Websites and Blogs Archives - Nonprofit Marketing Guide (NPMG)

Nonprofit Website Redesigns: What Should You Do at the Same Time?

Kivi Leroux Miller, Founder and CEO — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 22:48:14 +0000

If you haven’t led a nonprofit website redesign process, your time is coming!

In the corporate world, website redesigns every 18-36 months are not unusual. In the nonprofit sector, we often stretch that out to more like every 3-5 years.

But many organizations also include rebrands or refreshes when doing a nonprofit website redesign. Those decisions can make the process last well over a year. In other words, you might barely get a break after launching the new site before someone wants to talk about redoing it again!

Here’s a peek at some of the data we will include in the 2024 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report.

38% planned for 2024

Who Redesigned Their Website in 2023?

Twenty percent of survey participants said their nonprofit completed a website redesign in 2023. Nonprofits with budgets between $1.1 – $5 million were most likely to have done so in the last two years.

Of those nonprofits completing a website redesign in 2023, here’s who also made additional changes:

39% did a significant email newsletter template redesign
33% made changes to their brand color palette
32% did a logo refresh or redesign
27% made changes to their brand typefaces/fonts
23% did a full rebrand

Who Plans to Redesign Their Nonprofit Website in 2024?

Two hundred organizations, or 38% of the organizations completing our trends survey, say they plan to pursue a significant website redesign in 2024.

Of those organizations, the following percentages also plan to make the following changes:

39% plan a significant email newsletter template redesign
24% plan a logo refresh or redesign
21% plan to change their brand color palette
19% plan to change their brand typefaces/fonts
14% plan a full rebrand

Of those organizations who plan to redesign their websites in 2024,

40% said their current site was designed in 2018 or earlier
20% said the current site was designed in 2019 or 2020
18% said their current site was designed in 2021 or 2022

We’ll host a brand-new webinar on how to manage a redesign of a nonprofit website in late 2024.

7 Blogging Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Kristina Leroux, COO and Community Engagement Manager — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 19:19:42 +0000

Last week I shared some tips on making your blog a success.

Today we look at what NOT to do when blogging…

1. Ignoring your readers.

Who do you want reading and commenting on your blog? Your posts should be written for those people, not your staff, ED or board.

2. Having too many voices.

While you can have more than one person writing your blog, switching from a corporate sounding tone to a friendly personal one (and vice versa) will confuse your readers. Guest posts can add a fresh voice to the mix, but make sure they are a good fit with your organization’s personality.

3. Not including a call to action.

Like most communications, you need to tell your blog readers to do something. Ask them to post a comment, visit your web page, subscribe to your newsletter, RSVP for an event, etc. Give them a next step.

4. Using jargon.

Most of us have industry related jargon, but just because you and your team use those words on a daily basis doesn’t mean your readers will know what you’re talking about. Speak in plain English and go easy on the acronyms and abbreviations. Try to read your blog as an outsider. Here is more on avoiding jargon.

5. Getting too “cutesy” with your titles.

While email subject lines need to pique your readers’ curiosity, for the most part blog titles need to be descriptive so they will show up in web searches and get readers to click over. You can be creative but include keywords.

6. Using big walls of text.

Big blocks of text are hard to read. You can use the same content, just use more paragraphs to break up the text. Also, use lists or bullet points often.

7. Not using any images.

People are drawn to pictures so try to include at least one image in your post. You can find royalty free stock photos (check whether you need to credit the source though) pretty easily on the Internet. They are also likely to immediately read any caption under a photo so make the most of that space as well.

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7 Tips for a Successful Nonprofit Blog

Kristina Leroux, COO and Community Engagement Manager — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 21:50:50 +0000

A blog should be an important component of any nonprofit content strategy even in today’s media environment. But creating a successful nonprofit blog requires planning and strategy. But it’s worth it…

Why?

Blogging gives you more freedom than other social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and X while also giving you a potentially bigger audience than email. You have complete control over the content and don’t have to worry about your content disappearing based on the whims of billionaires.

