I know several organisations that have won a computer in previous years – and I helped a couple of them to make successful applications.

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.

The first Nominet Foundation funded projects

The British Computer Association of the Blind (BCAB) will fund a remote access support project that will allow visually impaired people access to computers and the Internet and provide training on how best to use the technology.

Funding will support the Internet Society’s Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Fellowship and Internet Governance Forum Ambassadors programmes which aim to ensure the continued development and deployment of the Internet.

Childnet will use the funding to establish and run its Youth Internet Governance Forum Project, which aims to give young people the opportunity to voice their opinions on the four main themes of the IGF; openness, access, security and diversity.

Cambridge Global Grid for Learning will enhance its 4C project (Content, Connectivity, Collaboration and Capacity), which provides a free suite of online learning and teaching applications and content for learners and educators in educational institutions worldwide.

Cambridgeshire Library Learning Services will support staff working on its Community Access Points project, providing communities in isolated rural locations and areas of high social deprivation with free access to online education and support.

YouthNet will be running a major research project which will underpin a campaign to raise awareness of digital usage among young people.

The Foundation began accepting funding applications only fairly recently. Read more about the Nominet Foundation’s initial round of grants or more information about their funding criteria.

• The organisation’s mission, goals, objectives, and work.
• How it uses donations and contributions.

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.

Where’s that donations button?

Sadly, on 17% of the sites, users couldn’t even find where to make a donation. That points to a big problem with the navigation and arrangement of content on the website.

The good news is that those people who decided to make a donation and actually located the right page, found the donation process to be simple and straightforward because these transactions systems are usually well-designed.

Take a look at your own nonprofit’s website

1. check whether it provides information about your mission and how you use donations;
2. put a link to your donations facility in a prominent position on every page;
3. read more about the report on Donation Usability.

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.

The golf event page provides links to only two locations: a rollover button and the words “Register Now” in large text, both link to the same PDF brochure; and in the footer is a link to the Baptcare home page. No distractions, just information.

So that was the landing page set up, but how did I make sure that it actually gets landed on? Using our Google Grant I set up multiple free adverts, like the one below, that link to the landing page.

Plus, on the home page of the Baptcare website is a big button that links to the landing page. If anyone reads about the golf day in our newsletter, then visits the website to find out more, they can’t miss it!