How High Performing Nonprofits Use Their Website as a Growth Platform

Um, hey, welcome everybody. Uh, today we're going to be talking about how high performing nonprofits use their website as a growth platform. So, um, a lot of different, uh, topics in sprinkled in today. Um, we'll speak on how you can use your website as a growth platform. How some websites see their or some nonprofits see their website more as a platform. So, um, we'll talk a little bit about a whole bunch of different things today. So, uh, with me today, uh, is Julian. Julian, if you want to introduce yourself. >> Hey. Yeah. Um, thanks, Zach. Uh my name is Julian. I'm the junior director of digital solutions here at Tap Network. So, you know, I'm working with uh nonprofits planning website projects, you know, coming in and, you know, uh executing on things that maybe they've had on their to-do list for a while. And a lot of what we're doing, you know, everybody here at TAP, uh is being able to to convert all these little things that that nonprofits are doing within their their digital platforms, their CRM, their websites, and and turning them into tools to help everybody grow. So, uh, I'm very excited to be here and I think we're going to have a, uh, a good webinar. So, we do have, um, a little bit of an agenda today. So, just to give you an overview of what we're going to do, we're going to start with the the biggest mindset shift that I think a lot of nonprofits are going to benefit from. It's is your website a project or is it a growth platform? Is it something you do once and then sort of, you know, wait 10 years and then you be, oh, we need to do another one or is it something that you're going to develop over time? From there, we're going to take a look at why sites struggle to create engagement, how your website should connect with your other systems, you know, your donation platforms, volunteer platforms, things like that. Then what ongoing optimization looks like, and how to use the actual data from, you know, real user behavior to guide these decisions. We're going to give you an action plan right at the end. Um, and then we're going to have some time for for Q&A. So, any questions you have, make sure to put them in the uh uh Q&A section. We're going to be monitoring the chat as well, but the Q&A section there is going to be the best place, you know, to make sure even if we can't answer it right now, it's not going to get lost in the in the chat feed. >> Awesome. Thanks, Julian. Uh, so most website, most organizations, you're going to have a website, right? But how you think about your website is going to determine how useful it becomes for your organization. Um, is your website something that was just built, completed, and launched, or is it something that you're actively managing as part of your growth strategy? So, I've seen a couple people in the chat say, "Hey, um, I was up updating my website today." That's perfect, right? So, that's what you want to be doing. Um, so this is what we mean by the project mindset. So, if your website is a project, you build it once and then after launch, the attention and the budget that you have usually moves somewhere else, right? So the website only comes back onto the radar when something goes wrong or something breaks. Um or even when it's so obviously outdated that another redesign feels necessary, right? Um another thing that happens here is that success is getting measured entirely at launch. So people are saying, "Hey, your new site looks amazing. That's great. But six months later, are more people donating? Are more people coming to your organization? Are more people finding your programs?" if those questions aren't being answered in a positive way, um you can kind of see where I'm getting to, right? So, um the last piece here is that the website often sits by itself disconnected from your CRM, your email platform, your donation platform, or even just your analytics. Um so, from the outside, again, your website might look amazing, but behind the scenes, is this website supporting your mission? is supporting your staff dayto day. Um, and that's what we're really trying to get to. Um, and here's the cost of a project mindset. So, this is why the distinction matters. A stale or a disconnected website. It is not only just like a looks problem, but it can create friction ex at the exact moment that somebody's looking at your site and deciding whether or not they trust your organization. Um, so online people make decisions super quickly, right? So, they're asking themselves, "Is this organization legitimate? Am I in the right place? Can I find what I need? Do I understand what your organization does?" If those answers aren't super obvious, most people won't spend three or four minutes investigating. They're just going to leave and hop to the next website. Um, there's also a systems cost. So, if somebody's giving you money and that information doesn't flow cleanly into your CRM or into your analytics records, now a staff member may have to manually import or export a spreadsheet. They'll have to clean something up in that spreadsheet and then import it somewhere else. So, the cost of your disconnected website will show up both in lost engagement but also in your staff's time. So now this slide we like to see it as it's basically a self diagnosis, right? So these are signs that your pro website is stuck in project mode. If you look at this list and you see two or three of these things that you recognize, that's a pretty strong signal that your website is being managed more like a project than an ongoing platform. And we're going to get into what that ongoing platform looks like in a second here. Um so one of my favorites here is nobody knows the login because that happens quite often. Um, maybe the person who managed your website left three years ago or maybe an outside vendor has the credentials to log into your website. Um, if you need to just update the headline on your homepage or a single link on your page and nobody can do that, um, that's a that's a problem, right? Um, mobile is another one. So a site can look perfectly acceptable on your desktop computer or even on your iPad, but the large majority of website traffic nowadays is coming from mobile mo mobile devices like your phone, right? So it matters that your website can be the can it matters that your website can dynamically shift based on what kind of device it's um it's displaying on. So, um, there's a handful of different things here, but I'd look at this slide less of like a list of failures and look at it more as a checklist for, hey, we can check five out of these six boxes off for our website. That's a great place to start, right? Uh, so next we're going to be moving into the platform mindset. So, in contrast to the project mindset, um, this views your website as an evolving asset. So, it's focusing on the long-term value of your website and continuously updating and improving your website rather than just having that website built and launched. So, this slide will put those two ways of thinking side by side. So, on the left we have the project mindset. Your website gets built and mostly forgotten. Um, and then on the right, your website's getting continuously improved and optimized. Um, there's also an ownership difference in this, right? So in the project mode, your website sometimes belongs to one person or that outside vendor like we talked about. Um but in platform mode, there's clear roles. So the communications person might own the content on your website. Um you may have a specific website developer, whether that's internal or external. Um you may have an IT person that manages the domain and the security side of things. And then your leadership will set your priorities, right? So um you don't necessarily need a huge team for this either. You just need clarity around who owns what. So if you have a team of three people, maybe one person really focuses on the content, one person really focuses on getting volunteers and things like that, um you can really divvy up those tasks amongst your team. And then when you introduce data into the process too, um you want to do this so decisions aren't necessarily just