Where are the Problem Spots on Your Website’s Home Page?

During yesterday’s webinar on “Successful Nonprofit Websites: How to Make Your Website Work for You,” I asked participants to rank their own websites on 8 of the 10 criteria we discussed.

About 30 people participated, mostly from small nonprofits, producing some interesting results from their own evaluations of their websites.

56% said that their website didn’t allow visitors to sign-up for email communication at all. Only 11% said their email newsletter sign-up form appeared either within their site template (and thus on every page) or at least on all of the major pages of the site.

Getting people to your website is the hard part. Don’t let them just disappear back into cyberspace. Encourage visitors to stay in touch with you by signing up for an email newsletter, action alerts, or whatever you’d like to call your email correspondence. The point is to capture those email addresses so you can start a conversation with those website visitors.

In contrast, only 27% said they didn’t offer visitors a way to donate online. Hmmm . . . What’s the reasoning here? You’ll take their money, but not their email address? Maybe because following through with producing the e-communication is more work and throwing a donate button on the site is easy? You need to do both — email communication and online fundraising — and I’m willing to bet that the orgs with donate links with no e-newsletter aren’t raising much online.

72% own just a single domain name. I strongly recommend that at a minimum, nonprofits own the .org, .com, and .net versions of their main domain names. Ideally, you should also own any reasonable guesses that people might make. For example, The Nature Conservancy owns nature.org (its main site), natureconservancy.org, and thenatureconservancy.org. They own most, but not all, of the .com versions as well. When you don’t buy all the versions, someone else will eventually snatch them up and most likely put an advertising site up.

Only 27% said they usually or always have a story on their homepage. 45% said there were no stories on their websites at all! Ack! Storytelling is probably the most powerful marketing tool nonprofits have and yet it’s not being used on websites. Stories are the easiest ways to give examples of the need for your organization, the challenges you face, what you are doing to overcome them, and your successes. If I had to pick one single area for improvement among the group as a whole, it would be this one.

Only 34% said their home page offered visitors a clear path to the top answers and actions they were most likely seeking. To help focus your site on your visitors instead of your organization itself, I recommend that you think about why people would come to your website in the first place. What three questions would they be seeking answers for? What three actions would they like to take (e.g. registering for an event, donating online)?  The path to those answers and actions should be crystal clear on your home page.

It’s a lot to absorb, but the good news is that all of these problems are very fixable. Here’s what a few people said about what they learned during the webinar:

“You hit on so many of the issues I’ve been trying to articulate to my organization about our website that I’m thinking about just having them listen to the recording at our next committee meeting.  The idea of a CMS, of making the website relevant to our clients (and donors and volunteers) and of loosening IT’s grip on the website is so intimidating to agency management that I feel I need another voice to back me up.  They’re open to making changes, so I hope an expert voice will help me make my case!”  ~ Rebekah Hickey, Community Services Consortium

“(Liked) the reinforcing comments about having pictures and stories. Also, I like it when you pose questions about how to improve example websites - the interactivity is great. Also nice to hear other suggestions and get my brain thinking, rather than just being a passive listener.  ~  Erin Kangas, Manitoba Children’s Museum

“(The webinar) had a lot of practical ideas. We are in the process of selecting a company to re-do our website as part of a capacity building grant and I wanted to have some information on what I should ask for. I got it!”  ~ Belisa Urbina, Renovacion Conyugal, Inc

Wish you’d joined us? You can get the next best thing - the video recording - by purchasing an All-Access Pass to Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com. The recording is available in the Webinar Archive right now, along with nearly all the recording from the past year. Your All-Access Pass also let you RSVP for live webinars for the next 12 weeks at no additional cost. Get the details.

P.S. Join us for our next webinar on Tuesday, May 12, Getting Your Nonprofit Started with Social Media.

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Online Marketing Strategy & Website Makeover - Example from #09NTC

My favorite session at last week’s Nonprofit Technology Conference was “This is Iron Chef . . .  Battle Nonprofit.”

