of a transient situation that a lot of nonprofits find themselves in starting over every two to two and a half years. And this creates these cycles where we're starting over and just having to refigure things out and it also creates a lot of what we refer to affectionately in the nonprofit space as accidental techies. People, maybe some who are part of this call today who get thrust into this role of doing technical support even though you really don't have interest or technical proficiency to do it, but there's no one else there or available to do it. So this happens so often that we're focused on trying to keep costs low or keep costs at zero that we end up just trying to do it on the cheap and then we end up not really having much opportunity for leverage. The second big mistake that nonprofits make is when we develop our website and we don't really consider how to make it part of the overall strategy, mission, or the organization's overall ideology. It happens all the time where we create these silos in our nonprofits. We have, for example, the event schedules that are going on where we have these people that are planning the various events that we're doing throughout the year. We have our leadership team that is holding their mission statement very closely to our chest and protecting our mission and our purpose and espousing our passion as an organization. And then we have someone that does marketing for us. Sometimes these are board members, sometimes it's a paid position, sometimes it's a volunteer. It varies from nonprofit to nonprofit. But what we do see is that all of these tend to exist in silos in addition to whoever this website developer is, where we've just kind of slid this website across the table to someone and say, all right, you're the smartest person in the room when it comes to computers and technology. Why don't you just take this and run with it? You can figure this out. And we end up handing it off to someone who may or may not really truly understand our core mission, just inherently where it's imbued into the way they think. We have really difficult times in our organizations when we pass the technology or the website development off to a person who's not plugged in to the organization. So I would like to make the point that in every organization, and I'm sure that all of my fellow go-to geeks on this call today will chime in with me and agree with me on this, we want the leadership team involved in the development of the website. The leadership team has to be involved in helping us decide how we're going to evolve at what's going to be present because having that purpose and the mission at the center of everything that we're doing as we're thinking about it is critical to make this work. So make sure if you are on the leadership team of your organization, however it's composed and however it's constructed in your organization, that you're involved in the process. It's really, really important. It takes way more than just a mission statement page hidden away somewhere on your website to create a really dynamic and really awesome website that people will connect with. And the number one thing that we see, the biggest mistake is lack of research and planning. Here's how it typically goes when a nonprofit organization decides that it's time to update their website. Someone will say, all right, it's July, almost August of 2014. The last time we updated our website was 2007, 2008, 2009, whatever it was, we've got to do something. So let's call a meeting. They pull everybody together in the organization, the other page, staff folks, maybe some key volunteers, maybe a couple of keyboard members. Certainly the go-to geek will be in that room, the person that we lean heavily on for all things technical, which again, we all have one. Sometimes it's official, sometimes it's unofficial, but in every organization there is a go-to geek of some sort that we lean on. And again, I want to make sure I'm clear on this. I say this with all the love and adoration. I can muster up in my heart when I say I love my go-to geeks. I've been one of them in many organizations over the course of my lifetime. So if it comes across as being disparaging in any way, when I talk about our go-to geeks, please understand that that's not my intent. But we call all these people together, and the person running the meeting will go over the rules of brainstorming. You know, we've all heard this before, no idea is a bad idea. We get the best ideas from the crazy ones. Let's get everything up on the board so they start filling the whiteboard full of ideas. Someone will go, oh, I've got an idea. How about we add this into the website? I saw this the other day and it was really cool. Someone else will chime in, well, how about that? And the other thing, you fill up a whiteboard full of different things that we can build into our new website. And eventually, the person running the meeting is going to lean back in their chair and they'll do that slow neck turn and affix their gaze on the go-to geek down there at the other end of the table and they'll kind of lock eyes for a moment. And they'll get that kind of look on their face with little scrunchy nose and they'll say, okay, now which ones of these things up here pointing to all the things on the board? Which ones of these things can we actually build? And the go-to geek in the room will return the scrunchy nose gaze and pause for a few seconds and say, well, we can probably do this one. I know of a module or something we can add in here and then they'll most likely pull out their computer, their laptop, or their smart phone and start doing searches to see if they can find some plug-ins that will do some of these things. And they're going to start answering that question based on which ones of these can we actually build based upon what we're capable of building rather than what it is that our end users want us to build. Now how crazy is that to think about it from this perspective? And this is the way 90% or more of our websites are developed by really thinking through this process of, okay, let's come up with all these great ideas and then let's figure out what of these ideas can we actually do. We start thinking about it from that perspective. Now obviously the ideal way to do this is to actually put people in a room and ask them the question. Think about all the different audiences that we serve as a nonprofit or those that are coming to our website at least. We have, of course, the constituents themselves, the end users that we're serving in our market. We have employees and volunteers and donors and other nonprofit organizations, hopefully members of the media coming to learn more about what we're doing, our board members, all of these different audience members and we need to build our website so that it serves every one of them in a meaningful way. And in an ideal world, we would have a focus group where we'd put up these two-way glass mirrors and we would bring people in and we would ask them this question if we built the perfect website for you, what you want us to build, but it's really hard to do that. I understand why as nonprofits we don't do that as complicated, it's time consuming, it's expensive to put these focus groups together. But for the rest of our session today that's what I'm going to focus in on because we've done that. We've had several hundred, more than a thousand constituents, employees, volunteers, donors of nonprofits all around the U.S., set in a room with other people and answer that question. If the nonprofit that I donate to, volunteer for, whatever, were to build the perfect website, what is it that they would need to build into their website? What would make me click and engage with this organization? So that's what we're going to focus on for the rest of our session today. Starting with this, the 30,000-foot view, the four attributes of an engaging web presence, number one being the positioning of our website. Think of positioning as the voice that our website speaks in. When we create our website, it needs to just live, eat, and breathe our purpose, our mission. So people know who we are and what we're about. Simply by cruising any page in our website should be really obvious, really evident. This is number one. Number two refers to the public aspect of our website. So think of this as www.yourwebsite.org. What is our public website? What does it look like? And in this day and age, in 2014, we should also be thinking about that in context with number three, the private aspect of our website. So this is a place where you would go, the private area, we sometimes refer to this as a content management system. We'll talk more about that later. It's a place where you would log into username and password and be able to update and modify information on the public website. It's that simple. You have essentially a private website and a public website. The private website is where you can go and update and modify the content on your public website. We're going to dig in and talk about that more in a few minutes. The fourth attribute is that of promotion. How do we get the word out about our website so that people not only know that it's there, but know why they should go there? And this is a really key aspect. I'm going to take just a couple of minutes here and we're going to talk about the five proven methods for promoting our website. And we start with the basic. The thing that we started with all the way back in the very beginning of the Internet when it first started to emerge, people would say, you know, got to get your domain name on