being made based on which staff member has the strongest opinions about something. If you use the data from your homepage or the data from any of your forms or things like that to help you make those decisions, uh those decisions will be a lot more effective. And then this visual is a good way to think about the role of your website. Um so your website is in the middle, but notice that it isn't just all by itself. There's all these other things around it, right? So, somebody may discover you through social media, land on a program page on your website and then sign up for your newsletter and then they may eventually donate or volunteer, right? So, um from a visitor's perspective, that's their relationship with your organization. They found you on social media. They may have followed you. They may have not have followed you. Um but ultimately, anything in that entire web of your organization is centered around your website, right? people coming to your website to donate, signing up to volunteer, um check get more information about your programs, right? Um the goal for your website and the entire system is for everything to work together well enough so that the supporter experiences one connected organization, not just a Facebook page and then a website and then a marketing email that you get. Everything should be cohesive and flowing together, not just internally for yourselves, which makes it super easy, but then externally for people looking at everything um with your org. And then just the last piece on this here, um here are five characteristics that um we would say a high performing website has. Um so the first one is integration. So actions on your website connect to useful systems. So again, if you have a donation platform, if you have a CRM, um wherever you do your marketing emails out of, that should all be connected to your website in one way or another. Uh the second is a clear user journey. So you don't just have pages of information on your website. Um that homepage is that landing page for people to meet your organization for the first time. And they should, it should be very clear to them if like if they're trying to donate or volunteer or um even just get information that button should be very clear for them on the website. Uh the third is consistent measurement. So consistent is important here because if you just look at Google Analytics once or twice a year, um this isn't going to tell you very much. Um you need to be looking at those at your data and your analytics and all these numbers coming in on a regular basis. Um, you can have notifications set up. You could have dashboards that you look at even once a week. Um, that will tell you a lot about your organization's performance. Um, fourthly, um, the website is evolving with your organization. So, we've talked about this a little bit. Um, you want to make sure that you're constantly updating your site. Um, even if it's just your upcoming events, things like that. Um if you show your audience and you show even people who are coming to your site for the first time that you are putting relevant new information on there um that will help you a lot. Uh and then fifthly uh fifth here um somebody owns it. So the last one so this one may I'd say it's one of the most important. You can have great technology. You can have a great website that's been built. Um, but if you don't know who is responsible for updating your site, checking your numbers, um, reviewing form submissions, that platform, while you have this great system built out, if you don't have somebody owning each individual piece of it, um, it's not going to work very well, right? So, um, yeah, these are five, um, those just five uh, characteristics here that are just worth uh, remembering and looking at. >> Yeah. So now we're going to look at, you know, here why most sites struggle to drive engagement. So I think most folks here are going to have a website for their organization already, but you know, we're working with, you know, uh, uh, lots of organizations, lots of websites, and we start to see these these trends. And so these are issues that are incredibly common. So this isn't like a, oh, you're you're you're in trouble. We're about to to call you out, but we want to show you these patterns so you can recognize them and start to look for how they apply to your own site. So, I have three challenges that we're going to go over and I'm going to show you what it looks like and then give you some ideas for where to go from there. And these are things that are going to be a little more behavioral, a little more process rather than sort of something you're going to throw money at. So, you know, part of this here, you know, we have we have some more numbers here. Um, you know, 55% of visitors spend uh fewer than 15 seconds on a website. So that means that you know you have a very limited amount of time to be able to get this person who has indicated whether it be through a Google ad through something they found on search uh a link in an email uh something on social media to to capture that enthusiasm that they have um and turn it into something that's going to help the organization a program sign up a donation volunteering something like that. And you know that that that initial part that that grabbing their attention off of that initial zeal from however they land on your website, you have about 3 seconds. Um and so you you take that and so you're saying, "Okay, this the the website experience is going to be so important. We have such a small amount of time to be able to, you know, uh uh integrate somebody into our organization in in one way or another." 70% of nonprofits are saying that their website doesn't reflect their current mission, doesn't match with what they're doing. um things aren't coming together in a in a cohesive strategy here and so you know you're you end up having this this project thing that you've launched at one point saying okay this was you know fairly accurate to what we do doesn't match now you're not you know getting the people who are interested in that in that small amount of time that you have and you're losing out on these opportunities to to grow the organization. So um the first challenge that we have here is that there's no clear value proposition across you know the entire uh site. And one of these things um you know I know I've mentioned this on a couple webinars in the past but the the vague or jargon heavy headlines or even just content throughout the site. So empowering communities through transformative action that sounds great when you're you know applying for grants. um you know, you're you're you know, applying for an award at you know, a regional uh uh nonprofit gala or something like that, but it doesn't really, you know, inform people, you know, who you are, what you're doing, things like that. So, um you know, you combine that with some other things here where saying, okay, hey, we're not really sure which audience this page, this landing page or even the homepage is catering to. Is it, you know, are you trying to capture donations to fund something? Are you trying to get people to volunteer or even start their own drives or or host events, you know, on their own? Um, anything like that? It's it's people leave confused and, you know, you're spending that, you know, 3 seconds to capture attention, 15 seconds, you know, across the entire website visit on average. You know, you're you're sort of uh wasting that with people trying to poke around and figure out what exactly uh the site's all about. You know, also having the mission uh buried below the fold. The fold is what we call basically the the bottom of your uh browser screen. So if you have to scroll to see something, it's almost like the newspaper fold. If you have to flip it over uh for the other half, you know, if if your mission isn't, you know, front and center, you know, people aren't really going to know what you're about, what you're doing. And even, you know, not having the emotional hook. Now, I always say that the the website is basically the thing that sits between, you know, a group of people and another person over here. You're trying to make a connection with a real person on the other side of the screen. And you know, having this completely static, unemotional, not tied to anything in real life brick in the middle, you know, it's not going to do you any favors. Um, you know, you're out there in the real world helping people, trying to, you know, develop this change. Incorporate that into the website. You know, we have a little before and after here on the sidebar. Um, you know, serving the community since 1987 through comprehensive programming and outreach. It's like, okay, that's it sounds nice. There's nothing, you know, incorrect about it, but free job training for adults in Detroit. 