Ten digital marketing tips for charities

With increased pressure on budgets and tough competition for donations, charities must treat their website as their most valuable asset: a money-making tool that's quick to update and easy to access.

"We've seen the technology behind the site evolve and improve as our fundraisers have found ever more creative ways of using it," says Joanne Warner, senior digital manager, Cancer Research UK (Civil Society, 2012).

Make your website work for you and your donors

1. Make your website transparent.
Encourage your donors to return by uploading regular news stories, pictures and video content evidencing how their donation is being used and the impact it is making.

2. Maintain a user-friendly website.
Ensure your message is accessible to all by designing a website that is easy to navigate, has links that are easy to identify and branded with easy-to-read text, and has audio versions of every page.

3. Customise your site.
Design web pages that are consistent with your brand guidelines. See how the repetition of layout and key colours on the British Red Cross website creates both impact and a simple to use website.

4. Keep in touch.
Encourage people to sign up to a newsletter about your charity’s activities and manage this data using an integrated customer relationship management system. This will help you deliver targeted marketing activities to encourage future donations.

5. Promote donations at every opportunity.
Encourage all your website visitors to give money by making it easy and positioning your donate button, your most important asset, in a prominent position across the site.

6. Ensure your site is always available to take donations.
Even during your busiest campaigns make sure no opportunity to collect donations is lost. Choose a reliable hosting provider that offers comprehensive support and service level agreements.

7. Offer a secure donation system.
Reassure your donors that online transactions through your website are secure. Victim Support stores online data in Eduserv’s highly secure UK data centre.

8. Take advantage of user personalisation.
Use a content management system that detects individual users and enables you to target them with specific messages and content based on their previous visits or geographical location.

9. Connect with visitors on-the-go.
Increase your target audience by automatically detecting whether your visitor is using a mobile device and serving mobile-optimised content.

10. Monitor visitor activity.
Use digital marketing tools to measure traffic and visitor interaction. This will give you an insight into the performance of your campaign and effectively tailor future engagement with visitors.

Eduserv is a not-for-profit organisation that specialises in providing web development and hosting services to charities and the public sector. 

We work with organisations such as the British Red Cross and Victim Support to develop, maintain and host their websites to help them improve online services.