Nonprofit web design

Do you take online donations on your charity’s website? If not, why not?

PayPal is an online payments tool. It’s extremely popular with 160,000,000+ people signed up, and if you’re an eBay user you’ve probably used it. Did you know that you can use PayPal to put a donate button on your nonprofit organisation’s website? Transactions are safe and secure and all details are kept for your records. Donors can pay by PayPal or credit card. Of course PayPal takes a small percentage of each amount, they’re a business after all!

It’s a really simple solution but…  Read more »

A charity recently contacted me because through no fault of their own their website had vanished. Their calls and emails to the hosting company were simply being ignored and many weeks later they had received no explanation or resumption of service. These are the decisions we had to make quickly to get their website up-and-running again… Read more »

Do you run a church website? If so, take a look at this checklist of features that every church website needs. It’s good advice from the ChurchBrilliant blog.

What I found interesting was the emphasis on using websites to involve people in real world events. Apparently, surveys on many church websites have shown that as many as 60% of visitors are looking for information about events they can join in with. As the blog notes, that makes a church website an important advertising tool.

You’re not alone. If you’re responsible for your nonprofit’s website and you’d like to talk to someone about it there are places you can go for support and to share ideas.

The Charity Web Forum is a Yahoo group for the managers and designers of charity websites. There’s some good, frequent discussion and it’s well-worth signing up, reading other peoples’ messages and joining in the conversation.

The TechSoup website gives advice about technology to nonprofits: it publishes articles about web design as well as hosting discussions about web building.

The ICT Hub’s web design forum isn’t as busy as TechSoup’s but it’s still worth posting a message, especially if you’re in the UK.

There are also conferences and other events where you can meet other charity website owners. In the UK there are the ICT Hub’s conferences, in Australia check out the Making Links conference;  and in the US you’re spoilt for choice but see what NTEN have to offer.

Are you a web designer looking to do some pro-bono work? Or a non-profit organisation that needs help with web design? IT4Communities is a UK organisation that matches IT volunteers with the charities that need their skills. There are many charities looking for website work so here’s a snapshot of what’s currently available. Read more »

Is your charity’s website well-designed and does it perform as well as it should? Here are eight simple tests to help you find out. None of these tests require you to understand web design but you may need to go back to your web designer to resolve any problems that you find. First, let’s check your site’s code for errors.

Read more »

I’m at the Making Links conference in Sydney, Australia. It’s a forum for workers from non-profit organisations to discuss ICT.

Yesterday’s all-day workshop, by Laurel Papworth, was about social networking. Laurel’s a great trainer and it was an interesting session that covered so much I can’t do justice to it here.

What’s social networking? Well, it covers a wide variety of online tools and websites that enable people to make friends, find people with similar interests, socialise, form discussion groups and share video, photos and information. For example, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, blogs and even games such as World of Warcraft are all social networking tools. Read more »

I’m at the Making Links conference in Sydney, Australia. It’s a forum for workers from non-profit organisations to get together and share skills and information about IT, web development and using technology.

I’m about to give a short presentation on how nonprofits can use Google Custom Search Engines (CSE) to quickly build their own free tools based on Google’s extremely popular search engine. I’ve written about Google CSE before but I’d like to share the five examples I’ll be giving at the conference. Read more »