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Video Blog - Four ways nonprofits can build a better website (in Drupal)

Michael — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:17:36 +0000

In this (video) blog I wanted to provide you with a very informal look under the Drupal hood, and particularly focus on the points I discussed in my blog entry the other day called Four ways nonprofits can build a better website (in Drupal).

The particular points that I address in this video are:

Illustrating how easy it is to enter a custom "Event" content type, including date field, location field, and Event description.
Show how a "view" has been created for this custom "Event" content type which automatically does the following:

Publishes the latest Event in the Upcoming Events block in the sidebar, sorted based on "Start Date" of thef event.
Publishes the latest Event in the various Calendar views (month, week, day, year).
Publishes the latest Event in the iCal feed, where users can download the "Upcoming Events" feed and store the information locally on their own computer calendar app.

Briefly touch on the idea of creating custom "Roles" for your users, along with configuring the "Permissions" which control what each role can (and cannot) do on your website.

You can hopefully see from this simple video, done in a simple website configuration, that Drupal can readily increase your nonprofit staff effectiveness by making it easier to create custom content and have it automatically be published where it needs to go. Additionally, staff will be able to increase engagement by making content access easier for the viewers by offering items such as iCal feeds or RSS blog feeds, while managing the capabilities of users through "Roles" & "Permissions".

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Ammunition against the "we don't need a website" argument

Michael — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:22:53 +0000

I just heard it again this week.

I had the pleasure of having an invigorating discussion with a couple of women at a local nonprofit...two people who have very strong ideas of how they wish to improve the situation at their NGO. Not only are they coming at it from a program & services delivery point of view, but they also considering how to become more self-sustaining in the future from a business perspective. Additionally, they want to be more "present" for their clients. In short, they have a good sized list of things they want to do, and they are very much aware that improving their online presence is going to be a strategic part of realizing their goals.

And then came the line that is unfortunately all to common in many nonprofits:

they had to try and "convince" some people about the value of improving the website.

I'm not putting my head in the sand here and pretending that I don't at least partially understand why some people would need convincing...but I have to say that it wouldn't take me too long to be convinced if I started looking at how the website was being used at my own particular NGO versus how other NGOs use their online presence. Eventually I would be asking myself "Why shouldn't we be taking our fair share of the online pie?"

So, for those who need a little ammunition for the "we don't need a website" argument, here are some points to reflect on.

A website helps people know you exist

When you want to find something, or learn about something, what do you do? Are you opening up the encyclopedia on your bookshelf? Thumbing through the Yellow Pages? Phoning a friend and asking? Odds are you go online and ask one of our marvellous search engines your question.

So, what question do you think most of your clients or supporters or other online audience members are asking? Now go type that question in Google or your preferred search engine and see what the response is. If your nonprofit is present in the top pages, and you are confident that people are finding you...great. If not...odds are many don't know you exist, so you aren't reaching as many as you could or should.

A website helps you educate & collaborate

When I go online, I am looking for information. In my own personal area of nonprofit technology, I want to know about websites, search engine optimization, marketing, analytics & metrics. I find a wealth of information, spread out everywhere...and as I keep looking certain people or organizations consistently provide awesome information and they get my attention. They get bookmarked. I will "tweet" about them.

What areas of service has your nonprofit developed an expertise in? Are you sharing this information locally & globally? Are you engaging in educating those who are in need of this information, collaborating with others who might be working in the same area, developing relationships centred around knowledge? If not...why not? Why go it alone, why work in a vaccuum?

The power of "one" isn't nearly as strong as the power of the "many". Wikipedia is a collaborative educational tool. Its impact is immense. This website blog is being written in Drupal, an open source software that benefited from another form of collaboration...which in turn helps to educate by sharing information. It is this collaborative software tool that is powering website like Amnesty, Greenpeace UK, The White House, and VIA Rail.

Every day, every week your nonprofit is gaining knowledge, expertise, experience. Share it with others!

A website helps you raise funds

If you are asking for financial support, whether from an individual or a corporation, there are certain questions that most will ask. Questions such as:

How will my money be used?
What fraction of the money goes to programs, what percent goes to administration?
How successful have your programs been?
Who have you helped so far?

These sort of questions can be easily addressed, online, via your website. Show financials. Share annual reports. Post videos of those you help. Give people access to programs along with your metrics (where appropriate).

This sort of transparent sharing of information goes a long way to instilling a sense of trust in online donors. And for corporations who support you...create a page on your site acknowledging them and the great work they do! Use your website as a big "thank you" vehicle.