everything. So if you have freebies like water bottles or you have balloons at your event, put your domain name on there. You have the emails that you sent out. Put it in the footer of the email. If you have a vehicle driving around town, get your domain name on the vehicle. If you're in a high traffic location for your physical address, make sure that you put up a sign or a banner or a window decal or something that has your domain name on it so people see it. But get your domain name on everything that you possibly can. That's still very important. It's one thing that hasn't changed after all these years. All right, number two refers to creating very simple and basic viral marketing promotion techniques and when I say viral marketing, way too many of us start thinking of the wrong things. We start to think about the really heightened solutions that people come up with that are really difficult and complicated. The stuff that we see all the time, it gets a million views. It doesn't even have to be a video, but it doesn't have to get a million views for it to be viral. I know that's the common definition. The best definition of viral is just anything that you share that's compelling enough or interesting enough that I want to share it with someone else. That's as simple as it gets. And I'm going to share an example with you, something very specific that I received. This happened a few years ago now in 2010. I got an email from a friend of mine. And in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, we were in the process of deciding as a community whether or not we wanted to build a new arena for the local college basketball team to play in for concerts to draw some bigger names to our community. It's a college town. They thought, okay, let's get something going here. About half the community was against it because of the cost. It was kind of a tough time back when the conversations first started to happen back in 2008. It wasn't a great time economically. Things were down. And the other half of the community was really excited about it. So we started seeing all these messages come across our desk. And this is one from a friend named Clary Kastner. And the email just said, you must check out this website, hilarious. And when I checked on the link in the email, it took me to a website and it merely said yes. So the domain name again, should I vote for the arena.com? And it takes me to a website. The answer is yes, May 11th, that's the date of the election. So basically three words on the entire website. Here's why this was brilliant. I checked with Clary a few weeks after the election and had concluded because I was really curious to know how many people actually clicked on and visited this website. And from the original email that got sent out to the recipients among which I was one, the original 20-25 recipients started forwarding this to people saying, hey, check out this website. More than 100,000 visitors, ultimately, 100,000 unique visitors ultimately came to this website and saw this page over the course of a couple of months after it was sent out. So here they spent about $9.99 to register the domain name and to host it for about six months. And whatever the intern's time was, which probably was about 10 minutes in the office to set up this really simple website, they spent less than $50 on this entire program and it reached 100,000 people. Now think about what kind of things can you do in your organization to create things like this that are compelling or interesting or just clever enough that makes it interesting or unique or compelling enough for me as a recipient that I want to share it with other people. Very simple, creating viral marketing techniques are really powerful. All right, number three refers to, of course, content and how we draw people to our website. The number one way to do this without question is to build a blog. And building a blog is not as easy done as it is said. Most of us, quite frankly, have failed miserably at blogging. Most organizations have tried and given up because they couldn't sustain it. It's because we're not doing it right. I have an entire session dedicated to this topic. If you're interested, you can reach out to Firespring or just go to firespring.org and sign up for any of our educational sessions. One of the sessions that I do on a regular basis is on social media, blogging, and thought leadership. And it's about how to really create incredible awareness in your community by becoming a thought leader in your community on the issue or cause or purpose that you exude as an organization. And using content to draw people to your website, creating thought leadership is really critical as a way to promote your website in general to get people to utilize it. And one of the things we just learned in the survey we conducted a few minutes ago, landing pages. I agree with your assessment where I think about 82% said that landing pages is the most important critical thing to our organization's website. I'm so proud to hear that that's what you voted as number one because I've been on the soapbox for about three years now talking about how important it is for every single organization to have a minimum of five landing pages that are powerful and effective. So here's an example of what we're talking about. This is one from the Red Cross a few years ago when the tsunami hit Japan, and the earthquake hit. They sent out this QR code in the middle of their Red Cross and when you clicked on it, it took you to a mobile website where you could give money. It was the largest, up to that point in time, the largest fundraising, mobile fundraising campaign that was ever, ever created. But landing pages are not just for mobile devices. Landing pages are powerful pages that are built into the structure of your website that make it possible for you to compel people to your website, to bring them in, to lead them into your website and have them land on a page where they can actually do something that is really effective. For example, you want to come in and get them to register for this particular event and make sure that the Register Now button is clear so that the call to action is abundantly clear. We have an entire session, by the way, dedicated just to this topic as well on building compelling and powerful landing pages. And I would encourage you, if you would love to know more about that, to sign up for that webinar and connect with us after the session and make sure that you're signed up for that. It's really important that every organization have a minimum of five landing pages built in that have a really simple and clear call to action. Here's an example of a live landing page at NoKidHungry. It says, take the pledge. 45,289 other people have done it. All we ask for is your email, your zip code, click, take the pledge, boom, it's done. You know exactly what it is that they want you to do when you land on this page. And what got me to this page was typing in the phrase, feeding hungry children. So if I'm doing a keyword search for feeding hungry children, it drew me here and it allows me to take action. It doesn't drop me off on the front page of NoKidHungry.org where I have to offend for myself and find my way to some way that I can help. It brought me to a landing page that allowed me to take action right from that page. That's so powerful. And that's what landing pages are all about. One side note on this, on search engine optimization, as much as important as it is to optimize our pages and our websites for search, it's important that we know the number one factor, the number one way that people are going to find you on search engines is by typing the name of your organization and some kind of geographic identifier into Google or Bing or Yahoo, whatever search tool they're using. They're going to look for you by name and by geographic region. That's how more than 98% of all of our organizations are found online by name and geographic region. So keep that in mind. It's important that we think about keywords like feeding hungry children and we focus on that but it's more important that our websites are optimized to be found by name including any acronyms that you might use which we all tend to do that in our industry and also any kind of misspellings. Like somebody tries to type Alzheimer's into a search bar and they misspell it more often than they spell it right. So make sure that you're accounting for that in your optimization of your pages. All right, and let's go to the number five proven method. And it's the thing that we hear about, we talk about, it's really, all you hear about and talk about is social media is so important in nonprofits, Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and now we're hearing so many conversations going on around Pinterest and some conversations around Vine and of course Instagram and all these tools that are available for us to use. Let me just say one thing about social media because it is really important for us to leverage our networks and get people talking about us on social media and to be part of that conversation. But don't put all of your efforts there. I've talked to organizations that have been given advice by so-called experts who are telling them put your time and effort and focus on Facebook because that's where the people are. There's a billion people on Facebook. Well, I've got lots of statistics to back up what I'm about to tell you but I will share with you that Facebook is least land. It's not the property you own. Your website is the land that you own that you should invest in and build a strong foundation there. Your