Three teams made up of consultants from four different agencies (Beaconfire Consulting, Forum One Communications, Free Range Studios, and Firefly Partners) got together on a Sunday for a strategy and design competition. Their challenge was to remake the online presence of Youth Speaks, a nonprofit presenter of Spoken Word performance, education, and youth development programs. They were all given the same information and amount of time to develop their programs.

Each team, comprised of 3-4 of the consulting firm frienemies, then presented their online strategy and home page redesigns for the first time at the conference. Take a few minutes to check out the slides to see what they came up with. You’ll see how some very creative firms go about a project like this, how they define online goals, set priorities and timelines, and use a blend of tactics.

I was tweeting during the session and these were my impressions as I listened:

• team 1 seemed a little too kitchen sink for me
• loving team 2’s real focus, storytelling, bringing in rural areas, building fan base for artists
• loving team 2’s thanks for attending email the day after event to get people to go online to share their impressions.
• team 3’s emphasis on artist’s own pages that they can really customize is nice touch.
• think I like team 3’s home page the best, but team 2’s strategy the best.

What made this session so good?

The Open Sharing. How often do we get to see four leading firms talk openly about how they would approach a real project, in quite a bit of detail? Uh, never. This one session saved Youth Speaks thousands and thousands of dollars, but it also let all of us learn about ways to approach these kinds of projects too. I admit that I feared that the firms wouldn’t want to give too much away and the proposals would be lightweight, but instead they were really packed with substance. Kudos to the four firms for really sharing their best ideas!

The Collaborative Spirit. This could have easily been set up as a firm-against-firm competition. But by blending the teams, it removed the real-world winners and losers element, and made it much more fun and less pressure-filled (at least it felt that way as someone in the audience - not sure how it felt to be on a team!)

No Right Answer. While there was certainly overlap between the three approaches, this session proves that there is no one right way to do online marketing - so don’t believe anyone who tries to convince you otherwise. Yes, when in doubt, follow the conventional wisdom or best practices, but don’t be afraid to try something new or to put your own twist on it. Although the intention was for the audience to vote on the winner, people were apparently having trouble getting a signal in the Hilton basement, so they did a “Make Noise” vote instead and called it a tie. More proof that there is no “right way.”

I would love to see more collaborative makeovers like this in the nonprofit marketing world. It doesn’t have to take on the whole Iron Chef theme. You may recall that Britt Bravo asked Nancy Schwartz, Katya Andresen, Nedra Weinreich, and me to review the Social Actions home page back in October. Here’s what we all said.

That wasn’t structured as a competition, but the outcome was similar - lots of concrete ideas that a real nonprofit can sort through and use, while also letting others learn from the analysis and strategies as well.

By the way, it was fabulous hanging out with Nancy, Katya, and Britt at the conference. (Photo of Britt and me by Nancy Schwartz. Photo of Nancy, Katya, and me by Nice Waiter at Foreign Cinema).

I’m already mulling over ways to pull them into some kind of Iron Chef / Extreme Makeover Something or Another for next year’s conference (Mark your calendars for NTC 2010 in Atlanta, April 8-10). Your ideas for a session? Or something we could do sooner online? Leave a comment.

P.S. Webinar Reminders: Successful Nonprofit Websites: Making Your Site Work for You this Wednesday, May 6 and Getting Your Nonprofit Started with Social Media on Tuesday, May 12.

Tags: 09NTC
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When Trying to Fundraise from Friends of Friends is a Complete Waste of Time

When we talk about fundraising through social media (and we had many of these conversations at 09NTC this week), the discussion always turns to how we should go about converting into long-term donors those friends of friends  -  people who gave to the cause because a friend of theirs and an existing supporter of ours (let’s call her the “Original Fan”) asked them to.

The standard advice is to come up with a cultivation campaign that introduces these new people to the organization over time and encourages them to become involved as a volunteer or donor on their own, directly with the nonprofit.

