Nonprofit web design

I recently announced that I’d been given a Google Grant to create free online ads to promote Greek Care. Two weeks later, are hordes of visitors pounding on the doors of this new nonprofit website? Er, no… not yet anyway.

That would an embarrassing end to that topic, if it weren’t for the succcess I’ve had with Baptcare‘s ad campaign, which recently doubled its site traffic. Why is that one nonprofit ad campaign works whilst another doesn’t? Here are some thoughts and ideas…

Doubled your stats you say?

Below are Baptcare’s web stats for the first 15 days of July 2008:

Visits: 1,229
Page views: 4,503

Compare those figures to the first 15 days of August 2008 (after the ad campaign went live):

Visits: 2,435
Page views: 9,184

To put these stats in context, we might have a 5% and 10% rise in stats from one month to the next, but until now, never 50%. What’s the reason for this? Maybe it’s…

Google’s helpful volunteers

A volunteer on Google’s staff regularly goes in to our AdWords account, sets up new adverts and tweaks them to make sure they’re performing well. That’s a great free service, really helpful and their edits can be effective. But it can also be disconcerting, especially when they rename your campaigns, capitalise every word and add exclamation marks to ads that you’ve honed to your own idea of perfection. I know I’m overly pedantic, I fuss about the grammar and punctuation and try to stick to Baptcare’s corporate identity, but Google’s volunteer must know more about what makes a good ad than I do, because their adverts are usually more effective.

Maybe Google’s staff choose to volunteer to support the nonprofits that most interest them, I don’t know quite how the system works but so far no volunteer has helped tweak the Greek Care ads. This may have been one factor in Baptcare’s online advertising success and Greek Care’s lack of it.

Start off by creating lots of ads

For Greek Care I started off with just a few ads and was disappointed by the poor response. Whereas, for Baptcare I quickly set up dozens of ads: some performed well, some didn’t, but at least I could then weed out the poor ads and concentrate on tweaking the click-through-rates of the good ones.

It’s the same story with keywords. Choose at least a dozen for each ad, then weed out the poor-performing keywords later. For an ad for Baptcare’s fostering programme, I initially chose about 20 keywords but when I checked the stats, only a few of those keywords (foster care, fostering, fostering children) were actually pulling in visitors, so I ditched the others.

Then keep weeding and tweaking

AdWords give you detailed stats that show which ads and keywords do and don’t work. Weed out the ones that aren’t getting clicked on. Now start fine-tuning your remaining ads.

Trying setting up several ad variations for an advert. Each version might have very different or just slightly different wording. Google will randomly show one of your ad variations and you can use the stats to find out which one was clicked on the most. This is a great way to test which kind of language works best. For example:

Foster a Child in Need
Temporary carers sought for kids
unable to live at home.

Become A Foster Carer
For Children Unable To Live At Home
Find Out More Through Baptcare. 

Advertise all your services

Don’t just advertise your organisation as a whole, or one or two services. Create ads for everything you do. The more your organisation does, the more you can advertise.

Greek Care is a small, niche website dealing with Greek culture and aged care, whereas Baptcare is a huge nonprofit with services that include residential and community aged care, disability, children and families, asylum seeker accommodation, research and many other areas of work.

It was so easy to go through Baptcare’s website and pick a dozen separate services to advertise, each with a very different potential clientele and very different keyword choices. With the Greek Care website there was less to work with and I will have to try to be more creative.

Link ads to specific pages on your website

Don’t set up dozens of ads that all link back to your home page. If your ad is related to your latest donations appeal, link directly to the landing page for that appeal. The Baptcare website has had big increases in visits to our fostering, residential aged care and vacancies sections because our ads link to their landing pages.

Keep at it

If your ad campaign doesn’t initially do all you’d hoped it would, stick with it. Try different keywords, try ad variations, create a lot of new ads. Keep tweaking, keep experimenting. Having got one online ad campaign off to a successful start, I’m going to go back to the Greek Care campaign and try again. If I’m successful I’ll crow about it in my next post; if not, I might go a bit quiet on the subject for a while!

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