Facebook page is least land. Not only have they in the past but they will in the future change the rules around how Facebook works. So don't spend all of your time and effort optimizing your Facebook page. Focus on getting people from your Facebook page to your website as efficiently as you can so you can have conversations with people there. They can connect with your blogs and they can connect with your content and the great tools that you're going to be building into your website after today, some of the fantastic ways that you're going to engage with people. It's really important that we don't spend too much time on Facebook. And it's not for everyone. Last thing on that, there are nonprofit organizations that just knock it out of the park with Facebook and I applaud them. If you're one of them, congratulations. It means that you're one of the few, the proud, the automatically engaging. There aren't very many of us. There are organizations that are automatically engaging on Facebook because of the type of service that we provide and because of the type of mission or purpose we have as an organization. Organizations that work a lot with children, a lot of children's diseases with animals, naturally engaged, naturally wired for engagement on Facebook. If you happen to be the type of organization that provides a really great and a really important niche service like for example, you are the membership association for an over the road trucking association. Probably not going to have a lot of people engaged on your Facebook wall every day having deep conversations. So we have to acknowledge that Facebook is much better for some organizations than for others. And don't fall into that trap of thinking that you have to engage on Facebook just because it works for everyone else because it doesn't. It doesn't work for everyone else. Let's end with the Golden Rule of Web Promotion here in the Promoting Your Website section here. And that is this, pretty simple. And it's going to sound so simple, but so few of us do it. The Golden Rule of Web Promotion is to tell people what's in it for them if they come to your website. Don't just say, check us out online or come see us at www.ourorganization.org. Don't just say that. It's meaningless. Instead, say, come to our website and register for XYZ events coming up in September. Come to our website and sign up to volunteer. Come to our website and donate goods and services, whatever specifically, what can they do when they come there, and then do whatever you can to get them to a landing page that allows them to basically fulfill that promise of what it is that you're telling them they're going to be able to do when they land there. But tell people what's in it for them. Don't just say, check us out online or come to our website because it's not effective and it's not going to get people to actually take action and come visit your website. We don't have time for that. It's a busy world today, right? I'm going to pause for just a moment. I'm going to check in and see if there are any questions that have come across up to this point that we might want to address now. Great. Well, we did have a couple of questions that came in, Jay, that were one was right at the beginning. And I think you may have covered it to some degree, but just to make sure everybody's on the same page with what is a content management system, let's make sure that definition is out there. Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you. And a content management system quite basically and very simply is a place where you can log in using a username and password, and you can update or modify any of the content that's on your website. So by default, if you have a WordPress site, which a lot of us do, the admin area of your WordPress site is a content management system. So anything that allows you to go and update and modify the information on your website through a web browser is a content management system. All right, let's keep going then. Well, I have one other question that we would piggyback on what you were just saying about maybe Facebook's not the right place for everyone. Christopher asks, my organization serves a retired population who do not use tech much in their work role to the degree common today. Any ideas or comments on how to bridge that generational divide? So how do you get a population that maybe isn't online very much to engage with you online? It's a great question. I always find this really fun because the fastest growing segment of the population adopting the web today, who are they? They're people over the age of 65. And then I say a big collective, well, duh, of course, they're the only ones left. Everyone else is online already. Of course, that's the fastest growing segment adopting the web today. But the fascinating thing is right now is the speed at the rate which people 65 years of age and older are utilizing the web is really shattering all of the expectations that the experts had 10, 15 years ago in terms of how many people in that age segment are online. And it's largely driven as a result of their grandchildren sucking them in and saying, you know, if you want to see the pictures from last weekend you've got to get online and see them. So it's interesting that people 65 to about 75 in that 10 year segment are, the vast majority of them now are online and utilizing some kind of online tools from email and even Facebook. It's pretty remarkable how many of them are out there. In terms of connecting with those folks the things that we need to do to be able to communicate with them effectively in social media and or just online in general is to build in into our websites really simple and fluid navigation. Number one, we're going to talk about that here in a few more minutes because so many of us try to design our websites to get all fancy to build in these flowing websites that are not really easy to navigate because it's like one long website with everything on one page. We've all seen those. It's a growing trend in the web design world now. And if you want to engage the age group that it's above the age of 65 you need to build simple and straightforward navigational tools so it's really easy for them to find their way around. And on top of that we need to make sure that we build in some of the ADA requirements which would be resizable text so that people can choose to view the website with larger text because not everyone knows how to make their web browser larger or smaller. It's sometimes nice if that's your primary segment to build your website with great simple graphics but larger fonts and make sure you don't reverse fonts out onto a page where you have a black background with white fonts laid over the top of it for example or any other variation of a reverse font. So some very simple design things. And we will cover some of that here in the next segment. So we'll dig into that a little bit deeper as we move on. Is there anything else Becky we should address now? We do have a bunch of other questions. There's only one other one that I think would be really good just to get your take on before moving forward. So when you talked about the WWW and the web domains earlier on, Heather asks what would you recommend using the WWW at the beginning of the URL or do you recommend ditching it? I recommend ditching it. We now know that more than 90% of people who actually go to a website don't even anymore type in the domain name. They go to their search tool and they type in the name of the organization they're looking for. I'm sure a lot of us probably do that same thing. If I'm looking for TechSoup for example, more than likely what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go to a browser. I'm going to type in TechSoup. I'm not going to even type in the WWW or the .com or .org designations. I'm just going to look by the name of the organization. So it's not critical anymore. It's so easy for people to find you as long as you are easily found by name, then you don't need to worry about using the WWW dot or any variation thereof. People are going to find you. I do recommend you still use your .org which is the preferred designation for the extension or your .com or .net or whatever you have. But ditch the WWW. Great. With that why don't we go ahead and move along. We have flagged everyone else's question so hopefully we'll have some more time with those later on. Thank you very much. And yeah, we will have time hopefully here to dig into those a little deeper here in a few minutes. But let's get into our meat and potatoes today, really what we're here for. When we're done with this next segment, everyone on this call today are going to be experts in building out an incredible website. As I'm going through these five elements of a powerful and engaging website, I encourage you to judge yourself. I know it's probably not what your therapist told you to do yesterday, but today we're going to judge ourselves. We're going to judge our websites. And when we get into our websites, as I go through these five elements, think about how you would score your own organization on each of these five elements. When we put a website into a focus group and we ask that question, I posed earlier, if we were to build the perfect website for the nonprofit organization that we volunteer for, that we donate to, whatever, what do they need to do in order to compel and engage me to utilize the website? When we think about it from that perspective, think about your website as I go through these five elements and how you would grade yourself on a scale of 1 to 20, with 20 being ideal, we