94% of graduates find employment within 90 days and you can apply in 5 minutes. That has so much more information packed in about who you are, what you're doing. Um, all this stuff in basically the same amount of text as just, hey, this is when we were founded and we do uh programming and outreach. It's like, okay, lots of organizations do programming and outreach. Do other organizations, you know, uh, have a five-minute application to, you know, have a job program in Detroit with with those sort of numbers? Probably not. So, you want to you want to highlight those things there. So, once you have them uh on the website and they they understand what you do, what your organization's about, the next question we have is what do you want them to do about it? So, is that because, you know, these things don't get complicated because anybody made a bad decision or anything either. Um, you know, we see, you know, if you ever heard a platypus is a a duck designed by committee. You know, we're having, you know, staff members or board members coming to the website and saying, "This is the most important thing right now. I want this to be, you know, front and center." And, you know, oh, we we have this new initiative. We really need more eyes in this area. We got to, you know, make this bold. And now everything's bold and it's flashing at you and doing all these things. And so, you're trying to serve all these things at once without doing anything really well. So you're having, you know, multiple things competing for your attention. Um, and these could be coming from, you know, small organizations have one person, you know, but you also have boards and other things to deal with some some larger organizations here. But your your donations, your volunteers, uh, your content uh, group is saying, "Hey, we need more people for the newsletter or sharing our social media posts." You know, a a user is going to come in there and and freeze up. So every page should have one primary action. Not to say that you can't have more than one action on a page, but you know, if you're going to have a event, you want to say, "Okay, here's all the information about the event, and the main thing we want somebody to do is register for it." You don't want to be clogging up that page with other, you know, information about, you know, uh, uh, finding volunteer opportunities or making donations. You can have them, you know, secondary towards the bottom or even part of the, you know, postregistration workflow. But you want to have a a very clear answer to what should I do right now when somebody's on the site. What should they do? You want to make that very clear to them. So here we have just, you know, a couple things up top. You know, multiple competing calls to action on one page. You want to make sure there's a hierarchy to them. You know, make it very clear what's the primary one and what are secondary things that are going to happen. Uh donation buttons. This is actually a surprising one uh that we see quite often. But you know if if people are are willing to give you money, you want to have as few steps in between them um and and that you know transaction as possible. So if you're an organization that collects donations, make it prominent in the header, have it be on pages, link it in your footer. Um, there's ways that you can have forms embedded versus just, you know, a button to external platforms, all this, but you really want to make sure that, you know, uh, uh, especially with, you know, some of the changes people have had with grants and stuff lately, you want to make sure that you're able to to have good financial health and, uh, uh, make sure that you're able to capture these donations. There's some other things here. The the vague button copy that gives no reason to act. That's another big one. Try and stay away from things like learn more or click here. It's not going to be good for uh uh screen readers and accessibility things. It's also not going to be good to actually prompt action. Um you want to say give $25 today or join the next uh program here. You want to focus this uh uh platform into a tool uh for the things that your organization does. And we have some more stuff about um the calls to actions and the uh uh audience specific journeys which we'll get into in a little bit just after this. Then finally, um, the third one here is the missing trust signals. So, um, there's a couple things in here, and just, you know, uh, uh, like Zach was mentioning, hey, if you're if you're seeing your website here and it's checking off some of these boxes, this is something that's going to be easy to, you know, make a change today on, and it's something you should probably do pretty pretty quickly. So, you don't have any impact numbers. you know, if you're not sort of demonstrating the the work that you're doing, the impact it's having on the communities you serve, you know, why would people want to give you money? Um, you know, what are you doing with it? How are you turning, you know, this dollar into some sort of change? Um, uh, testimonials are another big one. If people are giving you these things, they're either, uh, uh, making the donations or they're receiving the benefit of those donations, you know, social proof is a a big indicator. Um, especially with a lot of the the AI content that is put out right now, somebody's trying to find a review on something, they they're not necessarily looking for the perfectly crafted article that technically answers their question. They want to see what real people are saying about it. You think of that even on, you know, other e-commerce sites. If you're on like Amazon, you want to check out the uh the reviews to make sure that, you know, real people, you know, are enjoying it or getting use out of it. do if you have press releases or you've had articles written, big or small, you know, start start calling them out. Um, get your your charity rating badges up there. Make sure your contact information is up there. Um, I run into this all the time if I'm going to uh order takeout uh here in Philadelphia. I don't want to order necessarily from a ghost kitchen. So, you need to to research and say, "Hey, is this a real place? Is this a a actual organization that's doing things?" Having your uh uh email address, your phone number, your address, uh if you have a a physical location just sort of is another indicator say like, hey, this is a legit organization. Um you should interact with us. We're doing this this good work. And the final one's a technical one. Um but uh if you don't have all of your SSL certificates properly configured, uh you may have even seen this on your own. You're going to get a warning in your browser that says like, "Danger, this site may be trying to steal your credit card information. don't enter anything. You know, that's going to that puts an immediate stop on any sort of uh conversion you're going to get in there. So, that's something that's really easy to configure. And you want to make sure on all of your platforms, your website, your donation platform, your volunteer platform, all that stuff, you lock that down because uh, you know, if somebody's seeing that, hey, your your website is throwing off these dangerous warnings, it's they're immediately going to, you know, forget about you and they're not likely to come back and you're going to lose uh that potential trust that you have to. >> Sweet. Thanks, Julian. Um, so up until this point we've been talking talking mostly about like what the visitor is seeing on your website. Uh, so now we're going to