A website helps you recruit volunteers

If I am looking for an opportunity to donate time & skills to an organization, the first thing I will do is go online. What sort of "feeling" does your present website convey? Is it encouraging? Up to date? Progressive? Or is it bland, boring, out of date, somewhat apathetic looking?

I'm going to put my efforts behind the progressive nonprofits, because those are the ones I find most inspiring. Don't let a poor online presence give a false, negative impression to potential volunteers. If you are doing great work, meaningful work, hard work...day in, day out...shout about it! Let people know. A little positive, truthful marketing can go a long way.

Another thing, how easy is it for potential volunteers to get more information via your website? If they want to sign up to volunteer, are there easy forms they can use? Approach your website as if you were a potential volunteer and perform the tasks you think they might be interested in.

A website helps you deliver services

If there is a portion of your services that is educational, based on sharing & conveying information, consider posting it on your website. It can free up staff time from being involved in repetitive, non-value-add work such as answering emails or phone calls about service X.

A website helps you promote advocacy issues

For those who believe in your cause, who want to help support your mission, a website can make it simple to "get involved". You can supply the necessary email addresses, website URLs, packages to download, event details etc in order for people to help advocate on behalf of your nonprofit organization.

It's about need, timing, budget...

Like I mentioned earlier...I can sort of understand why some people need to be convinced about the necessity of building, improving, redeveloping a website for their nonprofit organization. Perhaps the needs haven't been clearly defined. Or the timing might be bad, with no staff available to devote the non-trivial amount of time required. Or it might be a case of needing to apply for funding.

There are many good reasons why a website project might not be a good idea "right now". But here is the acid test for whether or not you should be considering a redevelopment of your online presence. Can your nonprofit honestly say:

We have enough publicity.
We educate enough.
We have enough volunteers.
We have enough online donations.
We deliver our services effectively enough.
We don't need any more advocacy champions.

Unless you can clearly agree with each of those statements, I would say that the "we don't need a website" argument is very much open for debate.

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Four ways nonprofits can build a better website (in Drupal)

Michael — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:49:01 +0000

I talk about Drupal a lot. Perhaps too much....but I don't see that changing anytime soon.

The reason I talk about the Drupal website CMS (Content Management System) so often is because I am completely convinced that it is an excellent website tool for nonprofits. My goal is to make sure that both the non-techie and techie nonprofit staffer is aware of this tool, and consider it when starting a website redesign project.

Some nonprofits using Drupal

Here's a few nonprofits who are using the Drupal CMS for their nonprofit website:

Amnesty International
Greenpeace UK
International Justice Mission
Comic Relief
Meyer Memorial Trust (awesome article on Why They Chose Drupal)

1. Huge development community, immense website functionality

Here's a snapshot from the Drupal website, taken today, on what sort of development is presently ongoing. Note that all of this development is done by people around the world, for the good of the community, and they contribute their work to the Drupal CMS at no cost. Some of this work is indeed "sponsored" by particular individuals/companies who want specific work done for them, some is done for free...but all of it (should) goes back to the community to be used by all.

So what does this mean, and how does that impact your NGO in a good way? Well, the 14,040 modules represent 14,040 different "widgets" that perform a specific function. It might be a module to allow you to easily connect to Twitter, import Flickr photos, manage private groups, send alerts via SMS from your website when new content is posted...well...you get the idea. There is A LOT of stuff going on! That's why when ever I sit down with a nonprofit organization it is incredibly rare that they are asking for something that Drupal can't do.

2. Simple "people" management

Having a great nonprofit website is about two things: great content and great conversations. In order to have conversations on your website, you want to be sure that the right people have the right permissions to do the right things...and if things get out of hand, you need to be able to quickly intervene. That sort of thing is handled easily in Drupal by:

Setting up your own "Roles" for your website users (eg. Admin, Editor, Client, Board Member etc).
Configuring the proper "Permissions" (eg. Client can post comments without approval, use Advanced Search, submit Forum topics for approval).
Adding new "People" to your website and assigning them the proper "Roles".

3. Custom content types

(Note: the following is quite "techie" on the implementation & is to be handled by a website developer. However, the conversation around "custom content types" and how to present your content is an important one to be held between staff & website developer. I wanted to share a few screenshots so you get an idea of what your website developer will be configuring & creating.)

One of the most powerful aspects of the Drupal CMS is the "custom content type", combined with how & where the content is presented to the website visitor. Out of the box your website can support page & story creation. That's nice, but it's not awesome.

A few clicks and you can support a blog, polls, and a few other features. That's better, still not awesome.