Blogs are a also great way to establish your organization’s personality and tone. A blog post can include photos, videos and infographics easily making it one of the most versatile communications channels out there.

Plus, Google loves new content so having a blog on your website can help with your overall search rankings and allow you to gain new supporters as well.

7 Tips for Creating a Successful Nonprofit Blog

1. Establish the type of blog you’ll write.

You can mix and match blog types, but I think that it’s helpful to have one primary direction in mind. Think about what goals you want your blog to achieve. Some categories include news, advocacy, toolbox, storytelling, and CEO/ED/Staff. Read more about the Six Different Kinds of Nonprofit Blogs.

2. Brainstorm ideas.

One of the hardest things about blogging is coming up with ideas for posts. What posts would help you achieve your goals as well as appeal to your ideal reader? Take time to jot down 20 ideas. A successful nonprofit blog knows its readers and what they want. Ask some of your more ardent supporters what they would like to read about. Sign up for our free Monthly Nonprofit Writing Prompts for content ideas.

3. Have a regular feature.

Come up with a few regular columns that you can create on a weekly basis. How-to posts or question and answer posts, and news round ups relating to your cause are all good examples. It’s one less post you have to get creative with and it creates things for readers to look forward to.

4. Use repurposed content.

Since blogging gives you more freedom than social networking and email, it’s an ideal medium to re-work content from other channels. If you got a good response to a social media post, expand on it with a blog post highlighting some of the comments. Re-work newsletter articles by adding more graphics that may better explain your point, but would be difficult to read in an email.

5. Be consistent.

The best blogs offer content on a regular basis. Using an editorial calendar will help you keep track of what content you are putting where and when, so channels reinforce each other. It will also help you stay focused on your audience and your goals for the publication. Being consistent not only keeps readers coming back continually, but it will also help with your Google search ratings.

6. Make it easy to share.

Share your blog posts on your social media channels so they can be easily shared by others. You also want to include ways to connect with your social networks.

7. Optimize for search.

Our highest ranking pages (besides our homepage) are blog posts. It requires strategy and some patience to see results, but your blog is a great way to boost your SEO. For more see Blog SEO: How to Search Engine Optimize Your Blog Content.

Social media has changed it for sure, but blogging still has its place in content marketing.

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Make Your Nonprofit Website Even More Human

Kivi Leroux Miller, Founder and CEO — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 22:00:54 +0000

Maybe you’ve heard this advice: Treat your nonprofit website like an employee. That means setting performance standards for it. But it also means investing ongoing time (supervision) and money (salary) into it. You can’t set it and forget it — your website — any more than you would an employee on your staff.

Your Nonprofit Website as a Human Employee Is Still Good Advice

Given all the chatter about AI (artificial intelligence) replacing people and how your nonprofit should use AI, you may wonder how that affects your website. If AI-driven search will have all the answers, do we even need websites?

The answer is YES; you still need a website. That’s because you need a place online where you control the content, and now even more importantly, the conclusions about that content.

When the question is, “What do we put in our email, on social media, on our website, etc.,” our answer at Nonprofit Marketing Guide is to put P.U.T in your content – to make it Personal, Useful, and Timely.

We all love useful content: FAQs, how-to guides, lists, and more lists, and the like, because it’s, well, so useful.

But AI is often just as good or even better than we are at drafting that mostly process and fact-based useful content.

Where is AI not so great? The personal and the timely. With few exceptions, it’s awkward at personalization. And its brain is based entirely on old content.

That brings us back to your website. Should you still write useful articles? Of course! Do you still need a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy? Of course!

But I strongly encourage you to use a more human writing style and to add fresh content. In other words, treat your website like a human employee that you expect to talk to others and represent your organization as if it were a person. Expect it to be up-to-date on what’s going on in the world.

Here are some good ways to think about this.

Add More Personal Content to Your Website

Wherever you can, add more human voices and human experiences to your nonprofit’s website. Here’s how . . .

