I found it only semi-interesting but that’s because I attend too many similar events; other attendees who were new to the topic found it more useful. I mostly go to this sort of event for the networking but there wasn’t much time to move around and chat to strangers.

As the event was drawing to a close I wondered: who are these speakers and why were they doing this event? Another member of the audience raised this as a question so I couldn’t have been the only confused person.

It turned out that a tech company runs these events to promote their products. Which is why they could afford to put on high tea in an posh venue. Which I really enjoyed, lovely scones. And give away a prize of a set of six lovely Stuart Crystal glasses. Which I happened to win! So… er… what’s the point I’m making? I forget. Anyway, please buy their products. Whoever they are, they’re very nice people. Nice sandwiches (no crusts, that’s how you know it’s a posh do).

• Learn web design - takes ages to learn properly, not realistic for most busy charity employees;
• Look for funding - takes time and a measure of luck and patience;
• Find a volunteer - a sensible option to consider, maybe try IT4C;
• Use a free online tool to create a simple website - what are the benefits and drawbacks?

From the early days of the world wide web there have been online tools to help you create your own website. Remember when every other website was created with Geocities (not a recommendation) or a similar tool? Most of these services were frankly awful, both in terms of visual appeal and accessibility.

The free Google Sites might be better, enabling you to put together a cross between a website and a wiki. It won’t create the most impressive or original website - the templating seems very basic - but it will enable you to start up a basic website and create pages and upload documents, calendars, images etc.

One useful feature is that you can use various Google tools to collaborate with other people to build up your site content - in some ways Google Sites could be better suited to building a quick and uncomplicated Intranet than a website.

Want to find out more?

• The CodeKindness blog has a post about how PeaceGames, a small US nonprofit, used Google Sites.
• Why Google Sites isn’t a website builder.
• Take a quick look at what the Wild Apricot website had to say about Google Sites.
• Why Judi Sohn is disappointed with it.
• The example of a nonprofit that gave itself a Google Makeover.

My own opinion? I might recommend it to a cash-strapped nonprofit that couldn’t afford to hire a web designer or can’t find a volunteer, that wants a simple Intranet to share docs with their volunteers and trustees. I’m not sure whether it projects a professional enough image as a public-facing website.

Is anyone out there using Google Sites - how useful have you found it?

At the Intensive Web Day we’ll be discussing topics such as: managing your community website; working with developers; choosing the right tools; and more. The draft program is available from the Making Links website, and keep an eye on the website for further details.

This day would be of interest to those developing a new website, redeveloping or restructuring an existing website, or who just want to continue refining and improving on what they’ve already got. There will be a range of short presentations and ample time for discussion, Q&A, and spontaneous presentations.

I’ll be presenting one of the sessions, on managing your nonprofit website. And a Melbourne-based web design company with an excellent record of community web development will be talking about how to work with a web developer. Other short presentations will likely be about: domain names, free software, implementing a CMS, and how to do a website review.

Hope to see you there!

It’s not aimed specifically at techies, it’s easier to read and perhaps more relevant to charities than some other publications. It’s written in plain English and spells things out for you.

For example the current edition has an article on news feeds. It explains in simple language what feeds are, why they exist and how you can subscribe to them, and discusses whether you could offer them to your own website’s visitors.

Slideshare is a website that allows you to upload your PowerPoint presentations and share them with the world. You can then easily insert those presentations into your own website (just like I’ve done here) by pasting code that Slideshare provides into your web pages.

It’s heartening to see that many of the presentations on Slideshare have a social message, some are uploaded by nonprofits and many have a campaigning focus. Slideshare is a great resource to dip into when you’re looking for ideas for your next PowerPoint presentation.

And let’s face it, most PowerPoint presentations are bloody awful and we need all the inspiration we can get. They really don’t have to be just lists of bullet points. So here’s a slideshow that shows you how to avoid Death by Powerpoint and here’s a well-written and amusing free guide that tells you Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes.

IBM will be presenting about their corporate volunteering program, which empowers employees and retirees to work with non-profit community organisations and schools. We have another couple of presentations on online volunteer management and volunteer networking, making this conference particularly relevant to volunteering agencies.

I would have been interested to hear Robyn Cummins from the Spastic Centre talk about blogging but I’m scheduled to run a workshop at the same time where I’ll show how you can use WordPress to power your nonprofit’s website. Afterwards, Darrell Burkey will demonstrate how the Joomla CMS works.

Peter Scott from Infoxchange and Dean Lombard from VCOSS will present on the subject of building IT capacity in community organisations. Infoxchange are one of the main organisers of Making Links and have a huge amount of experience in this area: they will be giving several presentations, as well as organising a bus tour of Melbourne’s community IT initiatives.

We have several presentations on digital storytelling including one on capturing responses to the apology and one from the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). There’s something of a media theme to the conference - there’s even a mini film festival one evening.

Film evening. Bus tour. Interesting speakers. And a great networking opportunity. Hope to see you there - register for Making Links.

But today I finally got the www.baptcare.org.au website to validate - and it’s only taken a whole year, hurrah!

If you run a website, why not go to http://validator.w3.org/ and test its pages (not just the home page) for HTML errors? If you find any, instruct your web designer to fix them, although if you didn’t originally insist on standards compliance they might well refuse. If you’re commissioning a new website, insist on 100% validation in the contract, and be clear that you’ll withhold payment until it’s achieved.

