According to a recent survey by the Charities Aid Foundation, more than half of charities affected by the recession have dipped into their reserves. So now is a good time for organisations to re-evaluate their e-strategies to ensure they are making the most of the low cost and free campaigning opportunities that technology offers.
Sue Fidler, from e-consultancy Sue Fidler ltd, shared her top tips about how charities can optimise their e-communications strategies, at a recent CharityComms conference.
1) Optimise your search engine placement
Make sure your website has “meta tags.” Meta tags impact on your search rankings. They are snippets of code on a webpage that offer information about that page. Meta tags can be viewed by right clicking anywhere on a page, and clicking “view page source”.
Check your charity is on all search engine sites and try to be placed above the fold, (on the top half of the page, visible before people have to scroll down).
Create a Site Map. This is a list of all the pages on your site, which helps visitors and search engines to navigate easily around your site. They are especially useful for very large websites and can improve search engine optimisation by making sure all pages can be found.
Link to the sources that have covered you in the media. It’s useful to bear in mind that newspapers have websites too, which can be much easier to get published on as they are constantly looking for content. A link to a newspaper website will look just as good and continue to improve your search engine rankings.
2) Optimise your homepage
“Did you know that people on average spend seven seconds on a webpage before leaving it and can only remember between four and seven things at one time?” That means your homepage has seven seconds for people to notice four things on it.
The quickest and easiest way to optimise your homepage is to make sure you encourage people to do things. There should be a section asking people to do something for your charity, and it must be above the fold. “People don’t read websites, so they need a call to action,” Fidler explained.
Make sure all key words and phrases related to your charity are repeated at least three times above the fold on your homepage.
Remember that during the recession people want to be given alternative ways to support a charity other than just giving money. Think about offering people alternatives, such as giving their time and hosting a coffee morning once a month. Have these alternatives printed clearly on your homepage.
3) Optimise your e-communications
Use MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Twitter. They are easy, send out messages to a variety of audiences and give you another presence on the web, which can always direct them to your website. Remember you can always use the same content for each site to save time.
Use YouTube and Flickr. If you have any videos put them up, they are more appealing than lots of written jargon to trail through on a page.
Create a Blog. These are a great idea, as they don’t have to be written every day and can be written by different people. They are free and fun and another web presence with links to your website. Go to Google and type ‘blogger’ to set one up.
These simple tips from Fidler are a great way to help charities make the most of the opportunities technology offers them to raise their profiles on a budget. Obviously these things do cost something and that’s time, but it’s worth thinking about, especially now when communication is more important than ever.
To download other speakers' presentations from this CharityComms conference click here.