An organisation called nfpSynergy does research into charities’ use of the Internet and publishes the findings in their annual Virtual Promise reports. These reports give a useful insight into the evolution of charity websites.
Five years ago, when nfpSynergy began their research, only 16% of the public said they had visited a charity’s website in the past six months. By February 2007 that figure had risen to 23%; and by October 2007 it was 30%. That’s very encouraging news for charities spending time and money on developing their websites. So what else does the report tell us about trends in charity websites?
Charities can be slow to adopt newer technologies. Currently only 16% of charities publish an RSS feed to enable visitors to subscribe to receive content; surprisingly only 15% have a blog. That’s not to say that charities are unaware of the benefits because when asked what else they planned to implement, podcasts and blogs were top of their wishlists with RSS not far behind. Older, reliable technologies remain popular: over half of the charities circulate an email newsletter; and chat and forums remain popular ways to build an online community.
Half of the charities surveyed accept donations online and many can take regular donations by direct debit. An encouraging number of charities intend to set up online donations within the next six months.
43% of charities have a budget for the website. A quarter don’t have a budget, and a quarter don’t know whether they have or not – and I suspect that means not!
Responsibility for editing the content is usually left to just one or two people. Only 23% of charities had three or more staff working on the website and only 15% let volunteers contribute. Content management systems (CMS) have made it possible to enable many more people than that to author, submit and edit web content. No techie skills are required so I’d hope to see more charities enabling more staff and volunteers to contribute to the site content in future. Only 41% of respondents said they use a CMS but I’d expect that figure to rise substantially over the next couple of years, especially as older websites get redesigned.
I’m impressed by the 4% of charities that said they update their website hourly: I just hope they’re not the same organisations that only let one (presumably very tired) person edit the site content.
NfpSynergy asked whether charities’ websites conform to accessibility standards – 32% said yes. That’s higher than I’d expect and I wonder if that’s accurate, has anyone seen any alternative figures?
There’s a lot to learn from the nfpSynergy report so please read it. But remember that statistics aren’t always reliable or meaningful out of context, especially when a relatively small number of organisations has been sampled and the respondents aren’t necessarily au fait with techie jargon. For example, according to the report, twice as many charities were using a CMS in 2004 than in 2006: experience tells me those figures should be the opposite way round.
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