What types of errors needed fixing on the Baptcare site? Here are a few of the most common ones:

• An XHTML DOCTYPE was changed to a transitional HTML and that solved about 75% of the errors.
• Some tags ended in /> and some in just >. I changed them all to > to match the DOCTYPE.
• Tags were nested incorrectly. For example, there were dozens of <a> anchor tags that contained <h3> heading tags, like this <a><h3></h3></a>. It should have been the other way round.
• There were plenty of lonely, forgotten </p> tags sitting there on their own with no preceding <p> tag.
• Lots of ampersands & in URL links had to be changed to &amp; in order to validate.

So do all Baptcare’s pages now validate 100%? Well, let’s be honest, no. There’s still one recurring error I haven’t got rid of yet, an empty <ul></ul> that the CMS automatically sticks in some pages and not others. That’s technically a validation error because an unordered list should contain one or more <li> list items, but let’s be reasonable… it’s not the end of the world!

And I’m ignoring the Locations page which currently has over 500 errors (originally it was 1,400 which is a quite impressive figure!) and which I intend to completely replace soon with a new, standards-compliant version incorporating the Google Maps API.

If your web designer suggests building your new website using Drupal or Joomla or MODx or any one of the hundred other open source CMS out there, how do you know if you’ll like it or even get the hang of it? Well, you could visit the OpenSourceCMS website and try it out. This excellent website gives you full admin rights to some of the best CMS so you can give them a try and play around with all their features.

That would an embarrassing end to that topic, if it weren’t for the succcess I’ve had with Baptcare’s ad campaign, which recently doubled its site traffic. Why is that one nonprofit ad campaign works whilst another doesn’t? Here are some thoughts and ideas…

Doubled your stats you say?

Below are Baptcare’s web stats for the first 15 days of July 2008:

Visits: 1,229
Page views: 4,503

Compare those figures to the first 15 days of August 2008 (after the ad campaign went live):

Visits: 2,435
Page views: 9,184

To put these stats in context, we might have a 5% and 10% rise in stats from one month to the next, but until now, never 50%. What’s the reason for this? Maybe it’s…

Google’s helpful volunteers

A volunteer on Google’s staff regularly goes in to our AdWords account, sets up new adverts and tweaks them to make sure they’re performing well. That’s a great free service, really helpful and their edits can be effective. But it can also be disconcerting, especially when they rename your campaigns, capitalise every word and add exclamation marks to ads that you’ve honed to your own idea of perfection. I know I’m overly pedantic, I fuss about the grammar and punctuation and try to stick to Baptcare’s corporate identity, but Google’s volunteer must know more about what makes a good ad than I do, because their adverts are usually more effective.

Maybe Google’s staff choose to volunteer to support the nonprofits that most interest them, I don’t know quite how the system works but so far no volunteer has helped tweak the Greek Care ads. This may have been one factor in Baptcare’s online advertising success and Greek Care’s lack of it.

Start off by creating lots of ads

For Greek Care I started off with just a few ads and was disappointed by the poor response. Whereas, for Baptcare I quickly set up dozens of ads: some performed well, some didn’t, but at least I could then weed out the poor ads and concentrate on tweaking the click-through-rates of the good ones.

It’s the same story with keywords. Choose at least a dozen for each ad, then weed out the poor-performing keywords later. For an ad for Baptcare’s fostering programme, I initially chose about 20 keywords but when I checked the stats, only a few of those keywords (foster care, fostering, fostering children) were actually pulling in visitors, so I ditched the others.

Then keep weeding and tweaking

AdWords give you detailed stats that show which ads and keywords do and don’t work. Weed out the ones that aren’t getting clicked on. Now start fine-tuning your remaining ads.

Trying setting up several ad variations for an advert. Each version might have very different or just slightly different wording. Google will randomly show one of your ad variations and you can use the stats to find out which one was clicked on the most. This is a great way to test which kind of language works best. For example:

Foster a Child in Need
Temporary carers sought for kids
unable to live at home.

Become A Foster Carer
For Children Unable To Live At Home
Find Out More Through Baptcare. 

Advertise all your services

Don’t just advertise your organisation as a whole, or one or two services. Create ads for everything you do. The more your organisation does, the more you can advertise.

Greek Care is a small, niche website dealing with Greek culture and aged care, whereas Baptcare is a huge nonprofit with services that include residential and community aged care, disability, children and families, asylum seeker accommodation, research and many other areas of work.

It was so easy to go through Baptcare’s website and pick a dozen separate services to advertise, each with a very different potential clientele and very different keyword choices. With the Greek Care website there was less to work with and I will have to try to be more creative.

Link ads to specific pages on your website

Don’t set up dozens of ads that all link back to your home page. If your ad is related to your latest donations appeal, link directly to the landing page for that appeal. The Baptcare website has had big increases in visits to our fostering, residential aged care and vacancies sections because our ads link to their landing pages.

Keep at it

If your ad campaign doesn’t initially do all you’d hoped it would, stick with it. Try different keywords, try ad variations, create a lot of new ads. Keep tweaking, keep experimenting. Having got one online ad campaign off to a successful start, I’m going to go back to the Greek Care campaign and try again. If I’m successful I’ll crow about it in my next post; if not, I might go a bit quiet on the subject for a while!