The problem is that this treats the Original Fan, whom we sometimes call the evangelist or über-friend, like some kind of inconvenient or spent middle man. For many nonprofits, the Original Fan is anything but a middle man; instead he or she is more like a gatekeeper or nightclub bouncer. It’s only through the Original Fan that the nonprofit will have access to those people and their wallets.

Most national organizations with widely understood or broadly supported missions should probably go ahead and try to establish direct relationships with all of those friends of friends. But nonprofits with specific geographic limitations or niche missions (e.g., diseases that affect relatively few people) should move forward much more carefully and deliberately, checking to see just how likely it is that the friends of friends will actually convert into long-term, direct donors.

For example, I recently donated to the Community Food Bank of New Jersey,  because my friend Nancy Schwartz asked me to as part of her birthday celebration.  While I certainly support the mission of food banks in general, I live in North Carolina. Nancy is the sole reason that I donated to this food bank in New Jersey. No matter how many newsletters or appeal letters the Community Food Bank of New Jersey might send me in the future, it is extremely unlikely that I will ever give them another dime.

Unless, of course, Nancy - the Original Fan - asks me to.

That’s why when the executive director of Positive Wellness Alliance (PWA)- the beneficiary of my own birthday fundraiser and also a very locally based organization - asked whether she should add the names of my donating friends to her prospect database, I told her no. (I serve on the board, so that’s why I was asked. I doubt few Original Fans are consulted at all - which may be part of the problem.)

Instead, I asked her to send a thank-you note directly to my donating friends and invite them to sign-up for PWA’s e-newsletter, should they want to.  I’ve asked her not to message these people again otherwise. Why?

Because as the Original Fan, I know these people are giving because of me, and because I asked, not really because of the cause. While I’m sure that everyone who donated to PWA supports the mission, just as I support food banks, nearly all of the people who donated lived outside the geographic service area, and I believe it’s extremely unlikely that they would give again on their own.

Unless, of course, I - the Original Fan - asked them to.

I hope it is clear by now where I am going with this. While your nonprofit should definitely spend some time coming up with cultivation strategies for friends of friends, it is equally important (and more important for local or niche organizations) to develop strategies to keep your Original Fans fully engaged and willing to fundraise again and again for you.

The food bank and PWA don’t need strategies to reach Nancy’s friends and my friends; they need strategies to keep Nancy and me and all of the Original Fans happy with the organization and excited about its work so that we will continue to tap our networks on their behalf. It’s just not worth twisting ourselves in all different directions trying to convert these people into direct donors when it’s both easier and more productive to more fully engage the Original Fan.

Does your org have strategies of either kind — for friends of friends or for the Original Fans? Where do you think nonprofits should put the most priority? Leave a comment and let’s talk about it.

Tags: 09NTC
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See What Your E-Newsletter Looks Like in Different Email Programs

“Oh, no! That’s what our newsletter looks like to a third of the people on our mailing list?!?” Don’t be her. Preview your e-newsletter in different email programs.

Those new to the world of e-newsletter publishing are often surprised to learn that their email newsletters can look quite different to someone who is using Outlook versus someone using  Gmail or Thunderbird, not to mention what it looks like on a smartphone. That’s because email programs (called email clients) process HTML in different ways.

The only way to be sure that your email newsletter template is working well in all the major clients is to actually view it in all of the different programs.

While some email newsletter service providers make this easier than others, it’s not a standard service. But two companies do offer testing programs that will deliver screen shots of your newsletter in various email programs at reasonable prices, even if you don’t use them to send out your newsletter: Mail Chimp’s Inbox Inspector, powered by ReturnPath, (sign up for a free account, then buy three tests for $29) and Campaign Monitor’s Design and Spam Test (sign up for a free account, then pay $5 per test).

It’s well worth paying for the test services every now and then, especially when you make changes to your layout.

