Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog

I am hosting the next edition of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, publishing this Friday and the theme will be “What’s Hot and What’s Not in the Nonprofit Sector.” If you write a blog, share your thoughts on trends in your particular corner of this great big field, and then let me know about the post by sending your permalink to me at npc.carnival@yahoo.com. Don’t blog? Leave a comment on this post to share your ideas on what’s hot and what’s not.

Image by CJ Sorg on Flickr

Does this belong on our website? What should go on our home page? How can I make our website more user-friendly? How can we grab our website visitors’ attention and keep it?

My answers to these very common questions from nonprofits usually include some form of this response: It’s all about the answers your website visitors are seeking and the actions they want to take on your site. If you focus on making your site about answers and actions, you’ll successfully address the concerns behind these questions. (Learn more about online writing during this Thursday’s webinar.)

Answer Your Visitors’ Questions

People use the Web to find answers to their questions. What questions would someone have when they come to your website? That will all depend on what it is you do, but let’s look at a few examples.

If you run a local humane society, people will have questions about adopting pets.

If you run a Meals on Wheels program, people will have questions about receiving meals and delivering meals as a volunteer.

If you run a “Save the Squirrels” group, people will have questions about why the squirrels need saving and what they can do to help you save them.

Figure out the top three questions people have related to your group’s work and make the answers prominent on your website — on your home page and in your site navigation. Immediately upon visiting your site, visitors should either see the answers or see where to click to get them.

Make It Easy for Your Visitors to Act

In addition to finding answers to their questions, website visitors also want to take actions online, and they expect those actions to be easy and time-saving over doing it in person or over the phone.

Let’s look at the same three organizations and review the actions visitors would like to take on their websites.

If you run a humane society, it would be great for visitors to see which pets are currently available for adoption and to fill in adoption forms online (or at least print them out and start them on paper).

If you run a Meals on Wheels program, visitors will want to apply for meal delivery and complete forms to volunteer online.

If you run a “Save the Squirrels” group, visitors will want to advocate for the squirrels in some way, such as by signing a petition or sending an email to an elected official.

And, of course, every nonprofit should let visitors sign-up for an email newsletter and donate online.

Learn More

Want more online writing tips? Don’t miss this Thursday’s webinar: Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email, Thursday, August 14, 2008 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern.

When you write your web content, you are writing first for real people and second for search engine spiders. For your website to be as successful as possible, you need to keep both in mind.

Prominent keywords are important for both audiences. They help real people skim your page, so they can decide if they are in the right place or not and they help the search engines figure out what your page is about.

So where do you put them? Here are nine good places to use keywords.

1. In your page title. This is what appears at the top of the browser window when someone visits your website. It appears in the page code in between the title tags in the head section.

2. In your page description. Visitors don’t see this, but the search engines do. This is the two lines of text that appear below the main title in search engine results. It appears in the page code between the description tags in the head section.

3. In your page URL. Using your keywords in your page URL (what goes after the www.) can also be helpful with search engines. That’s why lots of blogs, including this one, use post titles in their URLs.

4. In your headings and subheadings. Make it easy for your readers to very quickly see what your page is about by using lots of headings and subheadings.

5. In your first sentence and your first paragraph. Make sure your important keywords appear here — the earlier, the better.

6. In your last paragraph. Use your keywords at the end of your content too.

7. Elsewhere in your body copy. When keywords fall naturally throughout your article, consider bolding them. Don’t go overboard with it or it will be a distraction. But if it makes the article easier to skim, bold those keywords.

8. In your link text. Instead of linking to words like “click here,” use your keywords in your link anchor text.

9. In your ALT tags on images. The search engines can’t read images (yet). With every image, include a bit of text called the ALT tag and use your keywords in that text.

Don’t worry about the keyword tags in the head section. Though it would seem like the obvious place to put keywords, it’s too obvious, and the search engines don’t pay much attention to that tag any longer.

Learn more about writing for the web during the August 14, 2008 webinar, Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email.

I’m heading out tomorrow for a week at the beach, but here are some great mixed links for you before I go. And actually, I’ll have a post or two queued up to publish while I’m out (I love that about Wordpress) — including one on where to put your keywords so both people and search engines will find them in your web pages. Stay tuned for that one.

On to some favorite links of late:

The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported on a new study about volunteerism. It says 26% of Americans volunteer and here’s one finding you might find counter-intuitive: Women with children and women who work have higher volunteer rates than other women. Hey, we’re already so friggin’ busy, why not throw some volunteering into the mix too! I know I’m volunteering more now, at a time in my life when I’m busier than ever. What’s up with that?

Marc Pitman shared this New York Times Magazine article on Facebook: What Makes People Give? (See, you can get useful info from social networking sites, even though I am still disgruntled about the Scrabulous debacle. Just installed Scrabulous reborn as Wordscraper. We’ll see . . .) The article looks at the work of economists and social scientists in trying to figure out why and how people respond to various types of charitable solicitations. Very interesting reading, and again, some counter-intuitive results. No one said this stuff was easy!

My friend and tagline diva extraordinaire, Nancy Schwartz, has a nice summary of a recent report called the State of Nonprofit Marketing. Since Nancy summarized it so nicely for you, I won’t bother.

Rebecca Ruby at Network for Good/Fundraising 1-2-3 has a new article called Determine Your Organization’s Onliness — the thing that only you are known for. Read it if you aren’t sure how to make your organization stand out from all the others around you.

If you don’t read Fundraising Success, you should. But if you don’t, you may have missed the interview Katya Andresen did with me on nonprofit storytelling. Katya reprinted it on her blog.

NTEN’s Blog posted an article by Jonathon Coleman at The Nature Conservancy on how to use social news sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to generate huge spikes in traffic to your website.

That’s it for now!