iConcertina’s Charity Website Benchmark Report 2006 Released

Howard Lake | 5 July 2006 | Newswire

Very few charities have a blog, even though this would be an ideal way for these organisations to improve communications with their stakeholders. Blogs are easy to use, simple to manage and cheap to run, so it is surprising that they are not more popular within the charity sector.
In fact, we at iConcertina were so surprised at this revelation that our in-house discussion about charity blogs became a 3-month project. And one that has produced a fully-documented and publicly-available benchmark of the websites of the UK’s top 110 charities.
Our benchmark shows how well charities engage online with donors, volunteers and other stakeholders, and reveals whether the online medium adds value or insight to their proposition.
The fact that a charity has a website at all is a good start, but what value does it add to the organisation’s communications mix? To make our assessment, we used the following benchmark criteria:
· Usability – is the site easy to use?
· Accessibility – can everyone access the site?
· Communication – can users find what they need?
· Transparency – is the charity open with its information?
· Responsiveness – are donations, legacies and volunteers encouraged?
· Integration – does the site support, and work in harmony with, the charity’s off-site and off-line communications?
· Housekeeping – does the charity own its domain, and put search engine optimisation (SEO) into practice?
The results:
The results are most surprising – and disappointing. Relatively few charities rise to the challenge of being transparent, and accessibility and communication are sadly below average. Most charities are only average at usability.
The Benchmark also reveals:
There are no blogs. Even the few charities with a blog achieve this rating – their blogs were simply too hard to find.
Not a single site has full points for accessibility. No sites are error-free.
Only 50% of the sites provide a last updated” date. Users will not bother to return if they don’t think anything new has been added since their last visit.
25% of the home pages do not say what the charity does. The charities should not assume it is clear what they do.
And many other shocking revelations…
What to do next:
To find out how your organisation matches up to the charity benchmark, and to discover how we can help you score higher next time, email Mi******@ic*********.com now or call her on +44 (0)20 7269 7919.
 

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.