Now...imagine that your nonprofit is constantly publishing things like news items, events, financial reports...what ever. Trying to make a standard website page into an "event" can be a pain...and is not the optimal way to present the information to your viewers. The solution is to have "custom content types" created just for your nonprofit website needs.

Your website developer will handle this, as it is somewhat technical, but during your discussions you will be able to capture what sort of content types you need, and what custom data "fields" you will want included. Now you are getting closer to awesome!

4. Optimizing where and how you show your content

Once your custom content types are created it is important to publish that content in the most intuitive, logical place on your website in order to best meet the needs of your visitor while contributing to your website goals.

In Drupal, this is done on the technical side by creating "Views" of the content. Essentially this means your developer is building various presentations of particular content. In the image below, I have asked Drupal to create a Page, Block and RSS Feed for my "Blog" content type. I only want 10 items per page, want a pager included, and want them posted with the latest blog entry first. There will be a menu called "Blogs" associated with the page, and the RSS feed will be attached to the page. A bunch of techie details, many of which you can ignore...but I thought I would share it with you to get you thinking of what a website CMS like Drupal might be able to do for you.

The takeaway

Properly discussing the benefits of Drupal requires a whole year of blog entries...as well as discussions with each nonprofit to determine how it can best fill their individual needs.

Choosing Drupal over other open source CMS solutions like Wordpress or Joomla won't rocket you to the top of Google's search results page, and it won't build you an enormous online following. To achieve those results there is no shortcut, no magic bullet. That is simply planning, execution, measuring, and iterating.

What Drupal can do for a nonprofit is give them a really powerful tool that can be configured to the needs of each role, and allow for future growth and progress via their nonprofit website.

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Writing Better Anchor Text for Better SEO

Michael — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:49:47 +0000

For this blog entry I thought I would take one of Google's suggested SEO tips from their "Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide" and show you how to do it in Drupal. For those who don't know it, Drupal is a website CMS (Content Management System), and it happens to be used by many great nonprofits such as Amnesty & Oxfam. It's also the website CMS we use at IT For Change.

So, browsing through the tips I come across:

Write better anchor text.

So, what do they mean when they say write better anchor text? Well, "anchor text" is the text that a user will click on to visit a link. Typically when you are writing content for your website you will want to link to an internal page on your site, or an external website page.

You could just put the URL such as "http://itforchange.org/blog/writing-better-anchor-text-better-seo"...but that isn't terribly easy to look at, and it doesn't give the viewer (or the Google search bots) a very good idea of what the link is. Well, actually that isn't 100% true, because I pay close attention to writing good URLs that are descriptive...but Drupal's default is something like "http://itforchange.org/node/54"...and that certainly is NOT going to help our cause!

So, Google is suggesting we write "better" anchor text. Here are the "Best Practices" they suggest in order to accomplish this:

Choose descriptive text.
Write concise text.
Format links so they are easy to spot. (This is a good point. Use a consistent style when presenting links...such as always using the same color, and anything underlined means "this is a link.)
Think about anchor text for internal links too. (Another good point. Some sites simply write in the internal URL you will visit...which isn't too friendly. Consider instead writing "Visit our About Us page" and making that into the anchor text.)

Click image to expand.

Luckily for most of us using a website solution that has some sort of a "WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get) text editor, adding a link and its associated anchor text is very easy. Here are the steps for our particular version of Drupal and the text editor tool we are using:

First, write the text that will represent the actual anchor text. In our example I will write "IT For Change Home Page".
Then highlight the desired anchor text using your mouse.
Next click on the "chain link" icon in the WYSIWYG tool bar (which indicates the tool to add a link...yours may look different, like a Globe with a chain link or similar).
Fill in the Link URL, Target, and Title as you prefer.
Click "Insert" and you are done.

Ensuring your anchor text is accurate, descriptive, and concise isn't suddenly going to put you at the top of Google's search results. What it will do is help your visitors navigate through your website more easily & intuitively, avoid frustrating them, potentially improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) results due to better "content" words, and globally contribute to presenting a more professional, enjoyable website.

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Five reasons why nonprofit websites are unique

Michael — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 15:45:08 +0000

1. You have to convince others of the "value" of investing in a website.

Board members & even staff members can't always see the tangible value of investing time & money in a website, especially when it seems that a dollar in technology is one less dollar going towards mission related work.

If you really want to see some real growth via your online channels, you need to view your website as an active member of your marketing & fundraising team, one of your core "relationship builders" that will guide the casual website visitor through a progression of increased involvement. This could mean they go from attending an event, to donating, to volunteering, perhaps even becoming a future board member.