If you simply can’t pay, you can do it yourself, but the hassle factor is high. Start by getting free accounts at services like Gmail and Yahoo and installing multiple email programs on your computer (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird). Beg friends with various ISPs (e.g. AOL, Roadrunner, Comcast) to do screen captures for you. Then run your own tests.

The goal isn’t necessarily to make your newsletter look exactly the same in every program. It’s to make sure that your newsletter is readable in every program and that there aren’t any wacky design shifts that are so distracting that the reader instantly hits delete.

I tweaked my Nonprofit Marketing Tips newsletter this week (go here to sign up, in the left sidebar, under the blue bar) and ran it through both services this morning. Here’s what I found.

MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector

To Run the Test: Set up a free account. Go to Create a Campaign > Inbox Inspector Test.  You’ll copy and paste your HTML, and add some other campaign details. Then you’ll pay $29 for 3 tests (nonprofits may get a better deal - I don’t know.). Within one minute, the results started to come in, but they changed after a few minutes, so I’d give it at least 15 minutes before even looking at it.

Campaign Monitor’s Design and Spam Test

To Run the Test: Set up a free account. This email service specializes in serving designers who manage e-newsletters for multiple clients. Just pretend you are your own client. Click on the client name, then create a new campaign (you have to have the campaign ready to go before clicking on the “Run a Design and Spam Test” button). Instead of cutting and pasting your HTML, you have to upload the HTML file. When I got to the section about the mailing list, I stopped and clicked on Design and Spam Testing, and it asked for a $5 payment. Speed was about the same - some results quickly, but not worth looking at until about 15 minutes later.

If you are using another email newsletter provider rather than creating your own HTML, simply login to your account, open a newsletter, go the HTML tab and copy the code. Paste it into a plain text program like Notepad. Then you can copy/paste into these services.

The Results and Pros/Cons of Each System

Plain Text Versions: Both systems convert your HTML to plain text versions for you, although Campaign Monitor’s looked much cleaner than MailChimp’s. Campaign Monitor also showed me the recommended line length on the plain text message, which is nice, so you can add hard-returns if you want.

Spam Filter: My newsletter passed all of the Spam Filter tests in both systems,  although there were some non-lethal warnings. For example, apparently the McAfee Security Center spam filter considers these words somewhat spammish: source, way, focus, print, pass, accounts, really, others. It would be crazy to worry about such common words, so I’m not going to. Campaign Monitor said McAfee identified 25 words like this as warnings, where MailChimp said McAfee found 30 words. I guess they must be using different versions of McAfee in their testing.

MailChimp tested against eight different spam filters. Campaign Monitor tested against the same ones, plus the Norton 2008 spam filter, but after several hours, the Norton results aren’t available, so that’s a wash.

Content Assessment

MailChimp analyzes your HTML for you and suggests code fixes. I ran the “clean up HMTL” tool in Dreamweaver before running the tests, but MailChimp still found a few code errors. Fortunately nothing serious — just leaving the # sign off of some of the color codes. My heart did skip a beat when it said it found 47 content errors, however. Turns out they were all spelling errors, which weren’t really mistakes (it didn’t like my name, the way I hyphenated All-Acess Pass, etc.). Campaign Monitor doesn’t offer this service.

Email Client Screen Shots

This is what I really cared about.

MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector

Campaign Monitor’s Design and Spam Test

After about an hour, only half of the screen shots were back in both services, but by that point, they both produced some of the biggies, like Outlook, Gmail, Comcast, and AOL. I had simplified my design quite a bit, although I still use a table with two columns, so I wanted to make sure the text wasn’t flowing or overlapping in any strange ways. Fortunately, everything looked reasonably good across the various platforms, although neither one was able to come up with a screen shot from Yahoo! Mail today.

The screenshots did remind me to set all image borders to zero so a blue box doesn’t appear around them when a link is attached. The blue blox showed up in AOL and Comcast, but not Gmail and Earthlink. I’d rather not have it anywhere, so it’s worth adding the border setting in.