knock it out of the park. We're the best I've ever seen with number one being we're a total failure. Obviously, you're not going to be either into that extreme spectrum. You're going to be somewhere in between. So let's see how you do as we're going through the process. Starting with the first of the five elements are site structure. Sometimes we refer to the site structure as navigation, how you get around, how you get from point A to point B to point Z on a website. An organization that does this really well is an organization called ColoradoKids.org. This is an organization that really understands the importance. Whoops, I just clicked out of there. I apologize for that. I'm going to go right back to that. This organization does a really good job of organizing and presenting the information. Hold on a second. I apologize. No problem. You just want to click to share. Yeah, I need to go back to my share desktop. I just had to get back over there. I was on the other side of my office. I apologize I had to run back over when that happened. My little mouse button clicked in the wrong space. All right, I'm back to where we need to be. So ColoradoKids.org does a really fantastic job of providing options, different ways to navigate. So at the top level they have a hierarchy, a site structure that makes it really simple, really easy for me as an end user to this site to get to where it is that I want to go. Eight categories or less so that I'm really efficient at finding where I'm going and what I'm looking for. At the bottom of their page they have essentially a site map that allows me to see all the different pages and sections and different areas that I might want to visit. And then they have a search tool. And if I type a keyword or phrase in that search tool it's going to find all of the different elements that I might find on this page. The key here is having different ways to get around, different ways to navigate through the website so that I can find what I'm looking for in three or fewer clicks. If I come to your website and I'm trying to go from wherever I am to wherever it is that I want to be, I want to do it in three or fewer clicks. Otherwise it's not built properly from a structure perspective. So here's another example at nature.org where we have here nature.org about us, news and media science, login, My Nature page English, a really well-structured hierarchy. We have the search tool and then of course we have at the bottom of this page a listing of all the different pages and segments. Again, easy to find your way around because I have options, different ways to navigate through the site. So this one's basic. It's straightforward. Make sure we build in three or more navigation options so that people can find their way around and make sure the structure is built from a very logical and user-intuitive perspective where I can just instantly understand how it is that I need to get there and where it is that I want to go. Number two refers to the design of our website. Quite frankly, I will share with you now that building your website's design, it really isn't about building something that is maybe sexy and more graphically appealing like something that was mentioned earlier in today's segment. That's really not what building a website is about. What building a website about from a design perspective is making sure that we have designed it so that it adequately tells the story of our organization. That's what's most important. Does this design tell the story of the organization through the use of the photographs and headlines that we're using? And I'm very deliberately going to bring up an example for you that doesn't knock your socks off and make you gasp for air and say, wow, that is just beautiful. That doesn't do that. It's an organization out in California, the Community Child Care Council of Santa Clara County Incorporated, one of those incredibly long names. And of course, they go by the 4Cs, 4C.org, great domain name. It's about the shortest I've ever seen, two-character domain name. But you'll see that there's some text reversed out on light text on a darker background and there's too many colors going on here. So there are a lot of things that this violates. But it really does a great job of telling the story of the organization through the use of photographs and headlines. We know from heat mapping this website, and by that it means we put people in front of a machine that measures whether eyeballs are focused so we can kind of measure exactly where someone's looking. And we know that when people come to this website, the first thing they focus in on is the photograph of the children holding fruit to their eyes. And the next thing they see, about 60% of the people next will go to this headline on the right, providing early care and education for children. And the other 40% will look down here where it says, ensuring children in child care receive nutritious meals. It doesn't matter if they go left or right underneath. Either way, they get it. They know who this organization is and what they're about, just simply by seeing the photograph and reading the headline. They connect with it. They understand they get it. So this is a really well-designed website, even though if we put this up in front of a group and said, okay, pick the sexiest website out, this is not one that would be chosen very often, if at all. But it does a great job telling the story of the organization. Here's another example of that, that groundwater.org. It's the water we drink, simple headline, photograph of water cascading off the side of someone's hands. We get it. We connect. We understand. But what if you're the type of organization that doesn't have an easy go-to, children holding fruit or groundwater? Okay, that's simple. You can come up with a photograph with water. What if you're a little more difficult to define? What if you're a trade organization or something that really has a harder time pinning down exactly how you would graphically represent your mission or your purpose? Well, I'll give you an example of that. This next organization, their design, is one that really is effective. It's an organization called EDSF. And we start off by saying, okay, great. Yet another organization that goes by an acronym, we have no idea what that means. Maybe it will help us if we know what that stands for. And then we look down and say, okay, there's what it stands for, Electronic Document Scholarship Foundation. Okay, I still have no idea what this organization does or what they mean. But here's what happens when we let someone see this website for the first time within a five-second time period. Within five seconds, our brain focuses in on this page and we immediately turn and affix our gaze over on the photograph of the young students there over on the right-hand side. Our brain quickly calculates that these are students. We put that word in our brain because the gentleman there has a book bag sash hanging across his shoulder. So our brain does its job and it says, okay, here's some students. What we've learned again from heat mapping is that we bypass, we don't even pay attention to where it says Electronic Document Scholarship Foundation because those are long words and our brain doesn't want to waste its time fixing on those or any of the text underneath it that's small. We jump right down to those buttons. It says, donate now scholarships education. So here's where the eyeball goes. The majority of the time when someone comes onto this page, they start by looking at the photograph of the students. And so our brain says, okay, here are some students. They're looking for donations so they can give scholarships so they can be educated. Okay, I get it. Or at least I get it enough, right? It does a really, really adequate job of telling the story of this organization even though it's a difficult organization to describe and to understand unless you come from inside out in that organization and you already knew of it before you came there. Which is likely the case, by the way. If you landed on this website, you probably already know who the organization is. But if not, it does a great job of telling the story of the organization to the use of photographs and headlines. And that's what design is all about. It's really important also, something I mentioned a few minutes ago, that every one of our websites incorporates some aspect of the ADA compliance checklist, meaning that people can resize the text. And even more importantly, I'm going to go back to this website here and point out if I'm a site-impaired visitor and I'm coming to your website and I'm just scrolling around on a website and looking to see what's out there. And I scroll over this photograph. I will have a special device installed on my computer that essentially reads to me the text that I scroll over. And it will read to me the tag that is underneath that image. And so if the image is tagged with the title like Picture 1, Picture 2, Picture 3, that's what it's going to read to me. This is one of the most common mistakes that nonprofits make is that we don't put descriptive tags on our photographs called an alt tag. And it's really important that your graphic designer understands that, that we don't just name photographs 1, 2, 3, 4, or leave the name that your camera gave it, the date with a bunch of gibberish next to it. We don't leave those names. We actually name the photographs by what's in the photograph. And this is a really important aspect of this ADA checklist. And I would highly encourage you at the end of the session today, you can request a