Tell even more stories.
Lean into thought leadership writing where you share opinions and insights.
Share more first-person accounts.
Do more personal videos.
Edit how-to and other “easy-for-AI” website content by adding more first-person lessons or behind-the-scenes accounts with details that prove a person wrote it.
Include more direct and attributed quotes from real people.
Uses phrases like, “We believe . . .”
Prove the human writers are there behind your nonprofit website with bylines and bios. Maybe even let your writers develop their own recognizable writing styles.
Lean into brand and reputation building as a marketing goal so people will want to hear from you directly, not from a compilation of anonymous voices via AI.
Allow commenting, posting reviews, or other user engagement with the content, such as taking quizzes and posting results.
Be clear about who you are talking to with your website content. As AI gets better at knowing who is asking the question, it will want to direct people to content developed specifically for that audience.

Add More Timely Content to Your Website

Don’t set it and forget it. Get in there more often. If you aren’t using the blogging function on your website, you should (even if you don’t call it a blog).

Update all of your nonprofit’s important website content more regularly.
Respond to breaking news or cultural moments with relevant insights and resources.
Use polling and surveying to create new data and research to share. Bonus: Include how people feel about topics in that data.
Don’t be stingy with your own expertise. As your knowledge and experience grow, share it sooner than later on your nonprofit’s website.
Reference breaking news or other timely topics in your content introductions (and on evergreen pages, remember to go back on regularly update those references).

Want More?

We recommend checking out these articles that helped refine some of our advice in this post (none of which was generated by AI!):

Which Types of Content to Lean into Ahead of Google’s SGE – And What to Avoid

AI Might Kill Organic Traffic: Here’s What SEO Marketers Need to Know

How Will AI Impact the Future of SEO? 7 New Strategies to Focus On (2023)

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3 SEO Trends for Nonprofits to Consider in 2023

Kivi Leroux Miller, Founder and CEO — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 22:17:42 +0000

SEO — Search engine optimization — is what you do with your website so that search engines like Google send more traffic your way. Here are a few SEO trends and corresponding advice for nonprofits to consider over the next year.

Note these SEO trends are in addition to what we shared late last year in SEO for Nonprofits: Meet BERT Who Likes to EAT and Hates ROT. That post summarized some of the changes to how search engines evaluate content.

Trend #1: Nonprofits Need to Carefully Vet and Edit Any AI-generated Content.

Many of us are thinking about ways that various AI tools can help us create and edit content. But remember, Google and the other search engines know that too, and they have no interest in promoting inaccurate, poorly written, duplicative (or plagerized) content.

If you end up using AI in content creation, set some internal standards for how that is done so that you don’t negatively impact your website’s performance.

Trend #2: Nonprofits Need to Add More Brand Personality to Website Content.

Because of Trend #1, it’s important that your content sounds human. If you can’t tell the difference between something you wrote and something AI wrote, that’s problematic. Ironically, several AI writing services can help you adjust tone and style! Stay human, people.

Trend #3: “Technical SEO” is Probably Something You Should Budget for Long-term.

Nonprofit communications professionals are used to thinking about content strategy for SEO, but behind-the-page technology considerations are becoming just as important. How fast do your website pages load? Do they work well on mobile? Can Google tell what your visual content- photographs and videos- are about?

This should be a shared responsibility between those handling IT and communications within nonprofits. If you don’t have internal IT capacity, talk to your web developer about these issues. If you don’t have a web developer, it’s time to work toward that budget line item.

SEO isn’t an essential strategy for all nonprofits. If your website works best for you when you direct people to it, that’s fine. But if you want the help of Google, Bing, and other search engines in sending folks to your website, you must pay attention to these SEO trends.

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SEO for Nonprofits: Meet BERT Who Likes to EAT and Hates ROT

Kivi Leroux Miller, Founder and CEO — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 22:21:49 +0000

Let’s just say this right from the start: SEO (search engine optimization) is HARD. It’s complicated, involves a lot of different elements you may or may not have time for, and could be someone’s entire job at your organization.

