If you volunteer with a community group or charitable organisation in the UK, visit www.btcommunityconnections.com to apply for a laptop and contribution to a year’s free broadband connection. The closing date for Round One is 9 June 2009 for postal applications and 11 June for online submissions.
I know several organisations that have won a computer in previous years – and I helped a couple of them to make successful applications.
The Nominet Foundation is a charity that provides funding to innovative projects which strive to improve and encourage the safe use of the Internet for educational, inclusion and other charitable purposes. They give grants to organisations with innovative IT-related projects that can make a positive difference to people in the UK, developing countries and around the world.
Initial funding came from Nominet, which maintains the .uk register of domain names and is one of the world’s largest Internet registries.
On 29th April 2009 the Nominet Foundation announced the first projects to be funded. >> Read more…
Currently 10% of charities’ donations are collected online but recent research by Jakob Neilsen has found that if charities’ websites provided better information, they would get far more donations. The main problem is that non-profits fail to provide the information that people need to make a decision about donating their money. Specifically charities are not providing clear details of:
But these are the main factors on which users base their decision to donate. To quote Jakob,
Sadly, only 43% of the sites we studied answered the first question on their homepage. Further, only a ridiculously low 4% answered the second question on the homepage. Although organizations typically provided these answers somewhere within the site, users often had problems finding this crucial information. >> Read more…
An article, published recently on the Web Designer Depot website, offers 8 tips to design a charity website. Each tip is illustrated with a screenshot of good practice in action on a nonprofit’s website. The tips are mainly related to fundraising and donations but scroll down the page for some great examples of good charity web design. There’s some good advice here and some inspiring design.
On my last day as Baptcare’s website and Intranet editor, my final task was to create a landing page for their charity golf event.
Here’s the result, designed and coded with valid HTML within only a few hours. The design has simple, attractive typography using Baptcare’s corporate colours. However, this landing page looks nothing like the usual template used elsewhere on the Baptcare website, it’s a complete one-off. Baptcare’s usual template is too restrictive, not eye-catching enough to use as a landing page.
What is a landing page? Usually it’s defined as a page that visitors will arrive at directly via an advert or link on another website. A landing pages might not be linked to from an organisation’s own site at all, only from banners or adverts on external sites or from ads on postcards or other printed media. >> Read more…
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