Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

You’ve probably realized that having a “Donate” button on your website is not enough to improve your online fundraising. But do you know what else you need on your site to encourage donations?

You only have 10 seconds to prove yourself. According to Nielsen Online, the average website visitor spends less than 60 seconds on a web page. As if that wasn’t enough, you want to do even more – convert the visitors to donors. Can you start that process in 10 seconds?

Join Glennette Clark, CITI Online Strategies Consultant, for a webinar on Optimizing Your Website for Donations, Wednesday, August 19th from 1 PM to 2 PM, in partnership with Kivi Leroux Miller and Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com.

Donors are looking for specific information to help them make the decision about whether or not to give to your organization or another.  Recently, two studies on nonprofit websites independently concluded that technology is not the problem when it comes to increasing donations online.  Instead, web visitors cited that nonprofits are not providing the information they need to make donation decisions.

Whether you are a novice or pro, this webinar is for you if you want to strengthen your online fundraising efforts by giving donors the information they want.

During this webinar, you will learn:

• What donors want to see
• What donors want to read
• How to avoid the donation killers
• How to optimize your website for donors
• How to use social media to your advantage

Register and get full details here!

Managing 3rd-party software implementations, including a new Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) system, fundraising system, member management system, or any software that your organization is paying big dollars to a vendor for, is an opportunity for creative tension and creative solutions. You’ll find that the vendor’s implementation schedule provides the activities that they as a vendor need done for the product to be implemented. However, from your organization’s perspective, the system is part of an overall new way of operating as an organization, including redesigning your business processes and changing the way people work for the desired outcomes your organization is expecting for investing in such systems.

You have probably heard the 80/20 rule on these projects:  80% of a project’s success will depend on how effectively staff and key stakeholders adopt the new systems and processes, and 20% depends on the actually technology. Intentional approaches to planning and change-for people and processes-are crucial to the success of any technology project.

Such projects are also an opportunity for organizational development. Changes in behavior, which means changes in the way people think, are required because the way people work is going to change (regardless of how much folks like the change or not). There are a host of implementation activities to plan for and engage people in, including data conversion and validation, integration with other systems, case scenarios, testing (with gumption and friendly accountability), training that incorporates the new system and new processes, and preparing for the transition.

During transition, people might doubt the usefulness of process changes in conjunction with the new system, and there may be some confusion and a tendency to hold on to the former ways of thinking and doing things – old spreadsheets, the previous database, etc. During those first few days (and weeks) of using the new system, help ease the transition by talking about the way things were before, including inefficiencies and stress points, and by emphasizing the benefits of the new processes and systems.

Most importantly, persevere with moving forward to the new way of working and thinking and let go of those side spreadsheets and Access databases. When everyone is sharing responsibility and there is accountability for data integrity, the value of such changes can result in the ROI your organization is seeking – to achieve operational and reporting needs that the organization sought by implementing the new system. Everyone investing in the integrity of the data in the new system means everyone can trust the data, especially when you get that phone call requesting a report and you click a few buttons, have the report and can trust it is correct – such trust becomes priceless.

A number of good training opportunities coming up in the DC area from NOI:

April 3rd: Nonprofit Executive Director Briefing
April 16th-17th: East Coast Nonprofit Training
June 25th-26th: Consultant Training
July 4th-11th: Summer Campaign Boot Camp