copy of the presentation. I would encourage you to do that. And we include this ADA checklist here for you to review. Hand this off to your graphic designer, your developer, and make sure that all of these things are considered and added into your website. All right, so that's design. Let's move on to number 3, which is content. And as we've said, since Al Gore gave us the wonderful gift of the Internet all those years ago, and we started talking about websites and they started to become really important to businesses and nonprofit organizations, content is king, right? We've heard that so many times. And I do believe that content is still king, but I would suggest that we might want to slightly alter this in today's world. And instead of saying that content is king, it might be more relevant today to change that end to an X and say, well, maybe it's context that's king. It's the relevancy of the information and how it affects us as an end user. What is the relevancy of this information? So an organization that does this really well is nonprofitrisk.org. You come into their website and go to their library. They have articles and laws and glossaries and fact sheets, really well done information that allows me to dive as deep as I want to dive into the content and the structure. Children's rights.org does this really well also. Come into issues and resources, great resources on child welfare and adoption, reunification and kinship, foster care. Again, I don't have to sort through things I'm not interested in to get to the things that I am interested in. They do such a great job organizing their content so I can find what I'm looking for really easily. The most important thing when it comes to content isn't really even the content itself though. The most important thing is how do we get that content into the website in the first place? And in today's world, in 2014, every one of our organizations should have a website that makes it possible for us to log into the website using a username and password like the private area we talked about earlier and update and modify the content on our own website through simple point and click tools. Point and click or drop and drag, boom it's done. I've updated the content on my website. You should be able to do this with blog posts. You should be able to do this with events that are going on, adding something to your calendar. I believe that in every organization there should be a minimum of three people who have the ability to do this as well. A minimum of three who have the ability to update and modify your site's content. I do not believe that all content should flow through a gatekeeper, one person who is responsible for updating everything. That is so outdated. It is so 2004 and we are in 2014. I can argue this to the end of the world that those organizations that are still holding on to that notion that we've got to have everything flow through one person so we can maintain the voice and the quality of the content making sure that we are all speaking the same way. Well that is not the way the world works today. It is much better to get information out there and get it flowing and get it posted and then have somebody come in. Maybe you assign a content cop for example and their job is once a week to go in and look through everything on the website that has been added and make sure that it is tuned and adjusted for the voice of your organization and anybody who posted something that doesn't speak the same way that they should or they say a word wrong or position something incorrectly, have them send off a note and say, hey, next time you talk about that you might want to say it this way. But have somebody in charge of that but don't make it flow through that person to get it posted. That is one of the biggest mistakes nonprofits are making today and it is really difficult for us to evolve and create these amazing websites with the web presence that really allows us to knock it out of the park if we are constantly flowing everything through an unintentional gatekeeper because these people don't want to necessarily be a gatekeeper but they turn into one. And we know what happens. We talked about this earlier. After 2 months, maybe 3 months, maybe 6 months, maybe a year at some point that gatekeeper gets busy. Life happens. Even if it is their job, they have a third child. Maybe they graduated from middle school and now homework is really serious all of a sudden. I have got so much on my plate whatever they just simply don't have the time to do it anymore. So make sure that we build in the ability for several people on your team to update and modify content even if you are a tiny organization with only one or three paid staff people. You probably have volunteers or key donors or board members or other people that are engaged with your organization on a regular basis. Give them the ability and the authority to update and modify content. The people you trust, you can always lock them back out. Change the username and password. But in this day and age in 2014, getting that information posted and free-flowing is really critical. So content management systems are really important to nonprofit organizations in order to maintain consistent and abundant content on our website. Number 4 refers to your website's functionality. And functionality, simply put, are the tools that we build into our website, the tools that we offer that make it easy for people to come and connect with us and engage with us online. Not only to make it possible, but to make it in some cases necessary for them to engage with us using these online tools. And these are things like having a place where they can come and sign up to volunteer, or maybe the programs that we are conducting, or maybe having the event calendars where they can come in and scroll through all the different events we have going on. And online registration. I know earlier when we put up the slide we asked the question, which of these website components are critical to your organization's website? And about 36% said your event registration tool. Well, this may or may not be a surprise to you, but when we pose that exact question to your audience, the people coming to your website, the people that you serve in the community, across the board regardless of the industry type, as long as you are the type of organization that has any kind of events if you have anything like that, it is the number one thing from the end user perspective that they want you to have. Event registration, the ability to come to your website and sign up for your events. And I am going to burst a few bubbles here and I apologize in advance if I feel like you are being scammed and I am nicking you on the heels with my scepter here as I am saying this. But having a form on your website, a PDF form that someone can download and print out and scan and email back to you or fax back to you, that is not online registration. It is online frustration. And we hear it over and over and over again in our focus groups. And we talk to your constituents. They do not want a PDF form that they can mail to you or scan and email back to you. They want to be able to consummate the registration right to your website where they can sign up and be done with it. And you know what would be even cooler? If you had an event registration system built in that automatically responded after they registered with an auto responder saying, thank you for signing up. Here is a map to the event. Here is a list of things you need to know. Here is the dress code and all these things. And then two days before the event automatically it sends another email reminding them so you never have to touch it. And you don't have to go and enter it in two or three different places manually once someone registers. It is all taken care of through your website. Really important, this is a huge functional tool that your end users are asking for. All of these functional tools are really important. In fact obviously connecting and engaging in a meaningful way is among the most important things that we can do with our website. And I'm going to take just a few minutes here and dig into another really important functional tool. But it's a tool that we use on our end, not necessarily from our end users perspective, but from our perspective as a nonprofit. What is it that we need to do to manage our donors and to have tools that make it possible for us to manage our donors in a way that allows us to be more effective than we are now? And I'm going to share with you just a tiny little bit on a massive study that was done just last year, 2013. And actually 2012 was the first year that this study was conducted. It was by the AFP and the Urban Institute. And the interesting thing on this to me is prior to this survey, the way we always did this in the past is we would go out and we would ask like we asked you all today, what do you think that your donor retention rate is? How many donors are you retaining from one year to the next? The average nonprofit executive or leadership team member, whomever fundraising professional, whoever we talked with at that nonprofit, the average response was I don't know. And that in and of itself is kind of a sad state of affairs that we really don't know. We do not know what our donor retention percentage is because we don't have the tools in place to do this. So what we did is rather than asking them their opinion, we went into the software to learn ourselves. So tools like the Razor's Edge or eTapestry or Sage or Blumerang, all these great tools that we use to manage our donor data, we go in and we