shift a little bit behind the scenes and talk about what happens after a visitor takes takes action on your site. Um, so this is where integration starts to matter. So if somebody fills out a form, if they donate, if they register for an event, sign up for your newsletter, where's that information going? Is it moving into the right system automatically? Um, or does somebody on staff have to copy and paste it somewhere manually? So um the distinctions here might sound operational but it does have a huge impact on both your staff's time and ultimately the supporters experience. Uh the more connected your systems are are to each other the more useful each interaction is going to become. Um so the simplest way to think about integration is that the information should go where it needs to go without relying on a human to move it manually. Um, so if somebody fills out a volunteer form, that information should ideally create or update a CRM record. If they donate later, that donation should connect to that same person who filled out the volunteer form. So over time, you're going to start to build more of a complete picture of the relationship between you, between your organization, and each individual. Uh so instead of just seeing one donation come in and one event registration come in and then an email sign up and see these as three unrelated things, you can see that hey this is the same supporter engaging with your organization in multiple different ways. Uh so that's where your integrations are going to become useful strategically. Uh you can start then segmenting your communications and sending people information based on what they've done. You can identify patterns in what actions people are taking. Um, and then ultimately you can follow up and try to convert them in more relevant ways. Um, because all of your data is connected. And if you only remember one technical relationship from this section, I would make it your website and your CRM. Um, so your CRM is where you're trying to maintain a history of your relationships with donors, volunteers, your participants, supporters, or whoever is matter whoever matters to your organization. Um, but your CRM is only as good as the information that is flowing into it. Um, and obviously the website is your one of your most important sources of that information. Um, because so many of the actions are happening on your website, right? Um, a donation can update a contact record and it can trigger an automatic thank you message. Um, a volunteer application can start an intake process and send them an email or send you a notification. Um, a newsletter signup even can be tagged based on the page where it happened. Um, a CRM stands for customer relationship management or constituent relationship management system. Um, essentially it is that system if you've heard of um, systems like HubSpot or Salesforce. Even Mailchimp has a CRM built in. Um, there are so many different CRM options in out there, but essentially that CRM system is where you store all of your contact data. Think of it as the contacts app on your phone. Um that is the CRM on your phone for all the people that you know. You have their phone number, you have you may have their email. Um but a CRM for your organization would have their email address. Um even website pages that they've viewed, donations that they've made. All of those different pieces of information for each individual are stored in the CRM. So yeah, it's your customer database essentially. Um, so essentially the CRM and your website, that is that core connection where if you're going to connect any two of your systems, make it be your website and your CRM. Um, website and donation platform. So, the donation experience deserves special attention here because this is one of the highest value actions that somebody can take on your website. Um, once somebody is ready to give, you want that experience for them to feel as seamless and trustworthy as possible. So, like Julian was talking about a little bit earlier too, um, embedded forms can reduce friction because the donor stays within your website experience. So, we see sometimes you'll have an outlink to a PayPal or a Stripe page or anything like that. You can actually embed those forms directly into your website so people don't have to click out of your website. Um, campaign specific landing pages can also help here because the messaging can match the exact appeal that brought somebody there. So, if somebody clicks on a social media post um or on your Instagram story or on a Google ad even um that web page that they get brought to can appeal exactly to why they clicked on that ad, right? So, um and you also don't want to forget the post-donation experience. So, a thank you page can do a lot more than just say, "We received your gift." Um, a thank you page or a thank you email can reinforce your organization's impact. It can invite them to perform another form of engagement. So, like follow you on Instagram or something like that. Um, it can it can essentially deepen the relationship with you and with you and the donor, right? So, the gift itself is one thing. Um, but if you can catch that person and get them caught into everything, if you can get them to follow you somewhere on social media or anything like that, um, it can it can end in a much longer supporter journey with them. So this slide um, introduces the idea of a tech stack, right? So the tech stack is essentially um, like we had on that previous slide, we had the website in the middle and everything around it. So that entire ecosystem is your tech stack, right? Um so what it really is is the group of systems that your organization is using together. So your website, your CRM like we've talked about, your email platform, your donation tool if you've got PayPal or Give Butter or any of those systems. Um everything that supports your digital work is essentially your tech stack. Um, so the important thing here isn't just which tools you use and which tools which tools you're choosing. It's how well they connect, right? So you can have five great individual systems and still have a poor overall setup if they don't talk to each other and integrate with one another, right? Um, so when you're evaluating which systems to use, whether you're adopting a CRM for the first time, um, or if you're trying to figure out which email marketing platform you should use, um, you should, one of the best questions that you can ask yourself here is how does this fit into what we're already using? If we, if our organization needs a new CRM and we're not sure where to start, let's start looking at CRM that integrate with our pre-existing systems, right? Um, a tool, one thing too is a tool with slightly fewer features but stronger integrations may actually create more value for your organization um than than a tool with all of the different features in the world, but it can't connect to anything else, right? >> Yeah. So, we've been talking a lot about the mindset and strategy and now let's try and start to uh put this into practice. So this ongoing optimization is where a lot of this comes from just an idea to something you know a habit you're building in in real life here. So uh uh growth driven design this is you know what we base uh uh all of our work here or I should say most if not all of our work here at taparound. So you know we have the the project which is like hey we're going to do this we're going to build this uh uh website and then you know in five years we'll come take another look at it here. you know, it starts with really understanding what this this website uh needs to do. Um what are your your goals? Who are the people that you're trying to reach? Your audiences, um what are the specific paths you're going to be taking throughout all the all the different areas online you're you're in. So figuring out where you are now and what you need to do um moves you right into actually building something that is uh uh lean, fast, focused on on those goals and those you know specific audiences and you can get something up and running um focused around those those core aspects and then we we monitor. So you need to look at how people are using it. Um you