Overall, I like Campaign Monitor’s screen shots better. They let you toggle images on and off when those email clients offer that option to readers, so you get a clear picture of exactly what people are seeing. MailChimp lets you see the same thing, but in a less convenient way - you have to open the preview of images on and the preview of images off. Campaign Monitor also groups the screen shots by web-based email clients, desktop email clients, and mobile clients, which I found much easier to scan, where MailChimp groups them all together.  MailChimp does show several clients used in Europe, if that matters to you, that Campaign Monitor doesn’t.

What’s Missing

It would be really nice if these services included screen shots of what your email looks like in different web-based email programs in different web browsers. That’s where you can see some real differences.

Look at the these three screen captures of my newsletter in my Gmail inbox viewed in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome. Though I prefer Firefox as a user, my newsletter looks the worst in this browser. The text at the top is wrapping oddly so that my name and organization are below the logo instead of beside it like in the others. Firefox and Chrome both remove padding within the table, so the columns butt up against each other, where Explorer keeps the nice white space. Chrome doesn’t include the ALT text on the images in the sidebar, so those are just blank boxes, while the others give you some of the text.

None of these differences are earth-shattering for this particular newsletter, but they could make a real difference depending on your layout and how important your pictures are.

In Mozilla Firefox 3.0.5

In Windows Internet Explorer 7

In Google Chrome 1.0.154.36

My Bottom-Line Recommendation

I prefer Campaign Monitor’s service, and it’s the more affordable option too (always a nice result!). If you really want that extra code check or send lots of email to Europe, then I’d take another look at MailChimp. In addition, be sure to preview the HTML file in different web browsers to make sure there aren’t any differences you can’t tolerate. If you pasted your code into Notepad, just open the browser and go to File, then Open to view your HTML - it doesn’t need to be online to be previewed.

P.S. Get more email newsletter tips during tomorrow’s webinar on E-Newsletter Essentials (1/7/09).

Tags: Campaign Monitor, email preview, MailChimp, nptech, spam test
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Are You Listening to the Buzz About You? Learn How

Free webinar on social media listening, Thursday, November 13. Register now.

I’m offering a free webinar next week for fans of this blog:

What’s the Buzz? Find Out Who’s Talking about Your Org and Issues Online

Thursday, November 13, 2008
12:00 - 12:30 PM Eastern (9:00 a.m. Pacific)

Registration required, but it’s free!

If a blogger raved about how great your organization is (or ranted about something you did wrong), would you know about it? Who’s starting conversations online about the causes you care about and who’s talking back?

During this free 1/2 hour webinar, Lindy Dreyer (SocialFish.org) and I will show you how to use social media tools to listen to conversations taking place online about your organization and the issues you care about — and to keep track of the online movers and shakers in your field.

You’ll learn why you should be listening to online conversations and how you can use what you hear to improve your nonprofit’s programs and marketing. We’ll also walk you through how to set up several easy, free listening tools, step by step.

Register Now to Reserve Your Spot!

P.S. Weekly Webinar Series fans and All-Access Pass Holders take note: We will be using GoToWebinar for this event, not ReadyTalk like usual, so be sure to run the set-up test after you register so you’ll be all ready to go next week. Also, you can listen to the audio through your computer speakers or via the phone (your choice), but the phone option will be a toll call.

More Goodies: Get Kivi's Nonprofit Marketing Tips E-Newsletter (2-3 times per month)

What I Learned about Nonprofits at the NC Conference

I was at the annual conference of the North Carolina Center for Nonprofits late last week. Here are a few things I learned there.

1. Nonprofits are very excited about Web 2.0, but also completely freaked out by the idea of people saying bad things about them online.

I tweeted (used Twitter) from the conference, along with a handful of other people. Check out our coverage of the conference. Several people who had never heard of Twitter were fascinated by the idea, but also alarmed at the prospect that someone might actually tweet that a speaker was boring. While they know that everyone would say the same thing to each other in person, or in private text messages or email later, or in the conference evaluation survey, the thought of it going out live in real time in a more public forum really bothered several people.