2. Your nonprofit website is often asking for financial support.

Most nonprofit websites have some type of a "Donate" button on their site. That's a pretty big ask for a first time or casual website visitor (it's different to ask for financial support from those who already know your organization and want to contribute to the work you are doing).

When you are looking for some much needed revenue through your online donation tool, it is important to make sure you are doing all you can to convince your viewer that your cause is a worthy one. Consider what sort of information they might be looking for, and ensure that it is very easy for them to find it. It could be a useful idea to have links on your "Donate" page, directing the potential donor to your latest financial reports, or a list of board members and how to contact them, or a report card on your outcomes for the past year. Ensure the "flow" to donate is very simple: try and donate yourself and see how easy/frustrating it is.

3. You probably don't have a dedicated website "techie" on staff.

There aren't too many small to mid-sized nonprofits that have technical people on staff, so when things go wrong with the website, it either doesn't get fixed or the task has to be outsourced....and that comes out of budget dollars that could have gone elsewhere.

Countless NGOs have website solutions that could work if only they knew how to use it properly. If you are considering a website redesign project it is going to be very important that your solution takes into account your staff technical prowess (or not!)...and that your website developer/partner understands & expects that there could be a lot of website questions about "How do I do this?"

As a brief aside, we build our nonprofit websites in the Drupal website CMS, and while building and configuring a highly effective website can involve quite a bit of technical knowledge, when properly configured the content editors can see a very simple user interface. Before you sign off on accepting any website solution, ensure it seems simple enough to use. Spend some time creating content, working out the kinks, asking questions.

It's like Einstein said: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

4. You will have opportunities to combine emotion with strategy.

If you start viewing your website as a truly strategic tool, you can begin to create optimal "flows" for increasing fundraising (or other particular goals you set for your website).

Here's a simple example of how you might take advantage of the positive emotions people might experience after attending an event to support your nonprofit:

You post your event on your website, ensuring it is prominently featured in a highly visible location on your site.
The day of the event your staff are armed with cameras and capture images & videos. You might even ask your supporters to take a bunch of photos which they could upload to sites like Flickr. Groups like Amnesty International Canada use Flickr, and in Drupal (the website tool we use) it is very easy to show your Flickr photos on your nonprofit website.
After the event you ensure that you rapidly publish all the multimedia on your website.
As the event attendees are arriving home they receive a big "thank you" in their inbox, and an invitation to see photos and videos of the event online at your website.
The opportunity now exists to perhaps realize more engagement from the event attendees. You might ask them to sign up for a newsletter, volunteer to help at another event, suggest they donate to a fund that will assist a cause they truly care about...it's up to you to determine the right "ask".

5. Many nonprofit websites are "taken hostage".

Sadly, I've heard many stories about nonprofits being "taken hostage" by previous website developers or website hosts. Given the fact that nonprofit staffers are often in a technically disadvantaged position relative to the website developer/host, it is critical to ensure your nonprofit is working with people whose intentions align with yours. I'm not talking about getting "free" services necessarily...as these "free" services can often leave you in a bind in the future...but take the time to find "like minded" people to collaborate on your cause. Not only is it more enjoyable, but it will make more business sense in the future.

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Maximizing the return on your content creation time

Michael — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:31:07 +0000

With a new year upon us, I'm sure that many people have some pretty good resolutions in mind....both personal and professional. For those of you who are responsible for your nonprofit marketing, you might be planning to make some great changes for 2012. So let's talk about how your website can help contribute to those changes.

Use your time optimally

I've been reading up on "inbound marketing" and how it can deliver great results in terms of helping you achieve your online marketing goals. The one line summary of this marketing strategy might be phrased as "content is king".

So, for those nonprofits who want to use their websites to advance their goals, there's going to have to be a commitment to creating content...including blogs, videos, image galleries etc. The fact of the matter is, however, that staff tend to have very limited time, so all your website content creation efforts need to be on point. How to ensure this is happening?

Know your website goals

Start by listing out your top 3 website goals...and focus your efforts here persistently. Are your goals to build a newsletter following, educate people on your cause, raise online donations? Build strategies around these goals to create content that supports these objectives. Keeping these goals in mind as you are writing will help you maximize the return on your invested time.

Aligning audience expectations with mission goals

What happens in the case where your top 3 website goals are X, Y, Z...and your audience is coming to find A, B, C?

The first big question we need to ask is do you know what your online audience wants to see when they visit your website? In fact, do you know who your audience is, what the segments are, and which of those segments are most important to your organization & pursuing its goals? Are they students, members, parents, donors, casual readers?