know that can be through things like heat maps, it can be through you know solicited feedback. um you can be, you know, playing back some of the the sessions in and some analytics tools, figuring out what exactly needs to be, you know, updated with real data versus, you know, somebody's coming in saying like, I don't care for, you know, uh uh this area on the homepage, and you're like, okay, well, is it serving our goals? We can look at the data. And that way, you're not relying on sort of anecdotal evidence that you've just sort of like heard around the water cooler or something. And then you get into step four, which is making these targeted updates based on that data. So then, you know, you basically go back between steps three and four, and you're saying, "Okay, we're we're looking at what's happening. Uh is it meeting our goals? Is it serving the people we're trying to to serve? If not, let's make that change." Periodically, you'll go back and, you know, if you were going to add a new section like a a large resource hub or, you know, a a member portal or something, you go back to step one. But still, you're all focused around uh uh building this as as a as a living product rather than a static thing that you nail exactly the first time. That's perfect and will never need to be updated. If you find a website like that, let me know. I'm very interested in it. Um but for for most organizations, you're going to be, you know, much better served by, you know, adopting this this cyclical uh view of things. So, you know, I also know a lot of nonprofits aren't coming in here saying, "Okay, I'm ready for a new website right now." Perhaps you just uh uh did one uh you know not too long ago or you don't have the budget for one right now. These are are metrics that are going to help when you are ready um and that everybody should sort of start keeping an eye on um uh today. So the first one is conversion rate. So this is one of the big ones. You've set up this this website as this platform, this tool for people to engage. How are you tracking if they're actually taking those actions? um you know the donations uh signing up for the newsletter, registering for an event or a program or anything like that. Um you know start collecting this information. There'll be something through like a Google Tag Manager. Uh Google Analytics also sort of has some stuff in there that can help. Um but then you're we're going to look at some of these uh other things like your average session duration. How long are they on there? The bounce rate. Are they landing on your website, not doing anything, and leaving? you know, um you want to make sure that all your most important pages have a relatively low bounce rate cuz again, your your donation page is geared around getting that donation. If people aren't doing that on that page, something's up. Um you know, uh completing goals, figuring out where your traffic is coming from. Is it coming from social media? Is it coming from your Google Ad Grant stuff? Is it coming, you know, directly or out of your newsletter? Um how people are viewing mobile versus desktop. So you have not just the the visitors that are on there but also you know the performance um of the website on both of those uh that goes into the sort of the page speed score and also the form abandonment rate. This is one that can be sneaky because, you know, uh uh you want to have a form that captures as much information as possible so that your first touch if you're going to reach out to, you know, a a possible new contact, um you know, you you can waste less time getting the basic information, just capture that up front. But if you're seeing that a lot of people are starting this form, but they're not making it all the way to the end to actually submit that information, saying, "Hey, there there's some sort of friction here. there's we're asking too much or uh we're asking for information that people don't readily have on hand or something that's preventing them from actually moving forward um and and uh completing that form and giving you that information. So you know AI this is something that can help with you know a lot of things and the key thing is work smarter not harder. So if we look at this sort of uh uh workflow up top, a donation is coming in. It's recorded in the system. The thank you email goes out that's personalized. It updates all your analytics and now your your reports and your dashboards are automatically updated. Um no one on your team actually needs to spend the time doing those things. Having AI come in here um is is going to reduce the actual amount of time people are are doing these tedious tasks for. And that's really where where it shines. Um it it can do a lot as well whether it's flagging laps donors so somebody who used to donate monthly and is now uh no longer doing it um getting the personalized thank you notes you know mapped properly depending on you know the donation amounts and things like that. So instead of just giving a receipt you can start to give you hey this person has given x number of dollars over the past calendar year. Um incorporating that into your thank you emails making a little more personal that way. segmenting your lists based off of behavior. So that way, you know, you're not just trying to go with this really broad approach with a message that's going to resonate with every type of donor, every type of engage uh engagement or event attendee. You're able to to segment these and and get really specific and relevant messages uh to each. So uh the rule of thumb here is get AI to handle the repetitive work that everybody hates doing. you know, nobody has the hours for and keep the strategy, the thinking and all the storytelling aspects uh of what you're doing, you know, uh keep that on the human side and that is going to, I think, you know, uh uh really amplify it's going to free up uh uh your people to do better people work and it's going to take away all these tedious things that could be prone to errors with all the the uh manual copying and pasting and updating and sort of hand that off to uh machines that are very good at calculating things here. And so metrics tell you what's happening but to understand why um you know it's important to see how people are using the site um you know real people not just sort of like aggregate data here. So there's a couple uh tools that we we have in here. We have heat maps, scroll depth, click tracking and session reportings. So, these are often free or low cost and they're going to give you an extra level of insight that sort of aggregates uh analytics aren't going to, you know, for heat maps, you want to see where people are are clicking or tapping if they're on their phones, how they're moving their mouse. Um, scroll depth is saying, okay, if you have this big long page, are people actually getting to the bottom of it? If not, you're going to want to shorten that or make sure that your important information isn't all the way at the bottom because people aren't going down that far. Session recordings is another one. Um, so this is basically coming in saying, "How are people using it?" People can give feedback saying, "Oh, I found this difficult to use or I couldn't find XYZ." But until you see them search where they were expecting things to be um you know functionality that that uh would help them along this path that isn't there you know you're going to get a lot of that out of the session recordings and then click tracking. So click tracking is an interesting one because um very similar data can be found by default in analytics. So if you're trying to um you know figure out if you have a pop out sidebar and you're saying should we keep this or not? are people actually using this pop out sidebar to, you know, find specific resources or or book a class or something like that? Um, you may want you may want to look at the the page views or those destination pages that are within it. That doesn't really tell you how people are using the uh the sidebar. It's telling you, you know, are people getting to the place behind the sidebar. So, by tracking clicks, you're seeing, okay, are they opening an interactive panel to see more information? Um, if