I heard a similar fear about blogging. The questions were not about how best to use the tool to market a nonprofit’s activities or mission (which is what I’ll be talking about during next week’s webinar on nonprofit blogging), but more like “What if someone says something really awful about us in the comments?” and “What if someone puts something mean about our blog on their own blog?”

2. Nonprofits are very concerned about copyright and privacy issues.

Several speakers suggested using Flickr for group photo sharing and to easily integrate rotating photography into a nonprofit website. In just about every case, again, the first question was not about how to use the tool most effectively, but rather “Won’t we need model releases from everyone in every photo?” and “Won’t people steal our photos?”

3. Nonprofits find the array of Web 2.0 options overwhelming - before they’ve even tried to use them.

Even though people were genuinely excited about the potential they saw for using the tools in their own organizations, especially after seeing some great examples of what others were doing from Katya Andresen, Angela Connor and John Kenyon, that excitement quickly turned into anxiety about trying to figure out what would work best for their particular situations.

What this tells me is that it isn’t enough for trainers like me to talk about the benefits and how-to’s of Web 2.0; we also need to address the very practical and real fears that come with this major shift in how nonprofits relate to their supporters online.

And here is something I was reminded about . . . It is SO GREAT to meet people face-to-face who you have only known online previously, and to catch up with great friends you don’t get to see often enough. Two cases in point:

- Meeting Leandra Ganko and Elizabeth Turnbull in person

Leandra, a web designer, connected with me through a mutual contact on LinkedIn several months ago and Elizabeth, a fundraising specialist, has been reading my blog for awhile. They have worked on nonprofit projects together here in North Carolina and I was on their “must meet at the conference” list. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know them both in person and I hope I can find a project for the three of us to work on together in the coming year.

- Catching up Katya Andresen and Claire Meyerhoff

Katya is not only one of my favorite bloggers and an inspiration to all of us in nonprofit marketing, but she’s also a great friend. And even though media maven Claire Meyerhoff lives in NC and we email constantly, I don’t get to see her in person nearly enough either. Here we are getting ready to watch the presidential debate together the night before the conference got started.

While I’m certainly a huge advocate of online training, by all means, get to a conference when you can. There’s nothing like spending time with people face to face!

More Goodies: Get Kivi's Nonprofit Marketing Tips E-Newsletter (2-3 times per month)

Make Your Website About Visitors, Not About You

The biggest mistake that a nonprofit can make with its website is to use it as an old-fashioned brochure, where you immediately hit the visitor with your long, jargon-filled mission statement, right at the top or smack in the middle of the home page, followed by bulleted lists of “projects” or “services.”

Why is this so bad? Because it’s all about the organization (and usually the most boring parts at that) and it shows little interest in what your website visitors really care about.

But isn’t our website supposed to be about us, you ask?

Yes and no. Yes, it’s about you and what you do, but organized in a way that’s easy and intuitive for your site visitor. What they want is more important than what you think they should be interested in.

Two Easy Ways to Organize Your Site for Your Visitors

Let me show you what I mean. There are two easy ways to organize your website so it is more audience-focused.

The first is to divide sections according to who the visitors are. The home page of KidsHealth.org is a splash page with links to sites for parents, kids and teens. Each group is going to respond best to information presented in ways that speak to their age groups and specific needs and questions. Ultimately the facts may be the same on each mini-site, but the language and presentation are totally different depending on the audience.

The second way, and the one I usually prefer, is to organize your website around (1) the answers to the top questions people are most likely to have and (2) the actions they want to be able to take on your website. What three main questions would a potential website visitor have and what three things would they like to be able to do on your site? Figure that out and organize your site accordingly.

The New York City Meals of Wheels program, for example, has three tabs right across the top: Get Meals, Volunteer and Support Us. That about sums it up, doesn’t it? The overwhelming majority of people who come to a Meals on Wheels website will want to find out how to get meals delivered or how to volunteer to deliver them, and “support us” is thrown in for good measure. The left side menu includes additional information, but those three tabs right at the top stand out, and show me that they know exactly why people are coming to their website.

