Introduction
For three years (and counting), our agency has completed over 180 free and bespoke website audits for good causes. We call these audits the Impact Optimisers because they do just that – help you optimise your impact through your website.
Beyond the individual support they’ve offered organisations of various sizes, these audits have helped us understand more about the broader website problems the sector faces. We have also been educating organisations about the importance of this channel and the small changes they can make to improve what they already have.
More about our Impact Optimiser
We do these audits — what we call the Impact Optimiser — for charities, community interest companies (CICs) and social enterprises. The organisations range from tiny community interest companies led by one person and small community foundations to large national charities, as well as a few well-known, multinational charities.
It doesn’t matter how large or small an organisation is — if they need help, we’re there to provide it, giving our time voluntarily to the charity sector.
We don’t want the Impact Optimiser to be a sales tool or a way of just relaying information charities already know or can’t act on. It is important to us that the audits make a real difference to the charities’ work. Through one-to-one sessions, we share a personalised audit, giving tailored insights with five (or more) changes the team can actually make.
The big five website issues charities are facing
Throughout all the audits we’ve done, five issues have continued to crop up repeatedly. These are issues with accessibility, choice overload, user journeys, impact storytelling, and donation call-to-actions. We’re not surprised we’re seeing this pattern, but these issues can be easily fixed and will massively improve your website for everyone.
The key fixes:
- Provide accessible content
- Reduce ‘choice overload’ by limiting options
- Improve user journeys
- Emphasise your impact
- Leverage more donations
Here’s an example of our advice to a charity to improve user journeys and reduce the choices users have to make:
We will explore these five areas of website development and highlight some key takeaways to help make your website more accessible, helpful and inspiring to your audience. With Giving Tuesday around the corner, better engaging your audience on your website can help increase donations.
1. Provide accessible content
Accessibility is a huge and multi-faceted topic. There’s a lot to cover (certainly too much for this post).
However, one of the biggest things you need to know is that accessibility isn’t just about supporting users with disabilities. It’s to support everyone by making your website easier and quicker to access. Improving access will benefit your users and your website’s search engine optimisation (SEO), too.
If your website is slow, full of barriers (I see you newsletter pop-ups!), and has readability and visibility issues (like difficult-to-read text, low-contrast colours, or images with no alternate descriptions), it will be difficult for users to engage with and for Google to crawl.
Using a couple of great, free tools, you can quickly get an overview of how accessible your website really is and what you need to focus on.
Some actions to take:
- Check for barriers that make it difficult for first-time users to understand who you are when they arrive on your website, like disabling popups on your homepage.
- Get an overview of your website’s accessibility level and page speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
- Check your website’s colours, especially where key buttons on your website are implemented, for colour contrast using our free tool to make sure they are visible for everyone.
2. Reduce ‘choice overload’
It’s no good trying to entice users to visit your website for Giving Tuesday if, when they arrive, they are overwhelmed with choices or need help deciding what choice to make. Providing all users with everything relevant to them can create an extensive menu, which can cause confusion and ‘choice overload’.
‘Choice overload’, or ‘overchoice’, describes how people get overwhelmed when they are presented with many options to choose from. We are often led to believe that more choice is a good thing, but research often shows that people can have a harder time choosing from lots of options.
This is incredibly important when thinking about a user coming to your website for the first time (and retaining them in the short attention window you have to engage them). From our audits, hundreds of organisations provide far too much choice in their main menu because they think about people who are already familiar with their cause or provide them with all the options because they think that ‘less clicks are better’.
Instead, think of your website menu like a restaurant menu, comparing one providing ten choices and another providing 100 options. The time it takes you to choose takes longer with the more options you have (that’s why 77% of people look at a restaurant menu before visiting a restaurant to choose their option). As website users can’t do this, your users want to easily find what section of your website is ideal for them.
Some actions to take:
- Review the number and importance of links in your main menu, reflecting on how new users will experience it.
- Review and limit where you are diverting people away from your site. For example, when social media handles are in the main heading.
- Make your primary call-to-action, like a donate or contact button, stand out on your homepage and/or menu.