you have the same link in two different areas on a page, you know, which one are they clicking, which one is actually driving people, you know, further down that user journey, you know, taking, you know, information from these things like the heat maps and the session recordings and the click tracking, it's going to give you such a deeper level of insight than just sort of aggregate page views or or or session durations or things like that. Even though those are helpful, um, you know, it's just going to keep you from guessing. Having having something that you can point back to and say, "We need to make this change because this is the behavior we're observing in the data." Um, it's going to keep you so much more efficient. Um, and give you that confidence to be able to say, "Hey, this is going to be worth the time and effort and money we're spending on on making this change because this is addressing this real problem that we're seeing in the data versus trying to make an an educated guess down the line. So to to close the loop here uh data is most useful I would say if it's driving decisions. So here we have common things that the analytics is going to surface um and then you know some action items for you to do. So if you have a lot of traffic on a page but people aren't converting that's saying okay maybe you need to make your call to action a little more clear. Maybe you need to uh uh declutter that page so it's more focused around the actual thing uh that you want uh people to do. If visitors are hitting one page and then they're leaving right after, um maybe that's something where you need to start to add related content. You need to uh uh give better ways for users to move throughout the site on their own uh by suggesting things through calls to actions. Um maybe they're they're not landing on a page they were expecting to. We see that often. You know, if somebody is is putting out a Google ad, they may spend a lot of time crafting this message. Somebody clicks on it and then the landing page has nothing to do with what they just saw in the ad. You want to make sure that, you know, uh uh the page content is is matching the intent of the people who are coming there. You're seeing that that form abandonment we talked about before. Easy one. Shorten the form. um you know, make sure that you're getting the the extra stuff either right as optional things right before the submit button um or you're just able to to keep it down to, you know, your name, your email, the amount you'd like to donate. You know, if your mobile balance rate is much higher than the desktop, take a look at that mobile version. You know, you can do it on your phone, you can do some emulation in in browsers for free, but just see, you know, what the load speed is. Are are the buttons able to be clicked? They may look like they're clickable, but maybe there's something, you know, invisible overlaying things that's just making it harder for folks to actually, you know, accomplish um, you know, any of these conversions. A big thing happens with um, if you embed your say donation form or other registration forms via an iframe, you know, they're not very responsive. They don't always work very well um, when your site condenses down to mobile. So you need to be checking these things just to make sure that hey if most of our users are going to be coming in on these smaller devices the website needs to perform at that that aspect ratio. Now if you're seeing that your email campaign is getting a lot of people to your website but nobody's actually completing those conversions see where you're sending them. You know if you're sending them to a very general page after having a very specific email ask you know you're really relying on them to know where to go and to seek that out. Um, again, you want to capture that that zeal that somebody has when they click to engage saying, "You know what? This is worth my time, worth my money, worth my attention." Um, every campaign you're putting together, um, you know, put together a landing page. Again, we want this to be one single place that's focused as a tool around a specific conversion action. And so, if you have different campaigns running, you're going to need different pages to support the information that you have in here. And this is one that we see. Um, you know, your program pages have have almost no traffic. Um, you know, internal links are going to be a big one. You know, because program pages are often, you know, on on a subpage from the homepage and then there may be a program's listing page and then each program might have its own individual landing page. So, if you're trying to get attention for a specific program, um, if you want people to find it organically, take a look at your search engine optimization. So, improve those metad descriptions. Make sure you're using the proper keywords. We talked about jargon a little while ago. You know, uh we had a client who who talked about, you know, navigating health systems. Um but, you know, they they used all this uh uh language that you would see in a grant, the people they were trying to reach did not use that language. So, as they were typing in their questions, their concerns um into things like Google, uh the landing page and and their website wasn't popping up because it didn't match the language of their intended audience. And then finally, you know, the ad brand is a big one. Uh if you have some very important programs, run some Google ads for it. Um it'll give you some insights to apply uh on your organic side with search engine optimization. Um but you know, uh uh making sure that again if if this program is one of the big aspects of your organization, make sure that people can find it. Either if they're already on your website, they searching in Google, um you know, make sure there's ways for them to get here to that page. And so I mentioned that um you know uh I mentioned journey maps a little bit. And so this is sort of looking at uh uh things as they're connected a bit more. So uh on the left hand side you have how people are coming in. Um so they may have something through uh a Google search. They may see something on social media or an ad or they may get one of your emails. And then, you know, depending on where they are or how familiar they are with you, you know, maybe they're just going to be, you know, sent to the about page of your website or to some of this social proof with your testimonials or success stories. You know, maybe if they're already registered via your, you know, your newsletter, you're inviting them to your annual gala. Um, and then, you know, there's a subpage in there about how donations are used. And you can see you're basically getting more and more familiar as you're going to the right. Finally, you have that donation action. And that's where you start to send in the the automations where you're getting the thank you emails, you know, giving them updates after the campaign has ended, what you've been able to do with those funds, um, asking for for testimonials, and, you know, getting some of these recurring donations up. You want to think of this as a a set of actions. So, just like the website is a a platform, a tool that you're going to, you know, incorporate data into and uh uh you know, iterate on over time, you know, you're not just putting out something on social media and checking off a box that says, I posted on social media, you know, we've met our marketing goals. You want to say I post on social media which drove people to this landing page which then was able to drive people you know uh to our donation platform to get this much um uh you know increased uh uh uh donations this quarter. You want to start looking at these things as entire systems and platforms that are working together versus isolated actions that you're taking you know in a complete vacuum here. >> All right. So just a few more things before we get into Q&A. I know we have a lot of questions here, so I'll try to get this through this section a little bit quickly, but um at this point you may be thinking we have all this information um but we don't have the capacity to overhaul everything on our website. Um the the