Ok, I’ll cut to the chase…..you don’t need a website – you need more than a website.
During our recent website reviews we reviewed many different types of websites. Some had been professionally developed, some were self developed by volunteers of the organization. And in this day and age of website builders such as Wix, and Squarespace, anyone can pretty much build a website.
But you don’t need a website. You need donations.
A website is a tool, like a telephone is a tool. It enables you to communicate. It enables you to receive messages, take donations, showcase the great work you do for the animals.
Simply building a website will not immediately result in getting donations. You need to have visitors to your website. There’s two ways to do this. Firstly you spend money and pay for traffic such as Facebook ads, or Google Ads. Secondly you share your content online to audiences that find it of value. Hopefully they’ll share it with their audiences, and heck it might even go viral. You have got social sharing enabled on your website haven’t you?
But who should you be targeting with paid traffic? Who is your ideal donor? Where do they hang out? How do you get in front of them?
Once you have traffic coming to your site, are you tracking where people are going on your website? Are they arriving and immediately leaving? Are they visiting particular content? Should that content be moved to your home page? What needs to be tweaked in order to ensure your visitors don’t leave too soon?
Do you have calls to actions on each and every page? What do you want the visitor to do after reading your About page? Is there a phone number to call or an opt-in to complete? If they do sign up to the opt-in, how do you manage that process? Do you send them 1 or 7 emails? What type of content do you send them?
So, in summary you don’t need a website. You need MORE than a website. Ideally you need a digital strategy. Most likely one of the components will be a website, along side traffic, social, SEO, optins and email marketing.
Talk to the team at Sanctuary Websites about your digital strategy and how your website fits into it. We’ll review any existing website you may have and look at your overall strategy. If you’re just starting out let’s talk strategy first!