3. Improve user journeys
While improving user journeys sounds like (and is) a big job, there’s one exercise you can do on your website to improve them straight away. We advise providing a relevant call-to-action at the bottom of key pages, when users are warmer to your cause after reading your page contents.
The big problem we see consistently with charity websites is that you often get to the bottom of most (if not all) pages, and the user isn’t directed to another action. So, if they’re warm and read your inspiring content above, what’s the one thing we’d like them to do next on their journey? Put yourself in the user’s shoes and think about their motivations and purpose for engagement.
Make your call-to-action a heading, put it in a coloured box, or add a button – do whatever you can to make it prominent and catch the eye before your visitors reach your website’s footer. Be their guide!
Some actions to take:
- Step into the shoes of your users (eg supporter, corporate partner or volunteer) and review how they can navigate the pages with their specific goals in mind.
- Outline the purpose and audience for your pages:
- Does it have a purpose? If not, why does it exist?
- Does it speak in a language the user will understand?
- What is the call-to-action on this page and through their journey?
4. Emphasise your impact
Our audits show that many charities only speak about what they do and how they started, but not about the incredible work they are doing year in and year out.
We’ve all probably had to write an annual report and publish it on our sites for users to find. But the information and statistics in those reports are absolute gold to your audience. Why? Because, at a glance, a person can find some clear, digestible statistics to understand the bigger picture about your organisation, cause and impact.
Information about your impact needs to be front and centre throughout your website because it’s a great way to instantly give someone the ‘big picture’ without reading reams of copy. It shows the fundamental difference you have made in the world and can talk to what still needs to be done with their support.
Some actions to take:
- Identify opportunities to spotlight your statistics. For example, use them in your introduction to increase trust and show your scale, or when making an ask of users.
- Don’t hide away your impact page or reports, so it’s easier for discerning users to find them.
- Don’t rely on your ‘about us’ page for key impact information – not everyone will take the time to read this page.
5. Leverage more donations
If we can speak to our impact, then we can use this information to ask our users for donations more clearly.
“What does a donation get me?” may sound like an odd question to ask, but it can be hard for donors to know how much to give and what a donation will actually do for the charity if the answer isn’t clear. We need to ensure we experience what our users go through when they’re trying to support us and adjust accordingly.
Too many websites instantly jump to donation forms on PayPal or donation walls on JustGiving, which either provides zero context on what donation a donor should give, or show lots of previous donations which can put doubts in a user’s head as to whether you even need a contribution from them.
Some actions to take:
- Put yourself in your user’s shoes and consider the user’s donation experience. We recommend regularly checking your page’s functionality and buttons across different devices.
- Build trust before asking for a donation. This means not asking too early before the user has had a chance to engage with your content.
- Also check if you are asking too late in the journey or if there are limited ways to donate.
- Tell the story of your cause and impact with key statistics, providing the context and tangible examples of where donations go and how much things cost.
- Add a webpage before any external donation platform so you can provide the context and track performance through Google Analytics.
The information put together for us was incredibly thoughtful and there were great recommendations on how to improve our website that considered our time and abilities as a small team. I would highly recommend this to any charity looking to improve their website.
In summary
By following this key advice, you can showcase your cause, history, and scale, ensuring the choices and pages available to users have purpose and influence. Considering these five key areas means you are making a huge difference to your website and users’ experience.
By ensuring our content and calls-to-action are accessible to as many people as possible and that our users’ journeys never end abruptly, we’re guiding them to what resonates with them and what’s important to us.
Working on these fixes will not only benefit you with Giving Tuesday on the horizon, but they’ll also benefit you long-term as an organisation with a 24-hour donation machine by your side.
Audits can help regardless of where you are in your website journey – from independent reviews of a new website and refreshing an old one, to helping you make a case for investment in your platform to begin with.
If you’d like to book a free audit with us, you can use our online calendar. We’ll see you for a 30-minute video call during which we’ll present the website audit, answer any questions, and send you the presentation afterward.
Image credit: Tanmoy Roy on Unsplash.