big thing here is we're not trying to push people to rebuild your entire website and your entire digital ecosystem tomorrow. It the really the big thing here is to identify the next few improvements that will create the most value for your organization. Um, so we've put together these next couple slides here, uh, for your benefit, right? So, these are things again, we're going to be sharing the slides after the presentation here. Uh, you'll probably get them later this afternoon or if not first thing tomorrow morning, but um, this 30-day action plan breaks the work into four man manageable weeks. Uh, so week one is really about understanding what you have. Review your analytics, check your mobile experience, identify your outdated content, and decide what your number one conversion goal is. Um, that can be super helpful. It's a great first step for that first week of this 30-day action plan. Uh, week two here is to focus on trust and f freshness. Um, so here you'll want to remove some of those outdated pages or update some of those outdated update outdated pages, sorry. Um, update your make sure your copyright year and your footer information is correct in your website. Um, and then add or refresh at least one impact set on your homepage. So again, that homepage is that first place that people are going to see on your site. Make sure that everything there is accurate and maybe even update something if you have that new updated information. Um, week three here is focusing is focus on calls to action and navigation. Uh, so make sure that your donate button is in the header. Um, maybe even rewrite rewrite um your three most visited page headlines to be more specific to what they actually are. Um, define one CTA per page. So, make sure that each page on your website has a call to action. Um, and then review your site navigation. So, you may have 20 different things in your header navigation bar. Maybe reduce it a bit. Add some uh some compounding sub menus in there. Um, some things like that. And then the last step here is week four, plan for ongoing improvement. So, um this step matters because if you're going to schedule your next audit right now, uh you're just creating a habit, right? So, one of the most simplest ways um to look at this is plan your website for ongoing improvement. Make sure that you're not just doing everything right now as a big project. Again, this is you want to look at your website more of of a platform rather than a project. You want to continuously be improving your website. um have content that you're scheduling regularly, things like that. Um again, this is just a four-step plan. Um week one, two, three, four. Even this is even something that you could do on a monthly basis, right? So, um I hope this is helpful for people. And then here we have a homepage self- assessment checklist. Um so, we have 10 things on this page. Um, what I would even do is maybe even because we're not going to be sending this right away, take a screenshot and then open your homepage after this webinar. If you score we have we have we say on here eight plus is passing. I would say if you have six, seven or eight at least, um, I'd say your homepage is in a really good spot. Um, there's a lot of different things on here, right? So clarity, make sure that your headlines are specific. Make sure that you have a call to action on your website. Um, do you have a donate button that's visible, whether it be in the header or visible on your pages? Um, making sure that your content is recent and accurate to what is happening now and a little bit in the future and a little bit in the past. If you have something that pops up from 2017 on your homepage, that's a huge problem, right? So, a lot of different things in here. Um, and what I like about this is that it focuses on usefulness rather than just aesthetics of your website. Um, you can have the most beautiful website in the world, but it can still score a one or two on this on this uh checklist. So, um, yeah, just a handful of different things here that you can look at to see where your website is at right now. So, um, you know, TAP has worked with hundreds of nonprofits at this point. Um, and you know, we're we're focused on everything from your communications to uh uh your platforms to your design and sort of general uh uh branding overall. And so one of the things that we have here is is I think a really exciting opportunity uh for 10 nonprofits each quarter. Um this is basically a a AI roadmap for your uh for your organization, for your website. You know, this is going to be fully funded. Um we have some some eligibility criteria Zach will go over right on the next slide. But uh this is basically we're going to meet with you take in all the information uh that you have see you know what you're working with right now where you want to go as an organization what sort of tools you're using and then present you at the end with a plan something that you can you know execute on. This could be ready if you have a board that you need to sort of collaborate with has all the information ready to go um uh uh right after uh the roadmap call. Um, so you'll be able to keep that for free. Um, and this is something that I think is going to help some of these organizations um that that we see with so much potential really execute on that potential and be able to find things and and step into this growth driven design by incorporating AI into a lot a lot of their platforms, you know. >> Yeah. So, I put the link in the chat there um just for a direct link to the landing page for more information. Um but this specific opportunity does have some eligibility criteria um around budget, staffing, program maturity, things like that. So um those thresholds are there because this is a fairly hands-on strategic engagement. So we're going to be working with your organization um directly. Um the goal here is to work with organizations that are in a plan that are in a position to act on the road map once it's been created. Right? So, um, if you don't meet the criteria, if it doesn't mean that there aren't resources available, um, it just means a different starting point, um, may make more sense for your organization. So, um, I definitely check this out. Like I said, I put the link in the chat. Um, and yeah, we're offering this to 10 nonprofits per quarter. So, um, yeah, definitely see if it if if it makes sense for your organization. >> And, you know, uh, we just have a couple offers to go through here before we get into the Q&As's. Um, here's two things we're saying. you know, if you're not ready, just sort of take these these big things on right away. We do offer some, you know, uh, retainer packages here, have a standard in or premium. Um, you can read about them here. Just because I want to leave time for questions, we're going to move a little quickly. One of the big things here that you are going to get with both of them is early access to Tap HQ. That's going to be a a system really purpose-built for nonprofits to do all their best work. Um, you know, we'll be able to share a little bit more about that, uh, soon, but this is going to be a really big benefit, you know, if you're coming on through one of our retainer packages, um, you're going to get into that platform a lot earlier than everybody else. Um, you know, if you're looking at this and you've heard us talk and you're like, you know, I I do think it's time to to basically, you know, start with this this growth driven website right away, you know, uh, you can reach out to us. We'd be happy to talk to you. our our websites typically tend to start around $15,000. And then we have um HubSpot here. So, you know, I know I've seen a lot of questions about CRM um you know, that we're going to get to, but uh we are a HubSpot shop, a HubSpot uh partner, and it's really, I think, going to be the tool for I I hesitate to use an absolute, but all nonprofits. I think, you know, if you have a a challenge um or or a specific configuration, Hops could be able to adapt to it and be very useful for you. Um if you're on Tech Soup's sites, um we have just uh the things highlighted here, the website services, digital marketing services, and the