It's easier than ever to find out. Simply ask them. There are numerous ways to do this:

Use online survey tools like SurveyMonkey.
Send out a survey to your email list of supporters.
If you are using the Drupal CMS (Content Management System) it is very simple to create a poll and learn more about your site visitors.

Once you have an idea of who is coming to your nonprofit website and what they can expect to see, you can view this from the perspective of your original top 3 website goals. How strong is the alignment? Do you need to reconsider your goals? Or perhaps you need to change who your audience is that is coming to your website. This is a separate topic, but on a macroscopic level this can be done by changing the content on your website, changing what terms cause search engines to find your site etc.

Don't forget to measure it

I'm very much about measuring and improving. So, now that you have reviewed your website goals, surveyed your audience, and are attempting to create content that will both a) help advance your marketing/website goals and b) meet the needs & expectations of your audience, you should be in much better shape. You can feel good knowing that when you devote your limited time to creating web content it is making a positive impact.

But wait, we don't know that for sure yet do we? Let's take this one step further and make sure our efforts are indeed paying off.

What metrics are you tracking to evaluate your progress towards your website goals? Is it the number of daily visits to your website? The time spent viewing your latest content? The amount of online donations? Presumably if you are matching the above conditions of a) and b) your progress should be moving in a positive direction. If it is...great...keep doing what you are doing! If it isn't, it means you have to iterate again through the process of aligning your website goals and what the audience wants.

Wash, rinse, repeat as necessary

I know when I read about creating change, pursuing goals etc they say people almost never get it "just right" the first time. It's about trying something, observing the results it gives you, going back to your model and tweaking it, observing the results...and slowly you see things take the shape you wanted.

Don't forget to take advantage of the fact that you can continue to periodically survey your audience, get an idea of whether or not you are meeting their needs and expectations. Their feedback is invaluable to helping ensure that your efforts and goals are in strong alignment with the vision of your supporters.

The end result here truly is worth it. Not only will you be adding content to your website, which improves your search engine results, but you will know that the content you provide is meeting your website audience expectations. Putting those two together and you will indeed start advancing those mission goals you set for your website.

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Want better search results? Look at your "Description" meta tag.

Michael — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:53:08 +0000

Let's begin by stating what the "Description" meta tag is. When somebody does a search on your nonprofit organization, the search engines will post snippets from your website in the results page. Those snippets are often taken from the meta tag "Description" field. You may not even know you have one on your website page...and in fact you might not. Whether you do or you don't, it's time to start thinking about it when creating new content in order to greatly increase the chances that the right people find your website.

In this blog entry I will be showing how to manage this "Description" meta tag using the Drupal website CMS (Content Management System). More particularly, I will be using Drupal version 7, the latest major release. The theory holds whether you use a website CMS or have to do old-school HTML...what varies is the ease of implementation as well as your own specific "how".

The process of adding a meta tag in Drupal

I'm going to create a simple "Page" in Drupal. Here's the first screen I get when I am asked to enter the Title and Body text of my new page. I have presently filled it in with simple lorem ipsum text.

Once I have entered my Body text for my page, I scroll down and see the following options. Your website may present different options, depending on your website configuration as well as your "Permissions" to adjust various website aspects. Often when configuring things for someone who simply needs to create & edit content we will make this section much simpler. For now I am interested in the Meta Tags tab, and in particular in the first field....Description.

You see how its default value is set to [node:summary]. Now if we take another look at the first image showing the place where we are to enter our content Title and Body, we will see a small hyperlink to the Edit Summary window. If we click to expand the link here is what we'll see (for the purposes here I have entered in more lorem ipsum text):

This is the Description meta tag that will be presented by search engines like Google on their results page. Note that sometimes they do skip this Description meta tag and will instead show other, (what they deem to be) more "relevant" parts of the page, depending on what search words the user entered...but for the part of things that is in your control, you will want to focus on "optimizing" this Description.

Why the Description meta tag matters to your nonprofit

First I have to say I am guilty of something. Until quite recently I just set one Description and applied it to my entire site. So, if you Google "IT For Change" you will predominantly get the same Description of the website, no matter what you searched for. That seems ok in one sense, but it's not really all that helpful to the end user who is trying to determine which page out of the thousand results to click on.

Let's say your nonprofit website is all about saving the rare purple koala from extinction. So, under the site-wide(globally used on every page) meta tag Description, you or your techie have entered something like "Our nonprofit is devoted to saving the rare purple koala from extinction."

