#ngo software

With its rising popularity, simple functioning, and inherent characteristic of bringing people together, crowdfunding is a 'trend' that NGOs simply cannot ignore. But NGOs often wonder how they can maximize their funds and what is the best (and easiest) way to expand their scope while working with crowdfunding. The answer to both those questions is #GivingTuesday.

Celebrated on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving (in the U.S), #GivingTuesday was started in 2012 as a way to kick-start the giving season that is Christmas. On #GivingTuesday, NGOs, influencers, and donors come together to give to the causes they care about. Now, even if you don't team up with big names in the industry or garner millions of followers, #GivingTuesday can still be highly beneficial to your organization.

Here are 5 ways to use crowdfunding to rally your #GivingTuesday supporters.

Collaborate with Other Organizations

Collaborations are highly advantageous to NGOs, especially when it comes to raising money through crowdfunding. This is because, when two organizations collaborate, two different communities come together to support the cause, each bringing their own followers with them. We have a whole blog [1] where we talk about how online collaborations are useful to NGOs that you can read to understand this point a little better.

Amazing Resources: https://bit.ly/2RQHfhV

Build Your Campaign Around Donor Engagement

The best way to get people to donate to your cause is by making them feel involved in the campaign. So, your campaign will yield better results if you design it around donor engagement. You can do this by holding mini-competitions/contests, conducting shoutouts and giveaways, or featuring some of them in your campaign.

Prioritize Donor Relationships

Make your donors the priority in your campaign. Work on building long-term relationships with them instead of sending them away with one-off gifts. This way, the donors will stay with you through your whole journey instead of just this campaign. Not just that, but the donors will want to give more towards the cause and they will be encouraged to spread the word around to get even more supporters.

Use a Giving Thermometer

A 'giving thermometer' allows you and your supporters see physical proof of the progress you've made towards your goal (on a side-note, have a set goal and let your supporters know about it). More importantly, these thermometers hold you accountable for filling them up. Another reason to use a fundraising thermometer in your campaign is that it provides your campaign with an aesthetic touch.

Encourage Donors to Create Their Own Campaigns

As mentioned earlier, building your campaign around donor engagement yields better results, this result increases tenfold when you encourage them to create their own campaigns. For example, you could encourage your donors to use their birthday or anniversary as an excuse to create a crowdfunding page for your cause and gather up their friends and family to donate to it.

So, you've made your website, it's been up for a few months, it looks exactly like you wanted it to look like but... it's not giving you the results you had hoped for. What now? Well, you have to start by figuring out where exactly the problem lies. The website not working is just a symptom that says 'something is wrong', once you figure out what that 'something' is, you can either rectify it or find a way around it when you rebuild your website.

No Sitemap

If you've designed your website yourself or have a hand in it, you already know what a Sitemap is, if not, it basically means exactly what it sounds like, a map for your website. This map helps you, your visitors, and even crawlers figure out what is where on your website. Which means that without the Sitemap, people will be lost, which leads to people leaving your site very quickly. So if a high bounce rate is what you're dealing with, maybe look into developing a Sitemap.

Complicated/confusing sitemap

Probably the only thing worse than having no Sitemap is having a complex Sitemap. Having no sitemap will simply make them go away for the moment, maybe they'll come back hoping for different outcomes. But with a confusing Sitemap leads to being lost, not finding pages they want, ending up on pages that hold no relevance to them, which leads to them being frustrated; frustrated people don't come back, in fact, they go out of their way to avoid the things that frustrate them, which, in this case, would be your website.

Too wordy

The real tricky part of writing content for websites is to convey all of the brand's personality, the company's mission and vision, and the goals of the person(s) behind the company as concisely and possible. If you get this balance of words wrong, it might act as a contributing factor to what drives your visitors away. The best way to avoid this roadblock is to cut down on literally any word that doesn't contribute towards conveying your message, hold back on using too many descriptive words and keep the copy as minimal as possible.

Amazing Resources: https://bit.ly/2RQHfhV

Too fancy

You want your website to look sophisticated, obviously. But you need to understand that there is a (really, really) fine line between sophisticated and gaudy. No one likes to go blind with flashy colours or have to squint really hard just to read the menu. Basically, don't go overboard with fancy layouts if you don't want to lose visitors.

Complicated Layout

It's one thing to have a fancy layout, but it's a whole different ball game when you have a complicated one. This is a lot harder to spot since it's good-looking exterior usually hides the problems your visitors could be facing. If you focus too much on how your website looks, you might overlook its functionality. A hard to find search box, a misplaced or non-existent donatedbutton, no clear call-to-action button, too many CTA buttons, or links that don't work all could be reasons why your site isn't working as well as you want it to. So to weed out any such problems, you should open your site and go through it from a visitors' perspective or have someone do it for you.

Not mobile-friendly

Did you know that mobile visitors are roughly 2 times desktop audiences in the aggregate? And the number just keeps growing. So, if your visitor count is low and your desktop website doesn't seem to be the problem, you should look into its mobile version. Look for inconsistencies between the mobile version and desktop version like missing or misplaced buttons, broken links, disproportionate image or text sizes, etc.