looked under the hood to try to learn, okay, what is the actual donor retention? And we learned that 61% of donors attrition from the average nonprofit organization across the United States every single year. And if you reverse that, 39% retention. So what we're saying here is that more than 6 out of every 10 people who give money to an organization one year do not give again the following year. And it's massively mind-blowing to me as we think about what this means. If you look at this on a chart, I think it's the easiest way for me to really grasp it and understand it. Let's say you have 1,000 donors and you are the national average. And again, this is not the worst case scenario. This is the national average, 61% attrition rate. And then we have 1,000 donors over 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years later, how many of those donors are left? 9. That means that we have to go out every 5 years and get 991 new donors to make up for all of the donors that we lost. It's just mind-boggling to me that we are so focused on this whole donor acquisition strategy where I'm like this donor acquisition treadmill running as fast as we can go, spinning donors off the back end of it at a really crazy pace, instead of focusing on donor retention, which is so much more helpful if we can just figure out a way to keep the donors that we already have. So let's talk for just a moment about why donors leave. Why do they leave us in the first place? Well, number one, some of them are no longer able to afford supporting us. It's the smallest percentage, but it happens. Some of them just don't feel connected with us anymore. And there are others who feel that other causes are more deserving now. They've kind of evolved in the way they think about this. Some have no memory of ever supporting your organization. Now how could that happen? Well, in this day and age of peer-to-peer fundraising where we bring a donor on as a result of a personal effort, like let's say for example Becky or Lori on this call with us today came to me and said, hey Jay, I'm going to walk in the 5K walk for whatever. I'm going to shave my head for St. Baldricks, whatever they're going to do. Would you be willing to contribute to my cause? $50, $100, whatever you can put down, that would be awesome. So appreciated. And I do that. And then a couple months go by, I remember supporting Lori, or I remember supporting Becky, but I don't remember the cause. I don't remember the name of the organization that they were raising the money for. That's how that happened. And it happens all the time because of the continued proliferation of these peer-to-peer events. So we need to figure out a way as organizations how to reach back and connect with those people after they do that. Maybe the organization's communications were inappropriate. I don't really like the way they said something or did something. Or maybe they're asking me for inappropriate amounts, too much or too little. Or maybe the organization didn't inform me how my donation was used. That's a horrible mistake. In fact, it's the number one thing that people want to know when they give money to an organization. What are you going to use the money for? What's it going to? What am I going to impact if I give you this money? What difference will I make by giving this money? It's really important that we share that information. And the worst of all is that they were never reminded to give again. Whether I gave $10 or $1,000 to an organization, I should expect to be reached out to again next year and asked if I'd like to recommit. And more than half of the money that's given in the United States today, more than half of those gifts are never followed up on where no one gets a thank you and or no one is asked to give again. It's just remarkable to me how nonprofits operate and we have so much work to do. I have an entire session on this topic where I dig into this as well, the important factors involved in donor retention and building out really strong online fundraising campaigns including some great stuff on email marketing. But I'm going to just take one more minute here and just focus in a little bit more on donor database tools. What do we look for in a donor database tool? If you're trying to figure out how to do this in a way that's powerful and effective, what kind of features do you need? So here's what I recommend. Find a donor database tool that has a dashboard because going back to an old business axiom, we manage what we measure. If everyone in your organization has access to a dashboard, so if I set the goal as raising X amount of money during the year 2014, I can see how we're doing it every step along the way. I'm more likely to be engaged and involved and proactive in that task if I know where we stand at any time. These dashboards are so important. Number two is having constituent intelligence built into the tool. What this means is that we automate as many things as we can. So every time say someone opens an email, ding, there's an engagement. Maybe they forwarded an email to a friend so they've made it viral. Ding, there's another engagement. Maybe they've come to our website and registered for our upcoming event. Ding, yet another engagement. Maybe they've come to a landing page and downloaded a study that we just completed and they're interested to know what the results are. Ding, yet another engagement. So there are so many things that we can automate these engagement factors so we know how engaged we are with a constituent. Find a donor tool that allows you to measure those things, to minimize the manual tasks, and to optimize the automation so that you have these things automatically flown into your tool and you know how engaged you are with a particular donor. It helps tremendously in retention. Make sure that the tool has email marketing integrated in so you don't have to import and export data out and in all the time. And then it has simple and easy to use reporting tools so you can customize reports that fit your style and fit the kind of reports that you need as an organization. And then lastly, it should be 100% cloud based. Totally integrated into the website so the people using this tool or the people coming to your website for example, automatically that data gets moved over to your donor database tool. You don't have to go in and manually enter everything and create all this duplicity and this extra work. Really important things, if you want more information about all the donor tools, again I encourage you to attend one of those webinars down the road where we get into more specifics. But let's talk about the fifth and final element today, aside from being a really great Bruce Willis movie. The fifth element is the element of vitality. And simply put, vitality is the perception of the freshness of content. So what we are saying here is that when someone comes to your website you need to give them the perception that everything on the website is constantly evolving, constantly changing. Because if it feels like this on the front page then my brain is telling me that the entire website must be doing this. And there is a silver bullet to this that is really remarkably simple. And the silver bullet is to post dated content on your front page a minimum of once every 7 days. A piece of content like a headline with a date next to it so my brain can see that this is happening at least every 7 days on your front page it will drive your vitality ranking through the roof and it makes it feel like this entire website is being updated all the time. Michael J. Fox does it well. The Council of Nonprofits.org does it well. Dated content on your front page a minimum of once per week. And by far the best way to make this happen is through a blog, if you can do an effective blog post. But if you have to resort to doing it the easy way, kind of the cheap way out, spend a few hours over the weekend to go to QuoteGarden.com and come up with 52 inspirational thoughts of the week. Very specific quotations that align themselves with your mission or your purpose and have a new one post every 7 days, every Monday morning at 6am or whatever time you prefer. Even the most novice web developer building out a website in something like WordPress can do this. It's not difficult to build that in. So make this happen. Get this vitality component on your website. It will drive your traffic through the roof. And don't allow the more technical inclined around you, your go-to geeks and others to overthink it. I've made this mistake in the past where I started to look at our statistics, the analytics using Google Analytics looking under the hood. And I started seeing that, you know what, not very many people are clicking on these links, these in-the-news items, only about once every so often does somebody click on there about 2% or 3% of the time. So several years ago I went through this process. We just removed them. Let's try something else. Let's put something there that's a little flashier that gets attention. And we got more people to click on it. But then over time, over the weeks and months that followed, we saw the recurring visitor numbers, people that would come back to our website, decline, decline, decline. It kept going down. And then when we reinstated our dated content once every 7 days, it climbed right back up and then exceeded the numbers again. It's really important that you don't overthink this because it's not there for people to click on and read. It's quite frankly, it's there to convince our brains that, look, there's new stuff being posted here every 7 days and there's proof