AI for nonprofits. Click on those, you're going to see what we're all about, what we have to offer. Um but you can always, you know, reach out to us um as well. And with that, questions. So, Zach, I see we have a lot in the Q&A section. >> Yeah, I tried to answer a few here, but uh there's just a few that I feel like you'd be really good at just off the bat. Um we have a question from Dominica just asking about um they have their website on Wix right now. Um some people are saying, "Hey, stay with Wix. Move maybe some people are saying move to WordPress." Um obviously there's great reasons for both of those. What would you say is kind of the best option, Wix versus WordPress, short-term, long term? >> Yeah. So, um, WordPress is going to require a little more development knowledge. So, depending on, you know, your the web designer, uh, she's saying, uh, I have a a team starting up with a designer and a creative director, all this stuff. The sites on Wix right now, WordPress is going to be able to adapt to, uh, uh, pretty much any of your needs, but it requires a setup. With Wix, you're really going to be locked into that platform. So, you're not going to be able to do as much if you're trying to integrate platforms. You're going to hit some walls a little bit quicker. Their sort of uh uh design system is also, I think, a a little more tricky to work with to get consistently uh high quality results. Their templating system um you know, doesn't quite quite match up. So, you know, for small teams, Wix can be really helpful because you don't need to be a web developer to sort of put something really nice looking together, but you're really trying to grow and expand, you know, what your your website can do, turning into a platform. WordPress is going to, I think, be a better option long term for that. But again, uh the end goal isn't necessarily for for one of these growth driven uh uh design websites, isn't to use a specific platform, to have it look a certain way. Um, all that we really care about is how it can be used by the user and how it can help make your life easier and your team's life easier. You know, we're focusing on this as a tool, not necessarily something that we can hold up and say, "Hey, I've based on this rubric, I have the perfect website." Um, you you want to be able to accomplish these. Um, I see another uh question here uh from an anonymous attendee. uh uh what site quality sing uh signals do you recommend prioritizing to pass automated reviews for programs like Google ad grants? And if a legitimate site gets flagged as generic or unverifiable, what's the most effective way to get that reverse? Um it's going to sound a little silly, but the most effective way is to make it less generic. Um, so you know, especially if you're if you're trying to qualify for these ad grants, uh, you need to make sure that it's not just sort of again putting things on the site that sort of like pass if somebody's taking a very quick look at it. You want it to be connected to what you're actually doing, who you are, the impact you're having on things. Uh, those trust signals we talked about also go a long way. testimonials. Um, knowing that this isn't just sort of something that somebody spun up, created something, you know, a website, call themselves a nonprofit, you want to be able to share all these things that sort of make the work you're doing important. Even if you're just getting started and you don't have a lot of social proof yet, that can then be your your marketing goals. It's not just saying, "Hey, you're going to build a website and that website is immediately going to turn your organization successful." It's going to help enable the work you're already doing and the work you want to do. Um, and so, uh, some very quick things, uh, you know, on a technical level, uh, make sure that you have, you know, a good amount of content on your pages so they're not just sort of blank with a couple words in there. Um, all your things are secure and updated. Um, and it's just generally going to be clean and presentable. Those are some really quick things here, but again, I would focus on on um getting getting it less generic and bringing in the more social proof aspects uh of what you're doing in there. >> We have a few different questions just talking about uh which CRM to integrate with CRM with a WordPress site. Um, like Julian said, uh, we are a HubSpot partner, but honestly, like even if I wasn't a HubSpot partner, working with HubSpot for the past number of years, I've recommended HubSpot to even just my personal friends in life. Um, HubSpot is great for whether you're a small organization or a large organization. Um, there's great um, integration capabilities with it. It'll integrate with your WordPress site extremely seamlessly. Um, but also I think that it's great. Um I know there is quite a big jump from the starter level to the professional level especially with pricing. Um but that starter level of HubSpot does offer you a lot of different um capabilities and tools and features and all sorts of things there. So um we definitely recommend HubSpot. Um, I know I've put this in the in the comments a couple times here, but I'll drop the link for the Tech Soup landing page. Um, where if you want to submit on the uh the form at the bottom of the page, um, somebody on our team will review your information and get back to you within the next couple of days or so. Um, we Oh, yeah. Sorry, Alena. Um, I would just recommend um I'll I'll I'll reach out to you directly, but um yeah, definitely recommend to anybody just interested in whether it be HubSpot or um any CRM recommendations, WordPress work, um definitely fill out the form at the bottom of that landing page and um we'll we'll review your information and get back to you. >> Yeah, I think we have time for one more question and so we won't be able to get to all of them. I apologize, but I think this one I'm going to choose because it'll be applicable, I think, to a lot more folks. Lorraine asks, "What do you suggest for a nonprofit focused on substance use where the website visitors are anonymous? Uh they go to the website to access an online meeting and are not required to register with contact information. This is going to be, you know, uh uh two different, you know, areas you're going to want to look at. Um the first one is you're going to present opportunities for people to provide you that uh that information." So, you don't want to necessarily gate access to those meetings, but you want to make sure that you have your secondary calls to action. Um, you know, if if they are sort of on on, you know, a journey to to help with substance abuse, you know, when they are ready, making sure you have these resources ready and available to capture that information when the user is. You're not trying to force them to be ready. You're you're uh uh presenting the opportunity when it's going to match what the user wants to do. Second one is getting into those other indicators that can track you know um you know the success of something. So um you'll be able to do click tracking on the you know join meeting button. With that you're not necessarily saying okay Julian is joining this meeting. You're able to say okay hey this many people come to the page this many people join the meeting. U you'll be able to track sort of sessions anonymously through Google Analytics as well. So I would think of it as capturing information that can demonstrate the value of of what you're doing on that website and then also having areas for people to deanmize themselves when they are ready to sort of partner with you uh more. And so you know uh you're going to run into this issue a lot of times when somebody is you know uh not authorizing cookies. If you have a GDPR banner in there you lose out on some of this information. So you need to make sure that you're capturing data and you are offering uh people the opportunity to provide you more information and integrate that way as well. Uh we are one minute over. I apologize for that. Um but thank you everybody so much for your time. I will send uh uh these these slides out very shortly. Um and I hope you have a wonderful rest of the day.