Now, let's say I'm an internet user with an interest in purple koalas, and in particular, on the impact of clear cutting lemon trees on their survival rate. Your nonprofit happens to have written a paper about that very issue and published it on your website...and yet in the Google results I only see "Our nonprofit is devoted to saving the rare purple koala from extinction." No mention of lemon trees!

There are two ways you can improve this situation (again, specifically referring to Drupal 7 in this blog). You can either:

Go back to that "Edit summary" button and fill in a short yet relevant description of what you wrote about in the Body. This will cause the default [node:summary] to automatically grab your new summary and share that with Google.
Skip the "Edit summary" bit and just enter your own Description, overwriting where it says [node:summary]. That [node:summary] is Drupal's way of telling itself to pull the summary you wrote above.

Either way will get you the results you need...you will present Google (and your website viewers) with a much more relevant description of what they can expect to read if they click on your link. So our koala saving internet surfer will instead see a description like "Our nonprofit has researched the impact of lemon trees on purple koalas and we share our results here." Much higher likelihood of getting the click through right?

A final thought on the "Edit summary" field. Putting aside the impact on Google and other external search engines, you may want to fill this field in so that you have better control of what is shown to users once they are on your site and doing things such as using your internal search and so on. Drupal shows "snippets" to the end user in search results and other situations. So, the snippet may be a trimmed version of your "Body" text...or you can specifically show the summary text. It's a question of what level of control you want over presentation.

So...the "Description" meta tag. By many it is largely ignored...but for those savvy nonprofit staffers who want to take advantage of every possibility to improve their website positioning, it's an easy way to boost your search results and bring the right people to your website!

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"Why" nonprofit websites really matter to us

Michael — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:02:31 +0000

"Often he who does too much, does too little." - Italian proverb.

When a nonprofit starts considering a website redesign project, an important part of that process is figuring out who to work with. Maybe the nonprofit is one of the lucky ones, and they already know somebody who knows somebody....but for most their need brings them to the search engines.

Envisioning the difficulty they might have while sifting through the thousands of groups offering "website design" services of one sort or another, I was reminded of Simon Sinek's TED Talk on "Start With Why." It's an excellent talk addressing "why" people buy from certain companies like Apple, and in it Simon suggests that many of us (and by "us" I am referring to website design groups for now) get our marketing process backwards.

For example, IT For Change is a website design company...who happens to focus exclusively on nonprofits...and we build using open-source software (specifically Drupal). We can build online communities, add in multimedia sections, make blogging easy etc.

But for that nonprofit staff member who just found our website via the search engines, knowing that we program in Drupal and make great websites isn't going to really help them decide whether or not they should work with us...because we first must be satisfied emotionally with a decision like this, and only then does the mind start collecting the data to support the emotional decision. Taking our cue from Simon, I thought I would write about "why" IT For Change focuses on nonprofit websites...why we think that is a big deal that deserve unique attention.

What nonprofit website success is to me

I'll start by stating that it has a lot to do with my personal definition of "success" regarding a nonprofit website. If that success was narrowly defined as building a site that was a) cost effective, b) easy to use, c) delivered on-time & on-budget, I have a feeling it wouldn't be enough to keep me pumped up. All of that is "necessary"...but not "sufficient". For me it's much bigger than that....much more interesting, with many more pieces to the puzzle.

I like to absorb an ongoing mashup of business stories, technology tips, and the psychology of why people do what they do (like Simon's TED talk). I also like the concept of brainstorming around setting SMART goals, personal motivation, determining key metrics, and how to keep going when the going gets tough (for example, when you just know you should write new content for your website but you don't feel like it). So referring to the "Change" part of IT For Change...the "Change" I am so interested in is the swirling potential that comes from taking this combination of business, technology, marketing, and personal motivation and applying it to help create a groundswell of change in the nonprofit space.

So...why do we focus on just websites, just open source, just Drupal, just nonprofits? Undoubtedly this will change over time as technologies change, as your nonprofit needs change, and as our vision changes and expands. But I am a big fan of narrow focus...having the courage to say no to certain opportunities in order to say yes to the ones you really want to grow. Besides, a brief scan of a dozen nonprofit websites will clearly demonstrate the need for groups like ours.

That is a big part of our "why". IT For Change wants to help nonprofits, big or small, techie or not, realize that their website can be a Swiss Army knife of online communications. We think we can bring a lot of value to the table by not only talking about the "website" itself, but also about your mission, goals, content creation calendar, analytics metrics you will measure (and how often), as well as myriad other points.