right here your brain is processing this behind the scenes without you really thinking about it. Make sure that you have dated content on your front page of minimum once per week and that working together with your structure, your design, your content, your functionality will allow you to build this website that is right at the core center of your brand that serves at the center of your world. And everything and everywhere where links are coming in from, or even just people are visiting from. Maybe you send out a direct mail piece, your annual appeal letter, or they're coming in from some social media like LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter or maybe a news feed or your email marketing program or search engines, wherever they're coming in from. All of these people coming into your website are going to come to your website and now they're going to be able to connect and engage with you because you have these functional tools there. And they're going to feel like your website is always evolving and there's something there for them because you have these vitality components working. And the content is going to be deep and diverse. And you're going to have a design that tells the story of your organization and you're going to have a site structure that makes it really easy for them to get around. Really simply, putting these five elements together will allow you to keep your website at the core center of your brand and create this really strong dynamic presence online. So action steps to follow. Make sure that you're focused on building three or more navigational options into your site structure. Use a design that tells the story of your organization. Very simple photographs and headlines that tell the story. Provide content for all different types of end users, all these different audiences, and build in the functional tools that are necessary for your constituents to engage in a meaningful way. And then make sure you have vitality that makes it feel like the content is constantly evolving. And if you do all of this on top of a content management system that makes it point and click, or drop and drag simple to update and modify the website, you'll just completely knock it out of the park. Choose a donor database tool to manage retention. And I highly encourage you to sign up and attend other free webinars. We do these all the time. One of my favorite things in the world, we have a mantra at Fire Spring to educate without expectation. We take all of our best stuff and put it out there and we know that ultimately if we can do enough good and spread the word and help nonprofits be effective and successful, then they're going to want to come and do business with us. One last thing, I would encourage you to check out nonprophethub.org. I like to give credit to Nonprofit Hub because most of the research components that we use today come from this organization. It's an organization that exists to basically curate and find the best content on the Internet. It's my daughter's dream job. Their editors spend their entire day online searching for really cool stuff and then posting it. So it's like the best of the best thought leaders in the nonprofit sector on all of these different topics and they post all this content out there. So I'd love to give a shout out to the nonprophethub.org and thank them again for providing so much research and content that I use in my presentation. Last thing before we open for Q&A, if you have those questions, send them across. We'll cover as much as we can in the remaining time. I want to take just a quick minute and tell you what it is that we do here at Firespring. What our focus is on building really powerful and strong websites on a content management system that's point and click, drop and drag simple. It's remarkably easy to use at any level. We include into that really robust event registration tools to make it really simple for you to set up a calendar of events and then set up events that work on the front end and the back end that tie everything together. Online donations that are built right in through the website that make it point and click simple for people to give money to the organization. Landing page template which is one of the most important things again today that make it drop and drag point and click simple to add a template. So if you want to go in and add a landing page for a new event or you want to add a landing page for volunteers to sign up for something, any landing page, you just click a button. It brings up a template. You choose the graphic or the image you want as your anchor and you build it really simple. Include search engine optimization so you can optimize every single page on your website including your landing pages to be optimized for that keyword or for those search terms. The news feed, so if you want this vitality component and you don't have the time to do a blog post yet of your own, you can utilize our content. We have great content that you can stream in to create this vitality component and our website completely integrates with the donor database Blumerang. We have a program set up with Blumerang that if you purchase Blumerang through Firespring, it's totally integrated. So everything you do in your donor database and everything you do in your website talk to each other and it completely eliminates all the duplicity that most of us deal with. We layer on top of all of that legendary support and training. We exist because of you. We exist because of nonprofits. We're a certified B Corporation. We're one of a thousand certified B corporations in the United States which means we're kind of a hybrid between a for-profit and a nonprofit. We exist to make social impact in the world around us and it's what we do and helping nonprofits leverage their social impact is what gives us joy. So we would love to tell you more about that. If you're interested, just reach out and let us know. You can go to Firespring.org to learn more about the services and the tools that we provide. Huge thank you before we open for Q&A to Becky, the entire TechSoup crew. You guys are professionals the best and we really appreciate the opportunity to share this information with the TechSoup audience today. Thank you so much for the opportunity. And with that, let's go ahead and take questions with what time we have left. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jay. That was excellent. A lot of really useful and practical tips that people can move forward with just the kind of stuff we like. So we have a lot of questions so I'm going to dive right in. So a couple of questions about kind of overall site design recommendations. One, Charles asked about what about responsive design for mobile users? Some of the websites that we showed today didn't necessarily have mobile optimized websites. How important is that since we know that people are accessing sites more and more on their mobile phones? And does Firespring also include mobile optimization? Firespring does. We do. All of our websites include mobile optimization but I will clarify that I don't necessarily believe that mobile optimization equals responsive design. It's not always the case that the only way to optimize a website for mobile is to use responsive design. Responsive design for those that don't know what we're talking about is when you go to a website on your computer screen if you're sitting at your desktop and you grab the lower right hand corner and you just shrink down the window and you see how the pictures and the images and the headlines and the graphics all just kind of compress, compress, compress until you've brought the screen down to the size of a cell phone and everything flows. That's called responsive design so that the design will work and display properly in your mobile device whether it's a smartphone or a tablet based on how big your window is. That's responsive design and usually responsive design is the best solution for a nonprofit but not always. Sometimes it's better to have a separate mobile design of your website and with modern technology we as a community of users we can identify when someone logs in and connects with your website on a smartphone or a tablet. We know if it's a smartphone or a tablet because the device has a little indicator that says, okay this is a smartphone so let's display this website. This is a tablet so let's display this website. So as long as it's optimized for mobile that's what's most important. It doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be responsive design although I would say this is total kind of speculation but I would say that 80% of the time responsive design is the best solution for that nonprofit but at the very least it should be set up for mobile optimization without question. So if you're getting a brand new website or if you're doing a major redesign then responsive design is most likely going to be the way to go. But if you're just trying to make some tweaks with what you've got now because you just don't have the budget or the time to do a full overhaul, there are a lot of ways to mobile optimize your site to make it more user friendly. So we have some resources that we'll share too. TechSoup did a webinar last year that was specifically on ways that you could mobile optimize your site and kind of in varying degrees of difficulty from little things that you could do today with any website to the full on responsive design sites. So we'll share that in the follow-up resources as well. Another question that's along the same lines is from Mod. She asked, I've noticed that a lot of the most impressive