But, as the communications pro in your office, it’s likely up to you to at least understand some of the basic concepts of SEO.

Much of SEO success is about how your website is built, rather than the content on it. Your website page loading times, how the website looks on mobile devices, and how accessible it is all go into your page rankings. Website building for nonprofits is no longer a DIY job, and hasn’t been for quite some time. Budget to get professional help with redesigns.

But of course, the content does matter very much too, along with how often it is updated. Those things are more likely in your control now.

So what’s a good approach to content that will be SEO friendly? Let’s look at three acronyms you’ll see when exploring SEO best practices for 2023 and beyond.

Who is BERT?

BERT came on the scene in 2019 and stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Don’t worry, you don’t need to know what any of that means. It’s basically a natural language processing technique that helps Google figure out what you are really looking for by better understanding nuances in our language choices.

What you do need to know is that BERT means your page content should be more conversational in nature. It also means Google is much more interested in niche, specific, valuable content that gets at the true meaning behind search phrases, rather than just a bunch of keywords stuffed on a page.

EAT is the Good Stuff for SEO

EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. These concepts are all interrelated and overlapping, but here are some ways to think about each of them.

Expertise: This is the knowledge shared on your site. Is your content current, in-depth, and complete?
Authority: Is your site’s design and architecture professional? Are your credentials for speaking on the topics in your content clear? Your organization as the content creator is as important as the content itself. This is where your About pages come in. It’s especially critical for any YMYL content — Your Money or Your Life. In other words, if you are sharing content that could affect people’s health or well-being or that could cost them financially, you have an ever higher bar on authority to meet.
Trust: Trust is about transparency and others demonstrating their trust in you by linking to your content and sharing it.

You can learn A LOT more about EAT with great examples of High EAT and Low Eat in Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.

ROT is the Bad Stuff for SEO

ROT stands for Redundant, Outdated, and Trivial. It’s a lot easier to act on ROT than EAT!

Redundant: Too much repetition
Outdated: Old content
Trivial: Meaningless content

Get rid of this content by deleting outright, redirecting the old pages to better pages, or rewriting the content.

More SEO Advice

Those are some big important SEO concepts. If you are ready for a lot more on SEO for your nonprofit’s website, we recommend the blogs and resources at

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Should You Track Your Website’s Bounce Rate?

Kristina Leroux, COO and Community Engagement Manager — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 14:40:37 +0000

The quick answer to whether you should track your bounce rate: Maybe?

Not helpful, I know, so let’s get into bounce rates a little more.

My quest to figure this out started with a question asked in our community during month’s Community Spotlight which is on measuring your communications. At that point I realized I spend most of my time on email metrics as opposed to website metrics and decided to do a little digging into the bounce rate and why it’s so divisive.

What exactly is a bounce rate anyway?

Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter your site and then leave (“bounce”) without viewing other pages on your website. It is calculated by counting the number of single page visits and dividing that by the total visits. It is then represented as a percentage of total visits.

So, if your homepage has a total of 100 sessions and 50 of those sessions are only single page visits your bounce rate is 50%.

On the surface, it seems like that would be a good metric to know, right? If people are leaving without looking around, then you aren’t giving them what they need, right?

Not exactly.

Is a high bounce rate bad?

That depends on the type of site you have and the particular page in question.

Blog posts or other informational pages can have high bounce rates because people find what they are looking for on one page, then leave. Think about what you do after reading a news article.

Also, if you have a lot of visitors from mobile devices, then you may also have a higher bounce rate as most users on these devices don’t look at multiple page during a session.

On the other hand, your homepage probably directs visitors to different areas of your website so a high bounce rate here could warrant further investigation.

High bounce rates can also be a sign of poor quality images, disruptive ads, or slow load times so be sure this isn’t an issue with your site.

Should you track your bounce rate or not?