Hopefully the next time a nonprofit stumbles upon our website when they are searching the Googlesphere for a website partner, they will see this post and understand us a little bit better. Whether they choose to work with us, or with one of the many other excellent nonprofit technology people out there, our hope is that they get to work with a team who helps them create huge "Change" through their website. It's such a great feeling...and it can do so much to catalyze a nonprofits growth!

10 ways a website content management system can help with search engine optimization

Michael — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:30:49 +0000

Many of you may have already heard of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. It is basically a number of tips & techniques you can use on your website in order to make your nonprofit organization rise in the ranks of search engine results. These techniques include things such as properly tagging images, using header titles, repeating the important keywords etc.

So, why does SEO matter to a nonprofit content creator? Think about it as using a huge lever, which when placed at just the right point can help you move mountains. When you spend time creating a new piece of content, people are either going to see it or they won't. If it's buried on page 11 of the Google search results, your efforts are in vain. However...with a little application of some SEO techniques, suddenly the payoff for your diligent writing efforts is looking pretty good!

In the past, this could be difficult and time consuming...and often required techie intervention on some of the HTML code related bits. Now, however, things are quite a bit easier...thanks to the website CMS!

A website CMS (Content Management System) can help with SEO in numerous ways. Here are some of them (note I am using the Drupal website CMS as the basis of my comments below...but am assuming that other popular open source tools have similar functionality):

Easily allows you to add the Google Analytics tracking code...which is important if you actually want to see how your SEO efforts are working out.
Can configure "related content" blocks to show up alongside stories...encouraging users to click through to additional relevant pages, and showing the search engine "spiders" a path to link more pages.
You can add custom "meta tags" per page...although it would appear that for some search engines this is becoming less important.
Your nonprofit website CMS will automatically update your XML Sitemap as you add new content. This sitemap is shared with search engines like Google, allowing them to understand the structure of your website.
With a content management system like Drupal you can easily allow your website visitors to post comments on your blog entries, videos etc. Users will tend to use relevant keywords in their comments...and search engine spiders love to see that sort of thing. FYI: Drupal has a feature that allows you to moderate & delete comments if necessary, and you can also assign a "workflow" to comments...only publishing them after they have been approved.
It is easy to manage your embedded images, giving them SEO friendly "Alt" descriptions, without having to be an HTML guru.
If you want some search engine loving, create more content! Once you get above the 70-100 page range on your website, you start to really see the benefits of SEO. Using a website content management system makes it really easy to post content...such as this blog entry...without worrying about the style, coding etc. It's simply "write it", "publish it".
No fear of breaking the underlying template! Search engines have issues with broken web pages...ones that aren't coded properly. Nonprofit content editors using a website CMS typically are only dealing at the "content creation" level, and need not be concerned about inadvertently messing up the coded website theme. With the Drupal CMS it is easy to set various levels of user "permissions", enabling an administrator to ensure that the right power is in the right hands.
A CMS like Drupal offers super easy version control. Imagine that you spend a few hours creating an amazing writeup about your most recent fundraising drive. It's rich with keywords that describe your nonprofit, you've properly tagged the images, you have added sufficient numbers of header titles and subheaders. It's published! Then, a couple of weeks later somebody accidently goes in and writes another version...which isn't as SEO friendly. No problem. If you have configured your website to make each new piece of content a new "revision", you can simply choose to go back to the previous revision without losing any of your data (it's all stored in a database...that's why you can do this...unless of course you delete the page!)
Creating permanent web page "redirects" is easy. If your old site had some important pages that users keep looking for on your new website, you can configure it so that the new pages are automatically found. Search engine spiders don't like "page not found" too much, so this is a nice tip to keep in mind.

This brings me to an important point: search engine optimization, in part, needs to have various functionalities set up in order for some things to be possible. For example, the permanent redirect in point #10 can be done by a techie who knows server code...or it can be "enabled" in Drupal, thereby allowing nonprofit staffers to be autonomous.

When considering a website project it is critical to think about what you will want to "do"...both from an SEO point of view and from a content creation & management point of view. Not all website configurations are created equal...so make sure you have a good conversation with your website developer, who can ensure you get the most SEO bang for your buck! The results are completely worth it!

Tags:

SEO

Website autonomy is bliss!

Michael — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:40:57 +0000

Why so much website woe?

If you take 5 minutes and start browsing some nonprofit websites I think you will quickly find two distinct cases of "outliers". There are those that seem to be like marketing megaphones, constantly broadcasting the latest news, events, or blog posts going on in their organization...

...and then there are the sadly too many nonprofit websites that are referring to their upcoming golf tournament in July 2009.

What's going on here? Why the big disparity? Is it budget? Staff size and availability to create content?

