Web socialite or stay-at-home hoarder?
Howard Lake | 9 May 2007 | Blogs
Is your charity out and about on the web – by which I mean joining in with other websites (information / charity portals, directories, enhanced Guidestar, eBay, MySpace, YouTube etc) and leaving its mark in a variety of relevant meeting points – or is it stuck at home hoarding its own possessions and in likely need of a de-clutter?
I have been struck in recent years by the amount of growth in the content and functionality of charities’ websites whilst underwhelmed by the relative movement of e-marketing.
Various Virtual Promise research reports into charities use of the Internet have born my observations out, and in VP 05 the charities surveyed had an average of 4 websites a-piece (compared to 2 in 04). The question wasn’t asked in 06.
A certain commercial fashion with micro-sites and splash pages and other one-time sites did pervade the charity sector, but the above figure counts for growth simply in their core year-round websites. That’s a lot to manage on the average staff levels and budgets of charity online departments?
I’m not disputing the role of some of those additional websites, after all I was a big culprit myself whilst at CAF. But I also tried to make sure and to push for CAF’s web presence and content to be disaggregated, rather than focused (egocentrically) on everyone finding their way to its own door.
There are all kinds of arguments to support this. The best are the financial and the behavioural. Financially, few charities will have the reach to build significant traffic direct to their own site, so that conversion ratios really deliver something that puts a big smile on their faces. So it’s advisable to piggy back the marketing reach of someone else, appropriately of course. And behaviourally, well few people really just have the habit of going out to one spot and never considering any other ways to spend their time. It’s not promiscuity, it’s variety, necessity and lifestyle. They have the need to be in many places at different times. So if you can catch them in more than one spot, you’ll likely have a bigger and more lasting impact, as well as more opportunities to say your piece.
So my advice is don’t hoard. Especially if you have something fantastic as an asset, whether in content or functionality. Get it plugged in to other sites. Do build the right collateral on your main web presence(s) – ensuring they form a cohesive whole and a clear overall identity – and then concentrate on taking its message out to those places where you think you may be heard. Be a web socialite, but make sure you have your cushions tidied for when you bring people home.
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.