Learn more about nonprofit websites during these upcoming webinars: July 30 - Attracting More Website Visitors: Traffic-Building Tips for Nonprofits | August 14 - Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email | August 28 - Online Marketing Basics for Nonprofits: From Email to Social Media

Tags: audience-focused
More Goodies: Get Kivi's Nonprofit Marketing Tips E-Newsletter (2-3 times per month)

Website Tune-Up: Get Multiple Domain Names

I’m presenting “Must-Have Features for Nonprofit Websites” as a webinar on this Wednesday, June 25, from 2:00 - 3:00 p.m. ET, and the first must-have on my list is a clear domain name and multiple variations on it. Not multiple websites. Just one of those will do. What you need is multiple domains that all point to your main website. It’s like having more than one door into your house. In your domain registrar account, you simply forward all of your secondary domain names using a 301 permanent redirect to your main domain that holds all of your website content.

Why is this so important? Because when people guess what your website is or try to dredge it up from their memories, if they get close, wouldn’t it be nice if they went straight to your website instead of getting an error page or someone else’s site?

And what about those fingers on auto-pilot that type .com instead of .org but otherwise get your domain name right? Again, wouldn’t be nice if they got to your site anyway?

Multiple domain names not only help visitors who don’t have it quite right; they also help you protect your brand. If you build a great .org site, you don’t want to give up traffic or the goodwill you’ve created to someone who uses your name as a .com site.

Get the .com, .org. and .net versions

Here’s what you should do. First, if they are still available, buy the .org, .com, and .net versions of your main domain name at GoDaddy or your favorite registrar.  I’m working with one nonprofit who was using a .com domain name. The first thing I did, before even talking about their design or content, was to have them buy the .org and .net versions, which (luckily) were still available.

In theory, .com is for businesses (commercial), .org is for organizations, and .net is for networks. But unlike .mil (military) and .gov (government) which are reserved for those institutions, .com, .org. and .net can be purchased and used by anyone. Go get them. There’s nothing stopping you except the price, which is usually less than $10/year.

Get the reasonable guesses and typos

Next, think of reasonable variations that a site visitor might type into a web browser. The Nature Conservancy uses the very short and memorable nature.org as its main domain. But natureconservancy.org and thenatureconservancy.org will take you to the same place. Those domains are forwarded automatically to nature.org.

If you think your site visitors might be prone to replacing a word in your domain name with another, you should also consider purchasing those variations.  When I started Nonprofit Marketing Guide, I thought to myself, “OK, if someone heard about a site like this, but couldn’t quite recall the name correctly, what guesses might they have?” As a result, I also purchased the domains for “Nonprofit PR Guide” and “Nonprofit Communications Guide.” Those all forward to NonprofitMarketingGuide.com.

If your website address includes a commonly misspelled word or name (e.g. Cathy or Kathy?), you should also consider buying those variations.

What do you do if the domain names aren’t available?

Many registrars offer backordering services. For a fee, you can backorder the domain names, and if the current owner fails to renew the domain on time, your registrar will try to snap it up for you.

For example, when I started NonprofitAnnualReports.net in January 2004, the .org and .com versions were already gone. As I recall, one was a consulting firm and the other was an ad site. Using backordering, I obtained the .org site at the end of last year and the .com earlier this year. Both are now forwarded to the original .net domain where the site is hosted. I also purchased nonprofitannualreport.com, .org, and .net (without the s on reports), since that seems like an reasonable typo.

Obviously, you can take all of these tips to the extreme, and end up spending a fortune. You don’t need to go overboard with it.  Brainstorm the most obvious choices and then get as many as you can reasonably afford.  If you can only afford a handful, I say get at least the .org, .com, and .net of your main domain name.

Tags: domain, domain name, domain registrar, nonprofit website, registering domains
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