and engaging new websites that I've been seeing have these bold graphics, minimal text, and quotes. And I've seen a lot of these new ones that are just the never-ending scroll where you just keep scrolling down and it's just big picture after big picture. What do you think about those new site styles where the navigation is really just taking you down with anchor links lower onto the scroll page? It is certainly the trend of the Internet right now to have websites that are indeed the never-ending scroll as you say. And usually the navigation at the top of the page or on the side of the page, when you click on those navigation options, it will just simply drop you down to the point on the website and then you can scroll up or down from there. It's very common. It's just the way that most new websites are being built today. And I'm not sure it's a trend that will last. I think the trend has happened more than not because it's visually interesting. It's visually stimulating to be able to see a website that's built this way, but it's not necessarily always the best solution in my opinion for nonprofit organizations because we tend in the nonprofit world to have more recurring visitors that are coming to our websites to engage or interact with us. And they're looking for something in particular when they come to our website whether it's a calendar or a volunteer page or whatever it is. And with these never-ending scroll websites sometimes it can be a little confusing and more difficult for people to find. They're really well intended. They were intended for companies that offer a product or a service like a software as a service product where someone will go to that website once, learn all about it, and really get fascinated and intrigued by what they're offering and then consummate a purchase and then really not go back to that website again. That's where these websites gained favor initially. And then generally over the course of time other organizations, other companies started to use them. So I can't say that it's a bad practice because certainly it's a popular one right now and there are a lot of people that are using it, some of them to great success. But I don't believe it's a trend that's going to stick for several more years in the nonprofit space because having a website that's a little more componentized and with a tab structure and the ability to get to the section or the area where we want to visit more efficiently I think is going to have more favor long-term for nonprofits. So I don't know if that answered the question. It's more of a preference thing than anything else. Sure. And the idea was to get your opinion on it because you're here to share that today. We have a bunch of people asking questions about content management systems. And one, John in particular said when you started introducing what types of things of FireSpring does, he immediately questioned, so wait, are you not recommending WordPress because you had mentioned it earlier on. And so people are wondering, are there some content management systems that you would recommend looking into? Obviously FireSpring, but in addition to that? Yeah. I'm one of those people that straddles the fence on WordPress. WordPress is, there are so many content management systems out there, first of all. Let me just say that. In addition to WordPress, there are systems like Drupal and there's Expression Engine and there's all kinds. I could go on and on all the, and if you just do a search for content management systems and plug it into a web browser, you'll find tons of them out there. My recommendation is that you work with a content management system that's specifically built for the nonprofit sector. And the reason why is nonprofits have a certain way of using web technology that's different than what the for-profit sector does. If you're a nonprofit that takes online donations or if you're a nonprofit who works with volunteers, not everyone does donations or volunteers, but they're really unique circumstances that are involved when we're dealing with constituents in the way that nonprofits do. So the best advice I can give you on finding a content management system is to work with a content management system that's really intentionally built for nonprofit organizations so that it includes components like some of the things we talked about, event registration, and it has really simple and easy to use landing page templates that's really easy to build and add landing pages that allows you to feed in a blog or a news feed to keep that vitality component up. And of course, that's what we do. So I'd be remiss again to not say, check out Fire Spring. I would highly encourage you to do that. It's exactly what we do. But there are all kinds of tools and technology out there at the very least, search and find something out that focuses on the nonprofit sector because those tools are going to be pre-built. That's the really important thing. Like at Fire Spring, we have spent the last 10 years building the perfect event registration and online donation and landing page tools for nonprofits so that you don't have to pay to have it developed all over again. We've already developed it and now we just tweak it and add a custom design and post it out there and now you have all those tools. You have 10 years worth of development that you don't have to pay for because we've already gone through the process of understanding how nonprofit constituents use this technology. So if it's not Fire Spring, find another organization that has a certain level of experience. It will cut out a lot of your cost. That's great advice. And people can also look to some of the content that we have on TechSoup's website, also from the nonprofit technology network or ideal where all of these different tools that are out there on the marketplace are compared and judged for the nonprofit sector. One last question and then we're going to go ahead and wrap up. So Kofi says, I work for a special collection and we have one page on our website that we can use for our stuff. How do you captivate with one page? So maybe just two or three things they could do to just captivate their audience with that one page. Well it's not easy to captivate an audience with one page. More than likely you have to have captivated them before they got there. So whatever material, whatever link led them there, whatever anchor text in a newsletter got them there for a reason. So start with that thinking what got them to that page in the first place and then make sure that you're paying off on delivering on the promise of what brought them there. It's the same concept you think about when you think of a landing page because that's what a landing page is. It's one page and the landing page is a page that should complement the anchor text that brought the visitor there in the first place. So if it's to sign up for an event, make it really simple for them to sign up for the event. Make sure that you grip them with the image or the video that you have present so that when they land there they are compelled to take action because they're viscerally moved by the video or image that you have there. And then make sure that the call to action is simple and clear and succinct so that they know exactly what it is that you want them to do as a result of seeing this page. If you start there, you'll do great on your one page. Wowing. Terrific. And I'm sorry, we didn't have time to get to everyone's questions. I just want to take a moment to wrap up and thank you so much again, Jay, for taking the time to share this with us today. You will all receive the email later on this afternoon with the link to today's recording and the presentation for your review. We'll be sure to include some of the links that we discussed as well to some of those other resources so you can continue learning and checking out what's out there. I'd also like to invite everyone to some of the upcoming webinars that TechSoup is hosting. If you're new to TechSoup, please join us next week for a tour of how to get donations through our programs. This is an open session to ask questions and get answers about the donations available in our catalog. Then we'll be doing some webinars specifically for libraries. So we'll have a webinar on mobile friendly youth library services so how to help the youth coming to your library with their mobile devices and programming for them. Then we're launching on August 14th, the first of our story makers, our digital storytelling events of this year, and our contest will be opening soon. We'll have a round table on how to create a breakout story. So if you're looking for ways to better tell your nonprofit story, please join us for that one. Then if you are with Boys and Girls Club, if you're a Boys and Girls Club of America, we have a webinar that's specifically for you to help walk through how to access the donation programs. And then we also will be taking on how to leverage social media for nonprofit events on August 21st. Thank you all so much for your participation today. I'd like to also thank Lori and Ally on the back end for helping to manage questions and chat with you throughout the webinar. And lastly, I'd like to thank ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor for the use of their platform today that they make it available for us to present these webinars to you on a regular basis. So thank you to them. Please take a moment when your screen closes to complete the post-event survey to help us to continue to improve our webinar programming. Thank you all so much and have a terrific day. Thanks again, Jay.