Those might be contributing factors...but based on my discussions with many nonprofits, a big part of the challenge is that a lot of NGOs are stuck with either archaic website tools or shiny new & overly complicated tools that they don't know how to use. In both cases the results are the same: staff do not readily jump onto their keyboards and writeup what's new & vital to their community. The impact can be quite significant, considering that over 60% of potential donors will visit your nonprofit website after receiving an "ask".

"I did it my way!"

Let's turn to Frank for a little guidance. If we are going to start viewing your nonprofit website as a living, breathing part of your marketing (& fundraising) team, there are a few "must haves". Your website solution needs to:

Be easy to use and intuitive.
Provide maximum functionality, without being overly complicated. As Einstein said, "Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler."
Give your viewers what they are looking for, rapidly (you have around 8 seconds to grab them...after that, so long they've moved on.)

My proposal...get yourself a website CMS (Content Management Solution). Why? It gives you exactly what you need. It let's YOU manage your content! No more need to ask a techie to help you format some text, or post a video, or upload an image gallery. No more suffering the embarrassment of having documents from 2009 on your home page because staff don't know how to delete it.

At IT For Change we build all of our websites in a website CMS...specifically, we use the Drupal CMS. It's used by some pretty good folks, including those at Amnesty and Oxfam. Definitely worth considering if you are looking to gain a little website independence!

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The benefits of using a website CMS

Michael — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:05:40 +0000

Choosing to engage in a website redesign is typically a pretty big decision for a nonprofit organization. There are a lot of issues that have to be addressed such as:

Why you are doing a website redesign?
Why now?
What it will cost?
Who you should work with?

Let's assume your staff have diligently worked away at answering these questions, and you feel pretty good about your choices. Now let's answer the one question that really matters: "Is this going to be successful?"

Put another way, we can ask "What benefits can I expect to see?" For the sake of argument I am going to assume that your new website will be built in a website CMS (Content Management System) and address the potential benefits that might be experienced by both your website viewers and your staff.

Caveat...there is no magic bullet!

Right from the start I will state that there is no website redesign that is going to suddenly make you the talk of the town. There is no one "right" partner to work with, or one "right" open-source software to choose. These things are of course important factors to consider when taking on a redesign project, but they do not result in a successful website.

Success is an ongoing process of (sweat and commitment!):

Publishing new content on your website on a very regular basis.
Using your social media channels to alert people of your new content.
Using an analytics program (such as Google Analytics) to see what content is working.
Cycling back to publishing new content again...taking into account your analytics results.

The good news...the benefits (for those who do the work) are very real!

Ok, let's assume that you are aces in this area of content creation and measurement. Now then...what are the benefits you're going to see?

Benefits for the viewer

It's easier to access the latest info. (A CMS makes it very easy to automatically position your newest content right on the front page.)
The site can be "intelligently" searchable. (Configure your website to search by content types, "tags", etc.)
Easy to stay in touch. (Allow them to subscribe to blogs via RSS, events via ical, etc.)
Quick to get feedback. (Staff can make configurable website forms to ensure they gather the right information and it goes to the right staff.)

Benefits for staff

In the long term, your team will save time & save money.
You will save time because content creation and management is easier, intuitive. There is no need for 3rd party intervention.
As you save time, you save money...both from not having to pay that extra person, and from redirecting staff time away from wrestling with a website to getting back to focusing on programs etc.
Your website becomes free "market research". You can build your site to encourage conversations with viewers (open up comments, create forums, add online groups).
More market research: put polls on your website...see what matters to your viewers and if there is a misalignment between the content you provide and the content they are looking for.
It can be fun. Yes...believe it or not, developing website content can be fun. It gives you a sense of pride in your organization as you invest your time in building a website that accurately reflects who you are. Your online reputation will grow and people in the community (both local and global) will start to recognize your nonprofit as experts in your field.
Since we already assumed you are experts who track growth using an analytics package, that means you will at times want to make changes to your website. Its easy to do this with a website CMS. Shift a block of information up a bit, move another one to the bottom right corner...as you get more viewer feedback you can customize the experience.

So, will your website redesign project be successful? That is entirely in your hands. If you commit to putting in the work, you will indeed succeed. That is 100% certain (defining your goals and what that "success" is will be the focus of another blog).

The benefits you will realize reach both ways...into your organization, and out to the community. So...if you aren't completely satisfied with how your current website is functioning, if it is limiting you and/or your supporters in some way, give some serious thought to bringing yourself into a well designed, well thought out content management system. The rewards are definitely worth considering!

Tags:

Analytics