Unfortunately I go back to my first answer: Maybe. While bounce rates can help identify an issue with engagement, it doesn’t paint a full picture. If you don’t have time to further investigate a high bounce rate on a certain page, then don’t bother. A bounce rate by itself won’t tell you anything helpful.

If you only have a single-page website, then again, this is not a helpful metric. Everyone will bounce because there is nowhere else for them to go.

It also does not affect your Google rank.

But as said above, it can show an issue with your homepage or other back-end issues like load time.

Yes, I know how annoying “Well, it depends” answers are so I will leave you with this news:

Google Analytics 4 did away with bounce rates and replaced it with “engaged sessions” so I think that may be the final word on this misunderstood metric.

Want to join our Community? Become a Free Member or Pass Holder or register for a training event.

Want to learn more about how to measure your communications success? We are doing a Master Class this Thursday on measuring your communications where we will show you practical, strategic approaches to tracking and evaluating communications work.

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Marketing Predictions and Trends for 2022 from Around the Internet

Kristina Leroux, COO and Community Engagement Manager — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 20:27:09 +0000

Not to be confused with our 2022 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report coming out later this month, I have compiled a list of what others are saying around the world of marketing about the new year.

Do You Call Your Blog a “Blog” or Something Else?

Kivi Leroux Miller, Founder and CEO — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 16:33:05 +0000

Is the term blog totally outdated?

That question came up in a conversation with participants in the Communications Director Mentoring Program, and several people agreed that it is.

The word comes from the combination of web + log = blog and was first used in the late 90s. Many people still use it (including us) and there are categories of writers referred to as food bloggers and travel bloggers, for example.

But if you don’t want to use it for whatever reason, what might you call that section of your website where you post content in reverse chronological order and put things in categories?

Here are a few ideas, depending on what you are actually writing:

Latest News
Portal
Library
Journal
Resources
Stories
Recent Updates
Learning
Insights
In the Know
Reading Room
Guide
Articles
Tips and Advice

We’re sticking with blog for now.

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Does Your Nonprofit’s Website Have These Features?

Kristina Leroux, COO and Community Engagement Manager — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 19:54:28 +0000

If you have been with us for a while, you know we just finished a HUGE website redesign. (If you are new here, then “Hello!”)

We spent a good chunk of 2020 and into this year researching design trends, best practices, and the latest website bells and whistles.

I already shared some Graphic Design Trends for 2021, but here are the top features your nonprofit website MUST have:

Mobile Friendly (or Responsive) Design

As I mentioned in Monday’s breakdown of the 2021 M+R Benchmarks Study, half of website visits came from mobile users so it better look good on a phone or tablet.

Compelling Copy

Why should people care about your cause? What makes it different from other nonprofits with the same mission? What impact are you having?

Show your website visitors what the problem is, your solution to that problem, and how they can become part of that solution.

Clear Calls to Action

One thing we really worked on when we redesigned our website was making sure new visitors had a path to follow. This meant we picked the one thing we really wanted them to do and featured that. In our case we wanted you to take a two-question quiz to get started with a professional development plan. So our homepage and footer has various “Get Started” buttons.

We then have various other calls to action on different landing pages:

Register
Subscribe
Sign Up
Download

What do you you want your visitors to do? Donate, volunteer, become a member? All of the above?

You can use various landing pages like we do, but we suggest highlighting the CTA most important to you on your homepage and in your navigation bar (for most nonprofits that will be the “donate” button). Then use different landing pages for other actions.

Email Subscription Form/Box

While this is another call to action, you need to have a option for visitors to stay in touch with you before they decide to follow through on the more prohibitive CTAs like donating or giving.

This form should be simple and only collect the information you need. Often a name and email are enough.

Other Important Features

Accessibility
Easy Navigation Menu
Blog (or some type of system for publishing content housed on your site)
Social Media Links
Online Newsroom
About Us
Financials

What did I miss? What do you think every website should include?

If you just went through a website redesign, we’d love to feature your project. Send me an email or share in the comments below.

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