Six Ways Your NGO Site Can Increase Membership and Donations

Cross-posted with permission from Promet Source

If you're looking to create great NGO and association sites using Drupal, below are six ways your NGO can increase membership and donations.

1) Develop a Community!

Drupal has a lot of exciting ways (including the Organic Groups module) for you to give members a social hub. Engage users with live social walls, user profiles, communication tools, user search functionality, event calendars, and more...Drupal lets you create your own social media site (if you will). A good Drupal development firm will be able to customize a user portal that fits with your mission.

Keep your member base engaged on your site so you can continually expose them to your mission, messaging and brand. If they convene elsewhere (e.g. Facebook) to socialize, you’re missing valuable promotion time.

2) Integrate with your CRM or AMS!

Member retention starts with tracking your members’ trends and activities. Whether it’s Blackbaud, iMIS, CiviCRM, SugarCRM, Salesforce, Oracle or something else, make sure it’s integrated with your site. Integration lets you say “Goodbye” to manually finding and entering contact data. When you are selecting your CRM or AMS, make sure it is easily integrated with your site. Ask about the API and ask your web development team if they have experience integrating with your CRM/ AMS.

Why integrate?

• Track your leads
• Track and manage your donation campaigns
• Gain insight into your members’ behavior
• Improve member communication and retention
• Analyze your donation flow

Pro Tip: Set up recurring payments/donations by integrating with Recurly. You'll save a lot of time and money!

3) Responsive Sites!

If you want to reach your member base everywhere, make sure your site is responsive. That is, your site can adjust between desktop, tablet and mobile.

According to a study by Pew Research, 55% of cell phone users say they use their mobile devices to browse the internet, exchange emails, or download apps. Make sure you are able to reach your member base 24/7, on any device. Non-responsive sites contribute to high bounce rates - if your leads and members leave, you risk missing member retention, donations and promotion opportunities. 

4) Speed Up Your Site: You have 3 seconds!

A recent study by KISSMetrics outlined how load speed affected the bottom line.

Some findings:

52% of users said load speed was an important factor in loyalty

40% of users will leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load

47% of consumers expect a page to load in only 2 seconds There are many factors in site speed.

To properly diagnose your slow site, you likely need a site audit to review your code, configurations and maintenance.

Before you deploy a new or updated site, make sure the site is tested for speed - and not just on the home page. Make sure every page can handle high traffic! Further, campaigns and seasons (especially December for NGOs) bring new visitors; ensure your site can handle that increase in volume. 

5) Content Marketing Automation!

Wouldn’t it be great if a non-member received content that promoted membership? And members could get quick access their benefits? And for users who haven’t donated to receive content that encourages them to give?

You can and should do that! Give users (both members and anonymous) the relevant content they need so you can drive memberships and donations. Create scenarios and rules so you can give the right content to the right people. Using Drupal and flags, you can tailor your users content to match their location, interests and other demographical information.

6) SEO-oh-oh!

Buying the right keywords is the first step in the ongoing process of Search Engine Optimization. Make sure you focus on the keywords your customer base actually uses. For example, are they looking up “meteorology” or “weather” or "temperature"? Often times, users look up much simpler terms than your in-house nomenclature. Keyword campaigns need to be continually refined - stay on top of the trends.

Create content and a lot of it! Keep your content current for Google algorithms (note: Google is becoming more advanced; bad content will no longer do). Use links in your content to other pages of your site! But, don’t just link to your company name. Add links to terms for what you want to be searched for! For example, we added links in this article for "site audits" and "testing" not just "development" (look! we snuck one in!) or "Promet". Further, distribute your content to third parties for the ever-essential backlinking. PRWeb is a great tool to publish press releases - make sure they are chock full of links to your site. Your partners and vendors may also be willing to publish your content on their sites.

If you’re using Drupal, the Metatag Module is a simple solution to internally streamline SEO. Use the meta tag description to provide a brief and concise summary of the page's content, preferably 150 characters or less. The description meta tag may be used by search engines to display a snippet about the page in search results. But, don’t worry about assigning keywords here; it’s not necessary.